FFXIV's Double Standard - Third-Party Usage and Spam Report Trolls

[Seddrinth]

They should just officially allow parsers honestly. Pretty much everyone doing savage and ultimates use parsers and fflogs. If SE actually enforce any type of punishment on parsers then you can pretty much say good bye to 90% of the end game raiding population.

[Vyrerus]

They should just officially allow parsers honestly. Pretty much everyone doing savage and ultimates use parsers and fflogs. If SE actually enforce any type of punishment on parsers then you can pretty much say good bye to 90% of the end game raiding population.

The reason they can't do that is becaust ACT and other programs akin to it are more than just damage meters. Like SinisterJoints pointed out, they allowed you to have extra telegraphs and timestamps that aren't in the game. This is usually rationaled away as, "It's just a machine instead of a person giving you a callout." But in reality it gives you the tells ahead of the in game ones, meaning you get more reaction and pre-positioning time. If they officially allowed parsers, they'd essentially be condoning a small form of cheating, and would have to create an official parsing program for the game itself, that also worked across consoles that does the same thing.

[SenorPatty]

By keeping track of your wipe to clear consistency. Clear consistency isn't held in very high regard by our raiding playerbase, for some strange reason.

For individual DPS, how fast you can break the current highest SSS dummy. For group, how fast you clear fights with the same set of players.

That's most likely because once the clear is achieved, the next stop is farming. Farming will always have at some point after the initial wave of first clears, an average clear time that is better than the first clears. To achieve that, you will need mastery of the raid mechs and improving on your performance that was needed for that first clear to hit that farm average.

Otherwise, you'd have people not caring about being in a party that consistently takes 10mins to clear a raid when the average sets it at 5mins.

[Vyrerus]

That's most likely because once the clear is achieved, the next stop is farming. Farming will always have at some point after the initial wave of first clears, an average clear time that is better than the first clears. To achieve that, you will need mastery of the raid mechs and improving on your performance that was needed for that first clear to hit that farm average.

Otherwise, you'd have people not caring about being in a party that consistently takes 10mins to clear a raid when the average sets it at 5mins.

I experience a different happenstance, and that happenstance is, usually some individuals are parsing their own runs with random people in the hopes of posting an Orange or what have you, instead of focusing on clearing the content. This results in them taking risks to maximize personal DPS without communicating what they want to healers, or the party in the cases that it is the healers themselves doing this.

Most of the time, average times don't matter to anyone, only things like skipping potentially problematic mechanics. In general, it seems to be selfishness over consistency. It happens in statics too, but statics are generally aware of who their selfish players are, and they generally work around them, especially if they are exceptional.

[EaMett]

Fair points

Here's the thing. Parsers are a required tool to identify issues.

You can optimize all you want with spreadsheets, practice and the likes, but what is to say that a change you made resulted in a gain or a loss? Measuring consistent variances in boss health is going to be incredibly difficult. Maybe the optimization you ran didn't increase the healer dps, or.... more likely someone had really bad crit variance or messed up a bit. You can't actually quantify personal performance without a parser.
Not to mention that the population of players that have the time and will to spreadsheet party mitigation and heals are sub 5%. That leaves a lot of players out.
So what results from having no parser? Well, lets take E8S. You run the content, nobody dies, you get your adds buff, nobody gets debuffs, perfect run yet you still hit enrage. Where do you optimize? Who's lacking? Do you need to change a strat? are your healers overhealing? It could be anything. Maybe it's week 1-2 and your healers aren't pulling 10k dps each in pre/post adds. They're in 480 gear after all. Or maybe it's week 4-5-6 and you just have one dps not performing well. You would have no idea since you didn't have parses to onboard this dps in the first place. Maybe he doesn't care to optimize, maybe he doesn't know how, maybe he thinks he's doing fine. Now what? You have no way of addressing the issue because you don't even know where it is.

This can impact pretty much any group hitting a wall at any point.

Now the other approach is to say "content doesn't need to be cleared as fast, it can be artificially gear locked". Essentially, all the groups that would be inevitably held back due to a lack of optimization tools will eventually clear as they build more gear. That's a fair point of view. It does come with a few drawbacks.
The obvious first one is that some groups will still encounter the issues in the paragraph above even once fully geared with the gear they have available. These people will be locked out of the content. Again, it could be your design choice, telling whether or not it's a good design choice is outside the scope of this post.
The second point is that it ignores some psychological aspects of gear locking. Which can be incredibly frustrating for higher tier players.
But even if we ignore that completely. More importantly than all, gear locking does not work for current ultimates. Since the minilvl-maxilvl delta is 0. Ultimates are all about consistent execution and mechanics. But you absolutely need to be able to identify issues with dps checks. And you will have some.

The game doesn't provide you with the tools required to identify issues within your party. The game provides you with fights that will require you and your party to iron out any issues you may have. You end up with third party tools that help with that. It's natural. And if you don't believe me, just believe SE's "turning a blind eye" policy. There's a reason why they do it.

Also, I think people highly underestimate how instrumental parsers have been in raising the skill of the playerbase. Many, many, many more players would be locked out of clearing savage tiers if we didn't have parsers. Even the good players as they could potentially be partied with heavy carries.. After all, how would they know?