An Alternative? to parsers..

[Sebazy]

Who is going to figure out what the threshold for these grades is, and how are they going to determine what it should be? You see wide fluctuations in expected DPS on different fights due to the mechanics of that fight and group composition (a SAM paired with BRD and AST is going to look a lot better than the same one pared with BLM and WHM on any DPS measurement scale). SE having to assign someone to come up with grading criteria for every new piece of content they add, without having large quantities of sample points to work with because it's new content.

This isn't actually much of a problem and the majority of the work can be avoided with a few tweaks to the proposition IMHO.

First off, the easiest approach to working about basic threshold values has already been done by logs. You just work out a series of averages from your big table of results and go from there, there's really no need to have an internal team do this (Beyond maybe throwing the QA team's score into the pot so the players can get scored from day one), once the code's in place, it'll do the maths itself. As the game evolves, so will the results.

Secondly, avoiding issues with party comp disparities is doable but it's not perfect. Going by potency per second takes much of the RNG away and also levels the playing field somewhat through ignoring party buffs and such. That still leaves jobs that might impact their own rotation to maintain a buff for others as well as jobs where some of their potency rests on RNG (eg bloodletter procs).

As long as the ranks were reasonably lenient I don't think these details would be impactful enough to actually prevent a decent player from scoring in a manner that they should. And let's face it, SE aren't going to implement something like this in casual content whilst expecting people to perform at a 99% percentile.

Fundamentally, the content itself needs to give you the risk of failure in order to address this problem. I'd much rather see them introduce enrage timers in Doma Castle or even earlier, instead of letting people get by until it suddenly slaps them in the face at endgame.

Yeah agreed, I've said it so many times, but at the risk of sounding like a stuck record, Amdapor Keep was a fantastic dungeon because it did such a good job of preparing people for the end game.