Quote Originally Posted by Eli85 View Post
So, PS4 player here without a friend who feeds me information on my parsing. When I'm playing poorly, I know it. You do not need a parser to tell you that. You just know it.
Surprisingly more untrue than you'd think.

This is something I learned back in SB when I got curious and checked fflogs for the first time to see if anyone had uploaded any of the EX runs I'd been pugging, so I could actually see my performance. Up to that point I'd always thought I'd been doing sufficiently well. I got most of my rotation right and sure I had to move away from the boss for mechanics but doesn't everyone? I geared correctly, looked up rotations online, beaten SSS and was fairly sure I was at least doing decently.

How was I really doing? Terribly. Grey parses. It was a bit of a shock, what was I doing wrong? It turns out that without any way to gauge performance over the last year or two, I'd become lenient. I wasn't pushing myself. Dodging mechanics while doing a great rotation at the same time seemed really hard so I assumed most players didn't get that perfect. I had no one to compare to, no standard to set for myself. All I had was assumptions, not solid facts and stats.

It was only after that, that I really started looking at how to raise my gameplay. I learned how vital uptime is, how to maximize it. I pushed my rotations until they became muscle memory. And in the end, while I'm not an incredible player, I improved significantly. And it even made me enjoy the game that much more, because I had goals to strive for and room to learn and improve.

But you just can't gauge performance accurately over a feeling.