An Alternative? to parsers..

[JunseiKei]

~snip~

Jeeze, all these people that make these suggestions, I swear, do so in a bubble.

- Some fights are spent more efficiently healing with Aspected Helios/ Medica II/Whispering Dawn and allowing some iota of overhealing to allow for other mechanics to be covered and/or allows healers to DPS; there's really no reason to penalize overhealing, just useless healing.
- There are fights where mechanics must be done, like soaking damage or taking meteors; having a scoring based on the amount of damage taken reduces your score will incentivize people to ignore mechanics. At the same token, certain mobs, like the diresaur, have completely dodge-able attacks; unless the system could point out where you took that unnecessary damage, it's worthless.
- As it is, people will sacrifice taking down a high priority target to DoT other monsters to increase their DPS (this was especially bad in Nidhogg and have been in parties where this has caused many a wipe from too many people doing this). And people trying to avoid overkilling because parse; yelled at my own raid team for this far too many times to count.
- Where would this be applied? You say "dungeons" but that is hardly content that matters. It's something generally done for grinding; be it levels or tomestones and where gear is not really required.

This grading system does not help it the game does not then hold your hand and tell you why you fell short in an area. IE: You did poor damage; will the system tell you it's because of your rotation, or because you've been unlucky and still have that i276 weapon in Castrum Abania? That's hardly on the player if it's the latter and wholly falls on the system with it's RNG nature because for some reason, weapon drops, despite having the most impact on your damage/healing/enmity, is the hardest thing to upgrade.

Basically, unless the system says why you fall short in certain areas, this is really moot. I'd equally be concerned on how much time and resources it'd take away from the team to create and implement to actually be useful. The last thing I'd want is for some system like this to be placed in and have my main story quality go down for a dumb personal ranking system that I couldn't give two fecal matter for.

[Yeol]

In the end, there's really only two types of players - those who feel entitled to decide who is good and who is bad according to their own stardards because... reasons..., and those who don't. And in the first group you will find people who are worried other people might not find out how GOOD they are, and so they desperately need a parser so everybody else will have to kneel before them because of how extremely awesome they play.

Very funny.
A good player does not need a parser to show off how good they are, they just show their Savage gear and Ultimate title

Believe it or not, good players are the ones with decent attitude. Bad players are the ones playing victims to everything and attacking the good players.

Stop making 'harassment' an excuse.
People run into low-performance players EVERYDAY and say nothing to them because its just duty finder.

But people want to hold players responsible for their low-performance at high endgame content (Extream/Savage/Ultimate).
Is that considered harassment?
Do you prefer that we ignore the bad players and just keep wiping content until they get bored and leave?

Is wasting everyones else time considered OK? /think

[JunseiKei]

This needs to stop being quoted. I may make an entire thread dedicated to this in the future if I keep seeing it. Lets review the reasons why this is honestly just the dumbest argument against parsers...

1. The comment people are quoting is years old. Opinions change.
2. Not everything Yoshi says is true forever - let's talk about how FC and personal housing were supposed to remain separate or how we were never supposed to have auto-demolition.
3. Yoshi's priorities as a game developer are different than anyone playing this game. He wants your money and also the money of a ton of other extremely casual players. If people are getting told they suck after every dungeon they might not enjoy playing as much which means parsers/this grading idea could lose him business.
4. Yoshi's opinion doesn't matter when it comes to in-game culture. We create the culture. Why is Balmung the rp hub? Why are there player-created rules against recruiting in the NN on some worlds? Why have the dev team been forced to tacitly allow parsers on a 'dont ask dont tell' basis? Because players decided these things entirely independent of dev intervention.

Just... just stop this. It is pointless. So obviously pointless.

One of the last interviews recently to ask Yoshida about parsers, to which a friend was one of the lucky few to be present, he said Yoshida's face went serious and said, in firm English, "No." That same friend wants in game parsers and he pretty much said, yeah, we're not going to get them just from how Yoshida answered, it's beating a dead horse.

Also, the in game culture stuff you quote is stuff not supported by SE. If it ever interfered with SE's business, they'd ban it. As it is with parsers; you get caught talking about it in game and get reported, you get suspended.

Right now, Yoshida's stance is very anti- parser.

People run into low-performance players EVERYDAY and say nothing to them because its just duty finder.

But people want to hold low-performance players responsible for their mistakes at high endgame content (Extream/Savage/Ultimate).
Is that considered harassment?
Do you prefer that we ignore the bad players and just keep wiping content until they get bored and leave?

Is wasting everyones else time considered OK? /think

Honestly, I'd sooner adopt the JP style of things: if you can't clear the content after so many tries, disband. It's not like I could help someone improve if they play a class I'm not good at, so even if I wanted to help them, I couldn't. However, I also don't want my own time wasted. Just appeals to me as it doesn't break ToS and my own time wasn't wasted.

[Tridus]

1.6 mln active characters over 20 lvl comparing to over 3 mln just 2 years ago on this one site with statistics.
Its not doing well, since the game is not welcoming to the new playerbase, guess why.

1.6 million active characters in a 13 year old subscription game when the last expansion was in 2016 is "not good"? Anyone else in the MMO market would take that in a heartbeat.

[Dzian]

I'm not asking anyone to kneel. I don't brag about my DPS. Especially because I don't think anything over 90 percentile is worth bragging about. Even 99 percentile isn't worth bragging about. Knowing how to play your class is not worth bragging about. But that's the thing players in the 80-99 percentile have in common - they know how to play their class. If they're in the 50-80 range they probably do as well but might be having trouble with mechanics and/or dying.

Meanwhile you have people in the lower 30-40s. I call them "bad",l

I honestly think it's not quite that easy. Gear plays a massive part and the powercreep the game has is getting steeper and steeper.

What that then means is it's simply not possible for many players to reach the high percentiles. I'm incredibly casual at the minute .my highest job is my i334 paladin still rocking 320 susano weapons. My sam is i327 still sporting a 320 susano weapon. My blm is i323 stilll rocking a 310 verity weapon and couple of 310 accessories.

The point is then that it's going to be impossible for me to reach 80-90 percentile levels of dps. Simply because my gear isn't the best. My blm for might not even hit the 60th percentile rocking it's 310 weapon. It's just an impossibility. It Does not make me a bad player simply one with less time than others.

However if instead of measuring dps you were to measure for example pps potency per second. Then you might find my 60th percentile blm is actually up there in the high 80s maybe even 90s. It's not player skill that's the problem it's simply the power creep of gear.

You then have a scenario where great players appear bad simply because of there gear and available time to play.

It's another reason why my stuff is hidden on logs because people might look at that see me at like 60th percentile and think I'm crap at blm. But it might actually be a good performance with my gear because I'm whacking out a ton of pps and uptime. Just gear and power creep drags it down a lot.

[Tridus]

Honestly, I'd sooner adopt the JP style of things: if you can't clear the content after so many tries, disband. It's not like I could help someone improve if they play a class I'm not good at, so even if I wanted to help them, I couldn't. However, I also don't want my own time wasted. Just appeals to me as it doesn't break ToS and my own time wasn't wasted.

People do that now in PF. But it amounts to "if we get a group where too many people aren't doing enough DPS, disband and hope next time those people get spread out amongst more groups that can carry them."

The lottery model of party creation isn't the most awesome thing I've ever heard of for high end content.

[JunseiKei]

People do that now in PF. But it amounts to "if we get a group where too many people aren't doing enough DPS, disband and hope next time those people get spread out amongst more groups that can carry them."

The lottery model of party creation isn't the most awesome thing I've ever heard of for high end content.

Every time you step into an instance with a stranger, you're already using a lottery model for the creation of the party.

[Tridus]

I honestly think it's not quite that easy. Gear plays a massive part and the powercreep the game has is getting steeper and steeper.

What that then means is it's simply not possible for many players to reach the high percentiles. I'm incredibly casual at the minute .my highest job is my i334 paladin still rocking 320 susano weapons. My sam is i327 still sporting a 320 susano weapon. My blm is i323 stilll rocking a 310 verity weapon and couple of 310 accessories.

The point is then that it's going to be impossible for me to reach 80-90 percentile levels of dps. Simply because my gear isn't the best. My blm for might not even hit the 60th percentile rocking it's 310 weapon. It's just an impossibility. It Does not make me a bad player simply one with less time than others.

It's impossible for many players to reach the high percentiles because it's a percentile. By definition, only 1% of players can be 99th percentile. If everyone improved to the point that everyone was within 200 DPS of each other, only 1% of players would be 99th percentile, but the gap between a 99th percentile player and a 25th percentile player's DPS would be ~5% and not a big deal unless fights are tuned extremely strictly, so only people going for world firsts would be concerned about it.

Obviously due to practice, skill, and gear, the gap will likely never narrow up that much. But you can't focus entirely on percentile as a measurement. It's a useful tool to see where you are relative to everyone else. It's not a useful tool to see if you have the required DPS to clear the content (whereas raw DPS measurements are). Half the playerbase will always be below 50th percentile. The aim should be to help bring everyone up so that the gap isn't as wide as it is now, because right now it's a huge spread.

However if instead of measuring dps you were to measure for example pps potency per second. Then you might find my 60th percentile blm is actually up there in the high 80s maybe even 90s. It's not player skill that's the problem it's simply the power creep of gear.

You then have a scenario where great players appear bad simply because of there gear and available time to play.

PPS can measure how effectively you're using your skills, but doesn't tell you "can I beat the enrage?", which is ultimately the result people care about. So long as gear is a factor, it'll be a thing. But yes, it's a useful measurement of how effectively you're using your skills.

It's another reason why my stuff is hidden on logs because people might look at that see me at like 60th percentile and think I'm crap at blm. But it might actually be a good performance with my gear because I'm whacking out a ton of pps and uptime. Just gear and power creep drags it down a lot.

Part of this is a mentality issue. If you're measuring percentiles, 60th isn't crap. It's significantly above average. That goes back to how wide the spread between top and bottom is, though. 60th probably isn't going to be enough to do ultimate because it's meant to be super hard for top people, but if the gap is closed somewhat, it can be enough to do savage. That should be the goal, at least.

[Tridus]

Every time you step into an instance with a stranger, you're already using a lottery model for the creation of the party.

Yes, but I'm not using the "if it fails, just assume other people were bad and hope it works out next time" plan. I can see pretty clearly what went wrong if I parse it, and if I'm part of the problem (which has been the case before), I know that and can try to do something about it.

Without any insight into why the group failed, all I can do is assume someone else was bad and try it with different people.

[Selova]

snip.

Yet it still remains the king of MMO's. Also, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make regarding the population of the game in correlation to parsers/combat logs. WoW's population declining has nothing to do with combat logs/parsers, that hasn't been a thing since wrath. Nice try though. I also, never said anything about blasting or griefing other people, I have never once done that nor do i intend to, so once again I have no idea what point you are trying to make.

Your entire post makes no sense whatsoever. The game will be fine with parsers, all you're doing is proving my point in how certain members of this community like to over exaggerate when it comes to parsers/combat logs with this hilarious "The sky is falling" mentality. Also, when you are trying to debate a point don't resort to comparing a video game to Real-life scenarios, It just makes you look foolish. I honestly have nothing more to say at this point.