In competition with myself: a request for PERSONAL parsers

[Eylirria]

In your eyes perhaps.

Would a group wide parser be more useful to the right people? Most likely yes. Case in point, I linked a screenshot of a BLM doing 165 DPS in Rabanastre in another thread, how long do you think she would have lasted if people had have been able to clearly see that. Whilst I suggested that she simply shouldn't have been there in the first place, nobody would have deserved the almost inevitable butchering she would likely have received if her performance was there for all to see.

As such, a personal parser is the best compromise especially given the casual nature of this game for the most part.

Is it useless? Absolutely not, with a legitimate feature in the game, people will be more likely to discuss and compare numbers with friends, more people will potentially overhear that and get rough reference points from there.

It's not a feature to turn everyone into world first progression raiders, rather it's there to help give people something by which to gauge themselves if and when they decide to take some interest in that. If it improves even 10% of the population, that's huge as far as the more casual endgame content goes and frankly, if it helps avoid a repeat of the BLM I saw earlier, that's even better as that wasn't good for anyone involved.

A personal parser is useless. The number you're showing there is meaningless without the person being able to compare it or put it into context against anything. Compare it to themselves? That's not going to do much if they've already learned a bad rotation and they're doubling down on it. If a 330 SMN is doing 2200 DPS and suddenly, by the magic of personal parsing, they realize if they do things a little differently they can do 10% better and start doing closer to 2500... you're still not fixing the much bigger, much more obvious elephant in the room. If you think that's still good enough, then you don't want a parser for what a parser is, you want a mini-game to play against yourself while playing FFXIV, and it doesn't need to show you damage per second, it could show you Potency Per Second, or Chocobo Cheers per Second, or what have you.

People that are doing bad, most of the time, have no idea that they are doing bad, or how bad they are doing. Going from 2200 to 2500 is an improvement, yes, but it's paltry when they should be doing closer to 5000. All you did was give that person the illusion that they've improved a lot. They're not going to find out how badly they are doing until they look up SMNs in general and go "Oh... I'm doing roughly half of what I could be... something's off" if they care.

Personal parsing is such a "cop out" that it's laughable. Parsing in FFXIV is such a done to death subject. Devs know that everyone doing difficult content use it, they know that a lot of people that like to perform as best as they can will run it... they don't care, they're okay with it, just because you know you're doing X amount of damage per second doesn't make you inherently better than someone else, it's just a tool. But the community is so... scared that someone will call them out on how bad they are, that they come up with the most ridiculous and convoluted reasons as to why this game should never get a parser... It already has one. People that care about it already run it, they just keep quiet because it's a Don't Ask Don't Tell type of deal with SQEX... if they ever made a parser part of the game, there's no reason to think they wouldnt continue doling out punishment for harassment like they do now.

And if you're doing ~160 damage, which I assume is an exaggeration on your part, they were either dead the whole time, or link-dead. Still, way too many people think that people will make it their job to continuously scan the meters and "kick" underperforming people. You know that how often you can kick people goes up every time you do it, right? It's not like you can just sit there kicking people all day, and nobody likes to stand there idle waiting for the group to fill up. There's a gross overestimation in this community that if one day everyone got to see each other's numbers, all of a sudden they'd all turn into crazy rage toxic monsters that do nothing but votekick at the slighest sign of underperformance...

Fun fact: Most people in your average Rabanastre/Roulette run underperform. The runs survive anyway.

[RichardButte]

The number you're showing there is meaningless without the person being able to compare it or put it into context against anything.

You mean like the DPS I was doing last run, or even 10 minutes ago?

Self comparison is still a fine means of improvement. It's not necessary for every player to be doing the maximum potential damage for their class and gear, but just being able to SEE yourself visibly improving is HUGE.

You know you've gotten stronger when you can do more pushups or lift more weight, just as you'll know you've gotten better at your rotation when you see your numbers improving over the course of trying to down a raid boss.

If nothing else, having this visible form of progress would also be nice, since tanks and healers can generally see the improvement of their survivability and healing output as they acquire better gear, but it's still going to be hard for DPS players to figure out their contribution when there are 1-3 other DPS in the group.

[Reinha]

A personal parser is useless. The number you're showing there is meaningless without the person being able to compare it or put it into context against anything. Compare it to themselves? That's not going to do much if they've already learned a bad rotation and they're doubling down on it.

I was under the impression that the most useful comparisons are the parses from the same job and in the same instance, uploaded to fflogs for statistics and analysis. That wouldn't change whether the parser is showing your party members or not. If you are the only SMN in a Shinryu ex farm, seeing other people's dps is not going to tell you how well you are doing as a SMN. A 70th percentile RDM does slightly less damage than a 25th percentile SMN in Shinryu ex, so without knowing how other SMNs do you might think beating a RDM is an accomplishment. Whether the official parser was public or private it likely couldn't even be used to upload parses, so it would be better used for self-improvement.

Besides, once an official parser is implemented, what would stop us from comparing our numbers in /fc chat or a "Show your parse" thread? Voluntarily talking about numbers would not be forbidden anymore and it would be about as accurate as comparisons to random party members.

Personal parsing is just objectively useless, parsing is only born from comparison, and self-comparison is the easiest way to lose sight of objective reality. How do you think the average player would react if they told someone, "Wow, I went from 1300 to 2600 dps, I've literally doubled! I've gotten so great at this game!" Only for someone to reply, "Actually, <on the same class with the same gear> I'm doing 4200, so you're not good at this game"? Seeing progress is great, but it's absolutely pointless without context.

You just gave an example of how one would obtain context for their numbers in-game.

[Krotoan]

A personal parser is useless.....

if you never talk to anyone else about your numbers and/or never search for things on the internet .. sure.

[Sebazy]

People that are doing bad, most of the time, have no idea that they are doing bad, or how bad they are doing. Going from 2200 to 2500 is an improvement, yes, but it's paltry when they should be doing closer to 5000. All you did was give that person the illusion that they've improved a lot. They're not going to find out how badly they are doing until they look up SMNs in general and go "Oh... I'm doing roughly half of what I could be... something's off" if they care.

Of course I appreciate that there's a bigger elephant in the room here. But I also appreciate that simply taking a percentage of people from 2200 DPS up to 2500 is still a victory and nothing to be sniffed at. I'll happily take any improvement over what we have because lets face it, this game is too casual centric for us to get the integrated group parser we really want. And yes, I've already made a bunch of suggestions similar to this over the years, ironically including a potency per second based dungeon ranking and a gold saucer mini game that's pretty much what SSS should have been in the first place.

Personal parsing is such a "cop out" that it's laughable. Parsing in FFXIV is such a done to death subject. Devs know that everyone doing difficult content use it, they know that a lot of people that like to perform as best as they can will run it... they don't care, they're okay with it, just because you know you're doing X amount of damage per second doesn't make you inherently better than someone else, it's just a tool. But the community is so... scared that someone will call them out on how bad they are, that they come up with the most ridiculous and convoluted reasons as to why this game should never get a parser... It already has one. People that care about it already run it, they just keep quiet because it's a Don't Ask Don't Tell type of deal with SQEX... if they ever made a parser part of the game, there's no reason to think they wouldnt continue doling out punishment for harassment like they do now.

I actually agree wholeheartedly. The thing is, SE are pretty conservative when it comes to this game, I suspect a cop-out is pretty much the best thing we can hope for realistically. Compare this thread to similar suggestions that were made a few years ago. This discussion is surprisingly positive imho with a healthy split of naysayers actually wanting more like yourself. You don't have to look that far back to see the same sort of suggestion getting hammered and shot down by swathes of people who flat out didn't want any form of parsing in their game. I'll take that thanks <3

And if you're doing ~160 damage, which I assume is an exaggeration on your part, they were either dead the whole time, or link-dead.

I really wish I was exaggerating, alas, that's not something screenshots do. And no, they weren't dead the whole time (5 deaths, and they got raised reasonably promptly on all but one occasion, there's no way I was hard casting a raise on them after their performance earlier on), neither were they lagging or DCing, their movement was smooth and consistent, as was their partners.

Looking at the log a bit more closely would almost have you believe they were sat in the corner AFK but the replay shows otherwise. From the first minute alone I'd almost wonder if they were either a bot or simply auto following their partner and being multi boxed. But once the panic clearly sets in and they pretty much drop any attempt at casting much of anything, you can clearly see that they are aimlessly running around with all of their effort being channeled into simply staying alive. They simply shouldn't have been there as they didn't have the mechanical aptitude or awareness to cope with the content. As unbelievable as it is, it would have been better for them to simply be AFK as at least they wouldn't have been such a burden on myself or the one other decent healer there.

Fun fact: Most people in your average Rabanastre/Roulette run underperform. The runs survive anyway.

Here's a sobering link for you.

To say I felt drained after that ~1 and a half hour Rabanastre would be an understatement. And this is coming from someone who did 10hour+ raid days on the first week of Gordias.

Any sort of thing that helps avoid experiences like that is a good thing in my eyes. It won't turn that BLM into a Leith anytime soon, but every little bit helps in these cases.

[Laerune]

I thought people wanted the parsers so they can hold underpreformers accountable for their bad play, a personal parser wont change this.

[RichardButte]

I thought people wanted the parsers so they can hold underpreformers accountable for their bad play, a personal parser wont change this.

I'm first and foremost concerned with being able to hold myself accountable.

But the other thing to consider here is that many players (especially more casual ones) may not even know just how much their DPS can shift by changing which abilities they use and in which order.

Having a little DPS counter on screen that goes up or down will be a constant, non-judgemental educator about how to generally perform better at your class.

Let me put this another way: if I were to say, "Most ________s don't even know how important it is to _________ before starting their rotation.", you could fill in the blanks with any NUMBER of class names and actions and you'd probably be right.

Just having that number there to tell you how much damage you're doing would make players say, "Huh, I did way more that time. What did I do differently...?" on a regular enough basis that they'll learn to be better players over time, probably by the time they hit endgame.

[CosmicKirby]

I thought people wanted the parsers so they can hold underpreformers accountable for their bad play, a personal parser wont change this.

I think a good number of players will, without really even meaning to, start to play better if they notice that certain ways they play result in higher DPS.

Right now, without a parser it's like walking around with a sharp stone in your shoe, but no pain receptors in your foot.
Sure, you'll notice that you're walking funny (going slow), or possibly tripping and limping, (Wiping repeatedly), but unless you feel the stone in there, it's probably pretty difficult to tell the exact cause of why the foot isn't performing. Even if other people are pointing it out, they aren't gonna take off your shoe and remove it for you, you'll have to do it for yourself.

[Eight]

I see no problem with them, if you're on PC just download one and run it but be respectful and if people harass you report them and leave the run. I mean a large majority of PC players are using them now anyways and SE doesn't care unless you're abusing it or harassing people at that point those people can get a ban.

Some of our groups run parsers to improve themselves and honestly our rule is never say anything unless someone asks how they're doing and some of our ps4 players are always asking PC people to tell them because they don't have the option of one.

[Tempest222]

I think a good number of players will, without really even meaning to, start to play better if they notice that certain ways they play result in higher DPS.

Right now, without a parser it's like walking around with a sharp stone in your shoe, but no pain receptors in your foot.
Sure, you'll notice that you're walking funny (going slow), or possibly tripping and limping, (Wiping repeatedly), but unless you feel the stone in there, it's probably pretty difficult to tell the exact cause of why the foot isn't performing. Even if other people are pointing it out, they aren't gonna take off your shoe and remove it for you, you'll have to do it for yourself.

This. I have no interest in top tier content and also know that I'm nowhere near skilled enough for it anyway. I'm not really interested in achieveing robot level perfection and being super competitive. I'm perfectly happy just running the main story stuff, but I would still enjoy a persona parser so I could easily see what works or what doesn't if I'm unsure about when I should be using a certain ability. It would be easier and more fun for people to learn to make improvements through immediatly seeing what's working the best vs having to go read some long winded explantion with charts and graphs about the best possible rotation they could be doing.

Not everyone who doesn't play really well is lazy/doesn't care. I'm sure there are many people who aren't aware they aren't doing well and who would start improving if they had some in game feedback. Of course there will always be some people who just don't care no matter what, but I still think a personal private parser would be benefitial and would help many people improve.