Final Thoughts

[Callinon]

Sighs, I miss the days of EQ and FFXI communities, most of the players I see now wouldnt last at most 2 months in those, or heck even a week progression-wise. Most any toxicity will result in you being ostracized from the entire server, thus your forced to either jump server or change names, both of which was not really available in the early years of those two mmos.

Those games had their own brands of toxicity. This isn't a new phenomenon.

[KageTokage]

I'll be honest in saying that the cheaters in this game are one of the things that piss me off the most about it, particularly because they openly brag about their "achievements" on Discord, Twitter, and basically any other social medium where it's not enforced.

It's mostly just the bots that annoy me though, because it's not like they're hard to identify or anything. SE just doesn't want to bother with any identification methods that actually require effort and thus my server's economy is basically just a bot farmer warzone now, as more new bots keep showing up and attempting to compete with the established farmers who've been here for years. The prices have crashed so hard for gear and consumables it's simply not worth the effort to make them legitimately anymore.

Parsers are mostly a good thing, though there are toxic people who use them to pick people apart for not performing to their standards.

As far as the hunt radars go, those do have the potential to be really annoying in the hands of players who intend to not share hunts, as they can tell them exactly where S ranks are the moment they spawn which gives them a huge leg-up on anyone else who's looking for them.

[HyoMinPark]

Edit: To post above me. I played FFXI a lot and while you have a point on player toxicity, the RMT bots were out of control on there and ruined many marketplaces. I don't see the same thing happening in FFXIV.

It may depend on the server, but there are some servers that have certain markets that have been destroyed by the crafting/gathering bots - either current consumables or current crafted gear.

[Drayce1]

Those games had their own brands of toxicity. This isn't a new phenomenon.

Eh they did, but it was dealt with within the community most of the time. Heck, GMs didnt really intervene. Unlike now where you got most players who refuse to learn how to play, expect to get carried, then cries out if things are "Unfair" just cuz "I pay a sub like everyone else"

Heck, most dont even go to these forums for information anymore, everyone tells me they get their info from reddit or in their FC/LS Discords for information and news, due to over 98 percent of all threads being just complaint threads. Meh.

Sighs, if only WoW didnt happen....

As for the bots. Tbh the GM Taskforce did pretty well in finding and eliminating them once they put it together. Thats why Gil between CoP and Wings was so expensive to buy online. Getting enough gil to say, get a Relic weapon for example, would have costed around 1500 dollars. Since RMTs were constantly found, and banned, thus the price would go up.

Honestly, I think they did a better job than whats going on in XIV now. From what I am seeing, SE is just letting them do whatever, and most of them farm Shards, hence why the prices are so low, since no one wants to farm shards. Tbh a good thing really. Probably why SE lets those particular Bots be.

[KageTokage]

Honestly, I think they did a better job than whats going on in XIV now. From what I am seeing, SE is just letting them do whatever, and most of them farm Shards, hence why the prices are so low, since no one wants to farm shards. Tbh a good thing really. Probably why SE lets those particular Bots be.

I don't know if your server is just a weird case or something but I almost never see shard bots on mine. They mostly go after ephermal/unspoiled nodes so they can farm mats to produce the latest relevant crafts, though there is a mob of bots (Whom I suspect to all be owned by the same person given certain evidence) who farm gather/crafting scrips instead.

Allowing cheaters to dictate the economy in any form or fashion whatsoever really is not something that any self-respecting MMO would do, though. Even if they were such an essential part of the economy, any price spikes caused by their removal would eventually level out to be appropriate for the amount of demand and people would just adjust and start getting shards themselves.

[Barraind]

I remember when we had to grep or parse hundreds of hours of log files to get our damage numbers and figure out where we could be doing better.

"Is my damage okay? Its the single most important thing I add to a raid encounter"

'I dont know, give me a day or two to run this log file through my parser'.

Those were the worst times.

Parsers in MMO's are on the short list of things you absolutely need to have (as long as your MMO has meaningful combat, at least)

[NekoNova]

I remember when we had to grep or parse hundreds of hours of log files to get our damage numbers and figure out where we could be doing better.

"Is my damage okay? Its the single most important thing I add to a raid encounter"

'I dont know, give me a day or two to run this log file through my parser'.

Those were the worst times.

Parsers in MMO's are on the short list of things you absolutely need to have (as long as your MMO has meaningful combat, at least)

Nope, you don't

[CorbinDallas]

I'm my experience, you aren't called a bad player for not parsing, you're called a bad player for...being a bad player.

[KageTokage]

I'm my experience, you aren't called a bad player for not parsing, you're called a bad player for...being a bad player.

Some people can be short-sighted and reference a player's past logs on FFLogs improperly and draw a wrong conclusion for it.

IE, I had some rather rudely conclude I wasn't ready to beat OS4 on the basis that the only parse I had ever logged for Exdeath was from my very first sloppy clear where both tank and healer mishaps had caused me to die multiple times. He didn't even bother considering my DPS in the current attempts which was more then good enough (Though that group never actually reached Neo Exdeath due to other underperformers).

I didn't, and still don't actively log parses so anything that's posted is strictly from other players which in turn paints a rather inaccurate picture of how well I actually perform, but I honestly don't care.

[Physic]

I remember when we had to grep or parse hundreds of hours of log files to get our damage numbers and figure out where we could be doing better.

"Is my damage okay? Its the single most important thing I add to a raid encounter"

'I dont know, give me a day or two to run this log file through my parser'.

Those were the worst times.

Parsers in MMO's are on the short list of things you absolutely need to have (as long as your MMO has meaningful combat, at least)

you can beat content without parsers. parsers basically make it easier to track your self/group however there are simpler basic methods that achieve the same thing.

an analogy, you could get a fancy watch and gps tracking to tell you how fast you ran, or you could just get an old watch, and time yourself.


parsers big flaw is that they alter the game experience. That being the social experience, and how they interact with the content. It would be interesting to see how developers might handle a game that is meant to make more use of those metrics, but most of these games arent designed with complete knowledge in mind.