Quote Originally Posted by Nedkel View Post
Parses and logs from it are used for all kind of reasons, a ton of people use them to tell the difference between players and themselves.
It does show much much more and give way more information than you could ever figure it out from the straight out observation, and this is a fact otherwise it wouldnt be used.
Shows numbers and often a performance of each individual relative to the average, depending on the addon.

It does affect players culture and it does make it more aggressive and less tolerant, there are countless amount of cases where people get kicked because parser shown someone number. It encourages the "go go" mentality, no one in WoW wants to socialize anymore, because they sweet logs will get lagged if they will not do the run fast enough. I wonder why people playing wow are so positive for classic wow and it encouraging socialising with others, its because they dont have it anymore in their current wow version, everything is a number and percent a rats race towards better performance, where everyone is frustrated and angry, this is how that game is right now.

Parses are just a tool, but people do not deserve to have it, thats all.
Nobody in wow wants to socialize anymore because there's absolutely no reason to. Cross world/sharding and LFD did more to throw wow's community out the window than any parser ever did, and now it's just a matter of gogogogo get done as fast as possible - the content is just an obstacle for the reward, and nothing is shiny or interesting enough to get people to slow down.

People aren't as fixated on numbers as they are on speed, and high numbers = more speed.

I have a lot of reasons to be frustrated with where wow has gone in recent years, but having damage meters as a tool definitely wasn't one of them.

Also I'm pretty sure they had damage meters even back in classic. So there's that. Any problem parsers may have made worse was a problem that already existed because of other things. It's a compilation of problems, and parsers are not at the root.