Quote Originally Posted by Barraind View Post
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.