How would an optional, official parser be toxic?

[Shurrikhan]

It wouldn't, so long as it's not merely personally based. Suspicion invites far more assertion than actual, ubiquitous knowledge. When everyone both knows who's underperforming and know that the underperformer knows it, there becomes no more than to comment on directly than one would the color of a whitewashed wall.

Instead, the question shifts to readiness, either technique or effort/wellness -- a difference in knowledge or priority/state. Of any communication that can occur between a party that needs or at least desires change from a given player, that is solely the part that allows for constructive criticism. The effect of universal, full-breadth parsers is to accelerate processes of communication past the majority of less useful and high-toxicity segments and straight to what's useful and for which toxicity, if any, is never purely so.

Perhaps a group will still take issue with a player for coming in without the readiness required by the party, given its description. Perhaps their effort or technique shows clear, almost invasive negligence on their part. These conflicts will still occur, but I do not find them to be toxic, even if they may feel as such to the player being rejected, just as that player's behavior will have seemed toxic and warranting removal to the rest.

But leave it personal, and it becomes a test of suspicion. Consider: you know your own performance, and it seems sufficient, and yet the party is failing. You know it's not you, so it must be one of them. And so, having exhausted, or nearly so, your own limits of contribution, you can only look out for mistakes on the others' part to suggest corrections or party member replacements, if necessary. Your focus is ambiguous and misdirected, and for what... To protect whoever is need of correction from accurate, proportionate efforts of suggestion? And what can you do but look? Ask them? They are free to lie: that is the sole functional purpose of personal parsers. Whatever the purpose, that is the distinction in functionality. One, when underperforming, can avoid responsibility and improvement by lying.

Every distinction between personal and full parsers is one which allows for--even invites--conflict and toxicity. Information is not inherently toxic. Responsibility is not inherently toxic. To ask for personal over full parsers is like saying that people should be barred from their glasses in seeing, and from relevant conversation with, whom they would date. Sure, it may begin more parties/dates, but you'd only have greater and more numerous feelings of disappointment or rejection in the result.

Real-time by-fight performance has far less ability to be used offensively or in grievance than what we already have in the form of fflogs, whereby one's parses can be posted without knowledge to be held representative of your overall performance. That is something actually worth being worried over. It is a place where one would expect to see either only one's best and wholly voluntary reports, or their personally made and representative portfolio of many, many parses -- formed to weigh them against each other and others', be linked for help and suggestions, etc -- and yet singular, outlier parses can be submitted without one's permission, to be held with no distinction to fidelity whenever one's name is searched. That allows for unfair discrimination -- a sense that one's perception is out of one's hands. That is problematic. But a real-time check of one's performance in a given fight does not belie one's performance in that fight. It's just pure information that does not pretend to any context or implication greater than itself.

Edit:
To be clear, I'm not saying that even just a personal official parser wouldn't be a massive improvement, provided it can render at least as much accuracy and detail as our third-party ones, and hopefully even improve upon their models. But as many people seem to believe that privacy protects against toxicity, I feel the need to show that, historically, the effect has always been the opposite. One is free to simply not care that they are underperforming in casual content, whether their numbers are shown or not. Broad parsers invite certain conflicts early on to create conventions in their resolution where personal parsers keep them hidden for a bit longer, but extend and agitate the conflicts with that added time. On the whole, I believe that -- and psychological, historical, and sociological studies, including ones on game metrics specifically, all seem to point similarly in cases of partial ambiguity -- there is likely to be greater total conflict, and certainly more "toxicity" (which I'll define here as intentionally maligned behavior frequently sourced by animosity or defense-response, usually from trying to create distinction between oneself and "other" or to reject another side despite unclear, unresolvable borders) allowed for by personal parsers than broad parsers.

I'd be happy even just getting a page that shows how many unnecessary hits the party as a whole took, how many orbs it let through, how much damage was dealt, and how that compares to the damage necessary to clear gauged against expectations for the phases/durations covered, with a personal parenthesized contribution to those metrics of progress and mistake. The prior can in many ways shift the psychological focus away from oneself, especially if it reveals what's left to improve upon. I just feel that it would, in fact, be inferior in the long run to broad parsers, especially where every bit matters. And of course, this is all assuming that we can look at data graphs in order to figure out what can be improved upon (i.e. the fflogs level of analysis but in-game and at-will), rather than having just a final average. Without such, parsers can (deservedly, in my opinion) excuse the culling of players not pulling their weight as per the expectations listed in (or conventional to) the party's formation. But with such, the emphasis falls to optimization, and the skilled often feel a tacit obligation to improve, rather than merely remove, what issues the party faces in the context of the fight, specifically.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I don't think there's any way to make it optional. People would be pressured into using it by the community.

I mean, if it were implemented like Duty Recorder. You can simply make a PF and turn the feature off. People may be disinclined to join your party but it's still optional.

[KaivaC]

well-thought out response

Okay, that is a fair assessment, one that I hadn't considered. Let me throw a different sort of question, and really, anybody can tag along in it if they desire. Not really trying to turn this into a discussion about me, but I am affected by the lack of a parser. Personally, I don't mind if good or bad logs are uploaded on me - it's something that I can still use. Unfortunately, I feel like a personal parser would be the closest compromise we could hope for. Which would be so much better than nothing. I don't like that the JP playerbase are the ones that, for the most part, determine QoL issues to be addressed by the devs. Suspicion aside, the ToS could still cover harassment over logs - there's no reason to feel pressured by somebody else to provide official parser information. If statics want to know, they could either look up fflogs or do a test run to see if a player is a right fit. At least, that's just how I feel.

[Arkdra]

They would have to hire more people to deal with all the nonsense from people being jerks about parsers. Bear in mind that I am very much for personal parsers. I really don't see the harm in letting people know where they stand as long as that information can't immediately be turned on people. Sometimes you get to carry really bad players and that is life in an MMO. But it seems really unfair that console players have no way to gauge their performance without someone else parsing them.

I also think, in addition to personal parses, that the game should give a basic rating to performance, just because contextless numbers are kinda meaningless. just a bad/decent/good rating, though they would have to be really careful with how they word the hey you suck message.

[KaivaC]

They would have to hire more people to deal with all the nonsense from people being jerks about parsers. Bear in mind that I am very much for personal parsers. I really don't see the harm in letting people know where they stand as long as that information can't immediately be turned on people. Sometimes you get to carry really bad players and that is life in an MMO. But it seems really unfair that console players have no way to gauge their performance without someone else parsing them.

I also think, in addition to personal parses, that the game should give a basic rating to performance, just because contextless numbers are kinda meaningless. just a bad/decent/good rating, though they would have to be really careful with how they word the hey you suck message.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Musosai in the initial Samurai quest comment on the skills that you were using in your fight against him? Couldn't something like that be implemented in-game with an official parser similar to the screen after every PvP match?

I don't think they would need to hire many more - people would just need to actually report harassment (I should probably take that advice too, but I generally don't like stirring up trouble for any reason in case of backlash).

Actually, now that I think about it, there is a site that analyzes a log you've submitted and it gives you tips on areas that you can improve in, and areas that you're generally doing pretty well in. Would it really be that hard to implement something like this in game? More so than fflogs, this other site that I've been using seems like a goldmine for self-improvement.

[Shurrikhan]

Okay, that is a fair assessment, one that I hadn't considered. Let me throw a different sort of question, and really, anybody can tag along in it if they desire. Not really trying to turn this into a discussion about me, but I am affected by the lack of a parser. Personally, I don't mind if good or bad logs are uploaded on me - it's something that I can still use. Unfortunately, I feel like a personal parser would be the closest compromise we could hope for. Which would be so much better than nothing. I don't like that the JP playerbase are the ones that, for the most part, determine QoL issues to be addressed by the devs. Suspicion aside, the ToS could still cover harassment over logs - there's no reason to feel pressured by somebody else to provide official parser information. If statics want to know, they could either look up fflogs or do a test run to see if a player is a right fit. At least, that's just how I feel.

I'd be fine with automatic online reporting, or even just convenient manual reporting, as I imagine an official means would be (well, if not provided by the XIV team, at least). I just don't like when it's inconvenient to get into, yet others have the ability to report as if... for you... in ways you may not (likely will not) desire. If it's not going to be representative due to count, it ought at least to be evenly preferential.

So, in short, I'd like to see logs publishable through Lodestone, via highly convenient integrated systems, which ought still to tie into pretty much exactly fflogs systems (as it's hard to imagine better detailed readability than what that site provides), perhaps also with toast and link systems ingame.

Honestly, if they actually could take a simplest comprehensive solution approach, rather than forcing counterintuitives into design as usual, I'm less worried about online records than just the useful metrics which aren't merely DPS or HPS within the real-time parsers.

___________________


Many players have suggested a DMC-style letter ranking system and while I disagreed with such at first because I didn't want it to be the limit of parser information, I new feel that such could be a great "at a glance" metric, if well tuned and defined. But, such would be very complicated to craft well. In WoW, such a system would doubtless include mitigation provided--including by interrupt or CC, and perhaps even by holding attention on would-be damage without permitting it (i.e. kiting)--but that's... awfully difficult to calculate.

Alternatively, though, you could just look at the rating for a particular fight, group-wide, and then just provide metrics on a player-by-player basis without judging the individual contributions. Did you slaughter that pull, relative to your ilvl? (Or, both.)

[valho]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Musosai in the initial Samurai quest comment on the skills that you were using in your fight against him? Couldn't something like that be implemented in-game with an official parser similar to the screen after every PvP match?

I don't think they would need to hire many more - people would just need to actually report harassment (I should probably take that advice too, but I generally don't like stirring up trouble for any reason in case of backlash).

Actually, now that I think about it, there is a site that analyzes a log you've submitted and it gives you tips on areas that you can improve in, and areas that you're generally doing pretty well in. Would it really be that hard to implement something like this in game? More so than fflogs, this other site that I've been using seems like a goldmine for self-improvement.

The information is already ingame so shouldn't be hard, the analysis site is also a good basic guide to use for improvement since it will analyse your uptime, weaving etc. I actually improve on my SAM using that site and I usually gets over 90% uptime now. If 3rd party can do it, I don't see why SE can't.

@Arkdra Simply giving a bad/good/great rating is pretty useless since it doesn't tells you in detail what you can do to improve. It needs to have information that can be analyse, that you can drill down to see where you can improve.

[Fyce]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Musosai in the initial Samurai quest comment on the skills that you were using in your fight against him? Couldn't something like that be implemented in-game with an official parser similar to the screen after every PvP match?

That's why I suggested it. But you can't put it into content where people stay in the same group (mostly Extremes and Savages) if you want to avoid any possible way of bringing the "toxicity" everyone seems to be scared about. If you give that data to players that are staying in the same group, that's where the "toxicity" can come in, and when the blame can start to be thrown around. That's also why you don't want to display that table after a wipe, but only after the content is cleared.

In short, you can only display that table after a clear on a content that wasn't intended to be repeated multiple times by the same group.
So, the only way I can see it working, is after a solo queue in DF/RF.

[Fiorinol]

One thing I've learned from playing MOBAs for so many years, is that often the reason a game is toxic, is because of the game itself rather than the players.

In the case of FFXIV, a lot of the higher up encounters will fail you if other players aren't up to par. This is why tools like the parser exist to begin with. It exists to measure your own performance, as well as see if anyone in your party is straggling. I suppose another use that Square probably wouldn't want in their game are the leaderboards. The leaderboards are what enforces the meta, because players, especially in North America, want to have the highest numbers they can get on the 3rd party website to feel good about their play.

I don't know what game you're all playing, but toxicity is all over the game. Go over to Party Finder for the new raid tier, it's full of players who disrespect each other, because the content is designed in such a way that if one player screws up, you very much wipe or are unable to complete the encounter.

[Jandor]

How would an optional, official parser be toxic?

So long as it's private and for just your character it wouldn't be, in fact it would probably serve to improve the general populations play quite significantly. As a tank or healer it's very obvious how well you're doing at your primary function, as a damage dealer... not so much.

Edit: although maybe Shurrikhan has a point about personal parsers and hiding the results from the rest of the party. /thinking.