Built-in Parsers

[Shurrikhan]

This statement posits the notion parses should remain unseen simply due to the off chance they may be abused. If that is to be your stance, you have to equally be against the Vote Kick/Abandon system as it can and is abused. Any argument otherwise would be hypocritical unless you agree tools do not directly correlate towards toxic behavior; i.e someone parsing has no direct bearing on whether they will treat others poorly. Of course, by doing so, your original argument loses all validity. So...

That is but a single example you appear to have missed. Perhaps you shouldn't be throwing around words like hand-wave and ad hominem when you're very much guilty of both.

This.

Note that a Vote Kick can be used to allow friends a quick daily Roulette bonus, at the expense of the replaced member's. Any of various false reasons can be given, but as each reason also lows for an underlying warrant in "difference in playstyle", these are essentially permitted distortions.

Similarly, players can be kicked or berated on the suspicion that their damage is low, where that suspicion may be misplaced. I was recently told that I must be the reason a fight took so long, causing the healer's mana to run out and eventually fail to keep the tank up, because I was third place in enmity, albeit by a small margin. I had been using Diversion and Lucid Dreaming on CD; the other DPS had not once used their Diversion, and when the healer again ran out of mana before the fight was over (despite my giving Mana Shift on CD) and the tank was two-shotted yet again (having used no CDs for a thrice-upgraded tankbuster), I was kicked. These, too, are permitted distortions.

Now, a parser, too, can face skewed evidence if, say, a tank especially inconveniences his party members by requiring what would otherwise be excessive healing or forcing excessive and uptime-costing movement, AND if the players are somehow unaware of the costs of these situations (e.g. if they assume that every fight should reach nearly the same throughput, despite variance in mob count, ST-to-AoE ideal transfer for each job, CD durations relative to pull duration, ramp-up times, etc). But it is at least a way to make things more fair than is presently the case.

A reduction of ambiguity, devaluing assumptions and allowing for informed action, does not equate to toxicity. My own, albeit anecdotal, experience would suggest a reduction in tossed blame.

Consider, why should one person bother to point out that one player is underperforming when ever player already has access to that information. They may as well say "we are currently indoors". The observation becomes meaningless. Any discussion useful to the annoyed player therefore proceeds immediately to analysis: How can the player improve? How can we improve things for that player, and our party as a whole? What do we need to change?

I don't understand why skipping this shroud of scarcely protective obscurity so frightens so many players. It seems to rely on a warrant that every player is somehow unable to smell the smoke just because they're blind to the fire, and that granting vision will mean that they will kick every underperforming player on sight, rather than as needed. I cannot say that this is impossible: it is an action of individuals, after all. But, having played in numerous MMOs with broadly-used parsers nearly since their inceptions, it is incredibly unlikely except in the event that a known DPS check will very clearly stop the party's progression if including the underperforming player, or that this player has clearly snubbed even his or her minimal responsibilities towards the party (to the same result as purposely standing in AoEs or spending a large part of each fight afk).

Seeing how the party is actually performing does not demand a purge of all things below an arbitrary value. Rather, it tends to forfeit tossed blame or gradual enmity in allowing more convenient observation and analysis. I've lost count of how many time I've increased a player's DPS by a third or more over the course of between-GCDs typed advice, just as I've lost count of how many players will answer "if the fight will last for more than a single combo, you may want to use Heavy Thrust for its damage bonus" with "*** off". The latter will still be anyone's right, but at least player B won't be threatening a ban just because I'm teaching player A with reflection on each pull: the data's already there, and players need not be afraid to know as if knowing were some type of blinding nudity.