How would an optional, official parser be toxic?

[Dualgunner]

Never seen someone pull mental gymnastics like that before just so they can bring up their political opinion on a video game forum.

I've seen people liken parsers to the second amendment before. It's always about as convincing as the post you just read.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

You are actually acting as if considering the abuse of a tool is a bad thing, simply because the tool can be useful. It appears you do not care of the negative affects a parser can have because you are able to laugh it off if it's directed at you. Not everyone is you. Not everyone is confident in their ability, and not everyone understands the game enough to know if they're being wrongly accused of poorperformance.

Some people come to the game to escape and/or relax. Not to be worried about some jerks who are synced down giving them crap for playing a class they're learning or trying to gear up. You may think wanting to prevent this is wrapping people in a blanket, but it's granting a measure of fairness to people to not be judged by a mere glance at some numbers when the reasons for their damage output could very well be completely unrelated to the buttons they're pressing, or justified considering their lack of experience.

Additionally parsers may make lvl sync problematic if sprouts see that their dps cannot compare to lvl 60+ synced players. They may think they are actually doing something wrong when they're not simply because the parser makes it appear so. In a sense the game would be doing parser abuse on its own by potentially making unsynced players look bad.

But apparently looking at the bigger picture equates to swaddling the game in bubble-wrap.

No. I am acting like accentuating the negative aspects and presuming they will overshadow any and all positives is a bad thing. Which, is it. Likewise, what I said is we shouldn't ban a beneficial tool because some people had their feelings hurt. I don't doubt people will take offense. That seems to be the unfortunate norm nowadays. But you don't promote borderline censorship because some people can't handle someone saying mean things to them online. If taken to its logical extreme, I could tell spam you right now. Should we remove the tell feature? After all, I am misusing it to cause harm. And we have established even the mere prospect of hurt feelings is enough reason to overlook any other benefits said feature might provide. Obviously, that would be absurd. You would report and/or Blacklist me. So what does that differ when a parse is involved? Why wouldn't you take the exact same recourse?

Fantastic. They can stay out of harder content. Why should other people have to cater to the whims of someone else who wants to "relax" whilst wasting the time of their party who may not share their same leisurely perspective? Since to mention, Leveling in a separate post. I am specifically referring to EX Primals and Savage. Even if a parse ever did become commonplace, people aren't going to care anymore than they already do about trivial dungeons. You'll see people more vocally point out a lack of Healer DPS or AoE but nothing in the realm of "omg, Samurai sucks for dungeons!" It just isn't going to happen enough to be worth mentioning. Regardless, people advocating for parses generally want them in harder content, not dungeons. And that's where the issue lies. I don't appreciate someone wasting my time because they couldn't be bothered to learn a proper rotation yet still chose to join a Suzaku EX farm party.

Common sense still prevails. Even a sprout ought to pick up quickly a max level player is going to do far higher damage. In fact, it opens up an opportunity to ask. Shock horror, I know, but people are surprisingly more helpful than this forum likes to give credit. Furthermore, an in-game would likely be something people have to turn on themselves. Therefore, a new player wouldn't even see it until later on. Could someone heckle them about low damage? Sure. They can do so right now. I know someone in this very thread who bailed on a dungeon because someone claimed they were new. No parser. They just didn't want to deal with a new player.

You aren't looking at the bigger picture. What you've said can essentially be boiled down to "someone could have their feelings hurt!" Hence why you're bubble-wrapping the game.

[Speaks]

I've seen people liken parsers to the second amendment before. It's always about as convincing as the post you just read.

Both comparisons are ignorant of anything they are trying to address. Why bother making it at all. Trying to start a political flamewar on a gaming forum is just goofy.

Actually on topic now;

Players are already parsing and using that knowledge to kick you and others. If it was officially allowed the only thing you can expect to change is:

PS4 players will be able to see their own damage and have an easier time improving themselves.
You will know why you got kicked. You will obviously still get kicked, that was going to happen regardless. But at least now you have a goal set to hit to improve youself on.

In my eyes SE has two options.

They can either keep their official stance on no parsing. That is fine, and I will accept that in it's entirety but with one caveat; all content regardless of difficulty up to and including Ultimate has to be able to be cleared with 2 competent DPS, 1 competent healer and a single competent tank. No hard enrages, no DPS checks, no forced tank swaps. After all, your DPS doesn't matter.

They can keep their current fight design. This is perfectly fine and I will accept that in it's entirety, but with one caveat; Parsers are open in content. After all, your DPS matters.

[Bhearil]

Sadly parsers are most of the time using as epeen/elitist meter than anything. Usually the rotations arent THAT hard that need a program to say to you "hey wrong rotation, last one was better " you can just use a dummy and practice, and fflogs high percentiles are bloated with those epeen meters by inflating their job focusing every possible buff of the raid on them to increase "muh dps". Even if overall fflogs give a general image of each job potential, some of their parses are heavily tampered favouring of the focused job in detriment of the rest

Even on WoW top raiders started to stop using those meters because players stopped caring about mechanics to not lose dps forcing the healers to go on overload healing damage that shouldnt be happening on the first place and covering for their intentional messes

So basically previous experiences show that they are more of a hassle than a help, and unless someone is really slacking off (sometimes really easy to spot when they have super low aggro despite not using their aggro tools), if people start using the "low dps meter" card to kick people they are free to report their asses.

Usually a single person is not a cause for a enrage unless its really slacking or not having low ilv. One is fixed by paying a minimun of atention during the fight and the other by using party finder and putting minimum ilv to join as a security blanket

The old "is X person fault we enraged" is quite rare and more like " almost half of the raid or more didnt use their damage tools properly" or "people kept dieing for not doing mechanics properly and our damage went to the garbage bin"

[Speaks]

Sadly parsers are most of the time using as epeen/elitist meter than anything. Usually the rotations arent THAT hard that need a program to say to you "hey wrong rotation, last one was better " you can just use a dummy and practice, and fflogs high percentiles are bloated with those epeen meters by inflating their job focusing every possible buff of the raid on them to increase "muh dps". Even if overall fflogs give a general image of each job potential, some of their parses are heavily tampered favouring of the focused job in detriment of the rest

Even on WoW top raiders started to stop using those meters because players stopped caring about mechanics to not lose dps forcing the healers to go on overload healing damage that shouldnt be happening on the first place and covering for their intentional messes

So "in theory" they don't matter. "Rotations aren't that hard" after all.

What class do you happen to play by chance with that opinion? It wouldn't be a class or job with an extremely easy overall rotation, would it? I assume then that you play NIN, MNK or BLM then. You would never play the simplest DPS in the game with that opinion, say RDM for example. Obviously the previously mentioned jobs have easy rotations or are easy to play.

Your statement about bloated numbers shows you don't actually know much of anything about FFlogs in general though. I have a friend who is an orange parse abacus white mage who raids quite seriously (far more so than myself) and I can assure you they are not getting bloat.

Cite your source on WoW raiders no longer needing parsers please.

Usually a single person is not a cause for a enrage unless its really slacking or not having low ilv. One is fixed by paying a minimun of atention during the fight and the other by using party finder and putting minimum ilv to join as a security blanket

The old "is X person fault we enraged" is quite rare and more like " almost half of the raid or more didnt use their damage tools properly" or "people kept dieing for not doing mechanics properly and our damage went to the garbage bin"

Ah yes this excuse. So if the rDPS to clear choas were theoretically 34k or so, and you were getting near max DPS from everyone else including the healers and it was in the first week or three of the tier but you had a SMN pulling 2k DPS resulting in 30k rDPS who would you like to ask to pull their damage up? Yeah wait you don't know the SMN is pulling 2k because when they practice on SSS they finish fine.

[Liam_Harper]

Even on WoW top raiders started to stop using those meters because players stopped caring about mechanics to not lose dps forcing the healers to go on overload healing damage that shouldnt be happening on the first place and covering for their intentional messes

Let's not make up stuff.

First of all, I very much doubt there are any WoW mythic raiders without a parser, it's an incredibly valuable tool for analysing the fight and seeing what you can improve on. I've never heard what you claim happen in my entire time in WoW. Logs and parsers are usually mandatory.

Second of all very few mythic raiders stand in the fire for more dps. Healers can't carry you in Mythic, the fire will kill you in seconds. Furthermore, you'd be benched fairly soon because your raid leader can instantly spot your mess ups by checking "healing taken" and "damage taken by spell" in their parser to see where you're neglecting to play properly. Linking your pro dps would mean nothing.

[Speaks]

Let's not make up stuff.

First of all, I very much doubt there are any WoW mythic raiders without a parser, it's an incredibly valuable tool for analysing the fight and seeing what you can improve on. I've never heard what you claim happen in my entire time in WoW. Logs and parsers are usually mandatory.

Second of all very few mythic raiders stand in the fire for more dps. Healers can't carry you in Mythic, the fire will kill you in seconds. Furthermore, you'd be benched fairly soon because your raid leader can instantly spot your mess ups by checking "healing taken" and "damage taken by spell" in their parser to see where you're neglecting to play properly. Linking your pro dps would mean nothing.

This already happens with current use of FFLogs, I would like to point out. You are more than your parse color, and anyone even somewhat decent at analyzing that data will be able to tell if you are eating mechanics for DPS, or if you are decent at your job but have a low ilvl.

Considering eating savage mechanics generally results in Vuln stacks, and considering how hard raidwide hits early in a tier, oh and the fact that you can look up and see the orange box on someone when they ate mechanics for DPS...

[Aerlana]

Even on WoW top raiders started to stop using those meters because players stopped caring about mechanics to not lose dps forcing the healers to go on overload healing damage that shouldnt be happening on the first place and covering for their intentional messes

hum? oh? Are you sure?

*go on youtube*

*search g'huun kill* G'huun is the last boss of the current raid. While searching his name + kill i find fast the kill from method (world first) and limit (second) and... each time, some parser are there (mostly corner bottom right).
Then, lets see exorsus (3rd) no video, i go to memento, that took the 4th kill... again parser. dont have time to see all guilds.


As already said, parsers not only show damage meter and heal meter. but also damage receive, death (count and the 10 last line concerning the character in the log) interrupts, dispell, overhealing, damage done by ennemies etc etc etc.
So people focusing only on DPS and doing bad mechanics (not switching soon enough on adds, not avoiding all, etc etc etc) are shown in parsing (too much damage taken from specific mechanics, or too much % of damages on boss, not enough on adds etc etc).

[Sigma-Astra]

Sadly parsers are most of the time using as epeen/elitist meter than anything. Usually the rotations arent THAT hard that need a program to say to you "hey wrong rotation, last one was better ".

If any of that were true then we wouldn't have people at level 70 not wanting to use their aggro reducing abilities, tanks not mitigating damage properly or using their enmity combos, monks/dragoons saying "hell no" to their own positionals, BLM's casting their spells out of order (or using Freeze and Blizzard constantly), MCH's not using Hotshot, etc.

I had a MNK yesterday in The Burn doing less DPS than everyone else. A MNK WHOSE DPS WAS BEING OUTDONE BY THE TANK AND THE HEALER. The other DPS was a SMN.

BUT, THE TANK AND THE HEALER.

I don't expect people to be 99th percentile, I expect them to try and be competent, and half of the time they can't even get that. A parser would at least tell them that their damage per second is awful.

Honestly, I look at people who have this exaggerated and paranoia fear of parsers as people who are afraid of finding out the truth that they're not as hot as they think they are, and I ain't perfect either. But, people can see that I at least try and relatively know what I'm doing.

[Bhearil]

If any of that were true then we wouldn't have people at level 70 not wanting to use their aggro reducing abilities, tanks not mitigating damage properly or using their enmity combos, monks/dragoons saying "hell no" to their own positionals, BLM's casting their spells out of order (or using Freeze and Blizzard constantly), MCH's not using Hotshot, etc.

I had a MNK yesterday in The Burn doing less DPS than everyone else. A MNK WHOSE DPS WAS BEING OUTDONE BY THE TANK AND THE HEALER. The other DPS was a SMN.

BUT, THE TANK AND THE HEALER.

I don't expect people to be 99th percentile, I expect them to try and be competent, and half of the time they can't even get that. A parser would at least tell them that their damage per second is awful.

Honestly, I look at people who have this exaggerated and paranoia fear of parsers as people who are afraid of finding out the truth that they're not as hot as they think they are, and I ain't perfect either. But, people can see that I at least try and relatively know what I'm doing.

A person who doesnt bother to improve his gameplay will not magically become better for having a parser, similar on how people dont play tanks despite all the bonus they keep putting for playing as one including faster queues, exlusive mounts, role bonus etc

Thats not a person whos learning his rotation, thats a person whos pressing buttons randomly sometimes without even bothering to read the skill descriptions. Everyone has had those kind of players (thanks god not very often) and you dont need a parser to know they suck (comes to mind a lv 70 Dragoon spamming impulse drive ONLY, or a Pala spamming Rage of Halone without the proper combo with aggro all over the place because not only aoe was too advanced for him he did lose aggro on single target as well) and if they didnt even bother to read what the hell their skills do, parser wont do anything for them to improve since theres 0 motivation to do so to begin with