Quote Originally Posted by Gemina View Post
Truth of the matter ties into what the OP is talking about. The common denominator is so low now that if you care about your performance and rotation; you actually read and understand tooltips; then you are already better than 80% of the players out there.
I sadly agree with this. I don't think giving the group a letter grade is the direction it needs to go in either.

SE's light anti-parsing stance seems to be based in that they don't want people to sweat about performing perfectly in-game, something a lot of people have weaponized into running as far into the "I can auto-attack through the dungeon and it's valid" kind of camp.

Problem is that if you're given a colorful sticker regardless of how you do on a test for example, the natural outcome is that everyone stops trying because there is no longer a difference in doing well and "doing". It's why you see people argue that if it takes you an hour to clear a dungeon, you cleared, why are you angry? Because we can do it in 20 minutes.

I believe a larger issue is that we can't control our experience in FFXIV very well. If you want to gather/craft and ignore all combat stuff? You do you. Savages? Go for it. But we want to play with like minded people and simply saying to "Make a group in DF" isn't a helpful response. How would you control that? Anyone can have item level 500, and I'm pretty sure there isn't a nice way to portray you want to clear dungeons in however much time without it sounding like you're implying something negative on the general community.