Quote Originally Posted by Gilraen View Post
And there's the other fallacy... that there's only two kinds of players, the 'hardcore raider' and the 'scrub'. I play to the best of my ability, but that's because I'm my own worst critic. I don't just sit back and mash 1 or 2 buttons. I watch what I'm doing, I berate myself when I screw up and apologize profusely when I screw up royally or cause a wipe. Most casual players are like this. We may not make playing games into 'work' but we own our mistakes and learn from it. Don't need a parser for that. Again, just need knowledge and awareness. I mean, I don't watch any videos when trying new content but I figure it out really quickly and have yet to actually forget how any dungeon works.
If most casual players were like you described that would be great... Even these might be underperforming due to lack of awarness tho. It is hard to correct something if you do not know that it is broken.

Before FF14 I played Wildstar and as much casual as I am, it seemed that I was performing well - reading tooltips, using skills correctly etc. etc. Then in preparation of raiding, I installed parser... it turned out I was doing barely enough to meet my part of dps checks. It basicaly meant that in case my group mates done worse than I did, we were not able to clear content. To continue the story, after installing the parser my dps improved by about 50% (granted I also started to use Aura mastery, but the initial motivation sparked from parser.) After that I was not just doing my job, but I was also able to help less performing players, which meant less failures and overall faster and more happy runs.