How would an optional, official parser be toxic?

[Ursa_Vonfiebryd]

The issue with this is that it doesn’t give you anything to go on—it’s literally just a number with not a lot of context behind it.

Unless there were players sharing their numbers, general baselines could never be established when it came to performance. A BRD seeing that they are doing 12,000 DPS (random number) doesn’t tell them anything. Is that good for their item level? Is it bad? Could they use improvement, or are they doing well enough? You don’t know without other numbers to compare it to. They could think they’re doing well when the average could be 15,000 DPS (again, random number).

There could be a built in ranking table as far as how you performed against the rest of the group. And if people wanted to voluntarily share their data with others outside of the game then that's fine so long as it was just THEIR data. It's potentially a huge liability to the developers when data generated by other characters is able to be shared with people outside of the instance (because you can pretty much see everything in the battle log but you can't share it). Many people would consider that a huge invasion of privacy, especially if it was used in a negative way and you pretty much know it will be. Statics already use FFlogs to judge whether a person is worthy or not. I can't imagine what it would be like if everyone had access to everyone else's data. Someone could make a acerbic post on here and someone goes to look up their stats, sees that they're low or middling and comeback with 'ah your opinion doesn't matter because your trash'.

I like performing well enough to contribute to the team effort but I don't want that being a main quantifier as to my experience in the game and unfortunately a fairly large portion of the community would use it that way. I don't ever see an in game parser because of this but if they did make one it would fairly useless to anyone who uses them as they are now because it would be so regulated and strictly private that implemeting it would amount to...basically nothing. The same information you can already learn from things already in the game (Stone, Sky, Sea) only with an actual number attached.