This is why this game should'nt get a parse

[Sebazy]

You're absolutely right, you don't and there is plenty of toxicity everywhere without it. As far as i'm aware there's no rigorous studies on the social dynamics of parsers and toxicity to point to, literally all I have is my experience and the behavior I've witnessed. That is toxicity grows when parsers are allowed in the game.

I'm not even really convinced that it grows once parsers become a thing, rather I think it's down to the content at hand. FFXI's highly competitive endgame scene was incredibly toxic and at times it bordered on a gangland mentality. Nothing I've ever seen or experienced in FFXIV has ever come close to the drama and abuse I saw pretty much every time a desirable HMN or King popped. This was during the days of Zilart and CoP, long before parsing was a thing. I did make a return several years later (Mid WotG) and the endgame had actually mellowed out quite significantly, parsing was starting to become a thing but that had nothing to do with it, it was all down to the lessened competition over content.

Challenging content breed's toxicity amongst pugs when there's an opportunity for failures to snowball over the rest of the raid. Void Ark was a complete cake walk and as a result, it was rare to see drama outside of the occasional troll. By comparison, the more problematic bosses such as Hashmal are breeding grounds for drama especially now where the raider to casual ratio is at it's most skewed. Some people just need a stone to throw when they feel like they are being held back by others and the anonymity of DF causes many to act highly inappropriately compared to how they would behave amongst people they know.

It's not a parser problem, it's a human nature problem and it's certainly nothing new.

The thing is, Alien, parsers are allowed implicitly. The only thing that can get one banned regarding a parser is harassment, and that wouldn't change with an official parser.

It's more a case of 'fight club' rules rather than outright allowed, don't forget this.

I earned myself a temp ban and tasty warning for making a SCH DPS guide on how to do 1000DPS in the dungeons at HW's release, no harassment, no naming and no drama in the thread, just a bunch of video clips along with a guide. My undoing was a screenshot showing the numbers I was putting out. I'm guessing that if I'd just have had the videos with a discrete log link or such I'd have probably been ok, but in showing and naming the software I fell foul of the ban hammer which is fair enough.

It's actually interesting to see that this thread has been allowed to continue TBH. Perhaps the official stance here has softened a little overtime I guess? It'd be nice to know what the actual final say is, but I can't see us getting that from any official source =(

But then, how does a community warm up to it? How could SE, or anyone, measure the acceptance of parsers? I suppose the corollary to that is how could one evaluate if toxicity gets worse or better with it? How could a community say this is or is not working? Personally, while I like reading the forums, they would be a poor medium to evaluate such a thing.

It's pretty much a given that there would be a substantial backlash here even if SE did something as simple as implementing a self only S-F tiered ranking prompt for your own performance in Savage content alone. It'd take time for people to realise that the world hasn't actually ended and that this tool can be rather useful and interesting. Numbers to chase! Something to actually spice up Expert a little bit

For SE to follow it's usage, I suppose the simplest way would be twofold, gate it's usage behind a side quest and track how many people bother with it whilst also keeping a tabs on harassment tickets and such.

As a community we can't even decide if we like Cloud's bike or not, let alone anything serious. That's one for SE to decide.