Tools they could add besides DPS meters... (For endgame)

[Lanadra]

if 3rd party website and figure out 100% usage of tools SE should be able to do it too.

From what I've seen it's less about 'being able to figure it out' and far more about 'SE chooses not to cater in that direction because they have no desire to'.

Integrate a personal Grade system, Based on uptime and stats,
Avoid all AOE rank F D C B A S S++
S is using cool down to mitigate 50% fight wide effect. S++ mitigating every fight wide Effect and avoid ever AOE
Uptime Rank F D C B A S S++
% of your uptime when you were using cooldowns.
if 3rd party website and figure out 100% usage of tools SE should be able to do it too.
Special Roll Rank F D C B A S S++
IE
TANK, Mitigate tank busters, keep hate, collecting adds,
Healer, Overheals, DPS regen or sheilds.
Range DPS (only really play BRD and DNC) Song up time, effect of ticks Dot %, dancing every 30 seconds and 1 min. % of time at 100% when you are wasting dps.
Melee DPS doing positions correctly, Cool down...
magic DPS NO CLUE I HATE MAGIC DPS THEY CAN ALL JUST DO THERE OWN THING... I've Tried to level BLM and RDM and they both suck.. But that just me and how I play. I know some great BLM DPS I Just don't like them... someone that plays them can come up with ideas.

end of a boss,
Report card
Uptime Rank B
Avoidable dmg, Rank A
Job Rank S

It would give people an idea of direct feedback as to what they are doing wrong vs the community calling them out or using 3rd party tools.
Turn on or off feedback.

I'd find all of this good and informative even outside of endgame content.. under the express condition that only you can see all this for yourself and others cannot ask/demand that you show it to them.. so pretty much similar to the 'others can't harass/bother you with their parser readouts'. I legit would have found it helpful in all my roles if the game had consistently kept track of how I've been doing throughout my journey from ARR to ShB with statistics such as what you show above.

[Brightamethyst]

end of a boss,
Report card
Uptime Rank B your best A
Avoidable dmg, Rank A your best A
Job Rank S your best S

Special rewards for getting S++ on fights.

And then people start trolling by intentionally dropping AoEs in the wrong place, not healing, etc. There goes your S rank!

You can't do personal scoring in group content like that. It's fine in solo content (Masked Carnivale already does it) but in a group any score would have to be collective.

[Colt47]

These definitely don't sound like they'd make the cut due to the baggage involved.

1) Score Cards or scoring systems. They did have something like it for deep dungeons, but putting it in savage is asking for trouble. It's better just to keep victory binary.
2) Systems that track Efficiency. Basically, it falls into the same realm as the DPS meters.

Stuff they most certainly could add

1) Better systems to facilitate learning a fight. I'm talking giving people actual information on the mechanic in the game and spelling it out for them, because this is one headache that isn't going to go away. Even if it only happens upon dying to the mechanic, it would greatly reduce the requirement on seeing videos before the fight, which means less prep time and more time playing the game.

2) A better progress tracker. They got progress trackers for when you do dungeons and things so I don't know why they can't be used for savage mechanics.

[Sealish]

So I've been reading through all of this and have a few opinions to throw in.
First (and most on topic), I think that it would be nice if there was some sort of soft indicator that would tell you as a DPS player if you were dealing enough damage to not be holding your team members back in whatever content you are playing. A simple indicator that only you can see somewhere (maybe a dot beside your party panel or whatnot). It would change colour as the encounter progresses to keep you informed.

Green: You are doing well. If you keep doing what you are doing, you will be able to make up for personal mistakes or even mistakes of others.
Yellow: You are still pulling your weight but you are making enough mistakes that one or two more big ones or if you start being even messier on your rotation you could start causing the group trouble.
Red: You are currently performing at a level where someone else is needing to perform higher than normal in order for the encounter to be beaten.

If everyone has a yellow dot, the encounter will still be completed. In fights without an enrage mechanic, the dot will never turn red. The reason I would like this is because if you are playing as a tank or healer... you know if you are playing well enough to beat an encounter. The party either dies or it doesn't. But when I play DPS I find it hard to tell sometimes if I am being a productive team member.

As for the other things discussed in this topic about elitism and gatekeeping and such... Here are my two cents.
Different game modes are targeted at different people. If you want to play the hard content, the content specifically made for people that enjoy challenge at a level where you need to optimize your play in order to be successful, then you need to make sure that you are playing at the same level as those you are playing with. The fun from THAT content comes from overcoming a difficult task with expert execution and tactics. You unfairly ruin other players' fun by not improving and playing at their expected level of competence.

HOWEVER that is not the only content in the game. A player should not be locked out of experiencing a piece of content entirely because of their ability to perform at the highest levels. They should still be able to play every raid/dungeon/whatever at a lower difficulty which requires only basic competency to complete, and all statistical and cosmetic item rewards should be the same across all difficulties. Drop rates can vary (reasonably, like 2-3x higher not 20-30x) but the availability of the rewards should not. Exclusive rewards for higher difficulties should be things like titles. An exclusive reward is important for a feeling of satisfaction, but the reward does not need to be something that excludes another player from advancement. Someone playing this content should be able to do the content without feeling anxious or feeling pressure from other players.

[Colt47]

There shouldn't even be a discussion on performance in the game. There are people that swear by dps being in a good spot and yet they are the busiest, most over burdened jobs in the game. Rotations are way better in other games compared to this one when it comes to damage dealers and end game. A lot of people who are not playing very well on dps in this game are probably just fine in any other one.

[Awha]

LUL this is far too much effort just allow for meters to be used and just follow the protocol if someone harasses someone over numbers and they get reported GM's take action.

[Vahlnir]

LUL this is far too much effort just allow for meters to be used and just follow the protocol if someone harasses someone over numbers and they get reported GM's take action.

At the very least I think it could implemented seamlessly into the Stone, Sky, Sea mode instead of just telling players "Here's a dummy. Kill it fast. Good luck have fun" and leaving it at that. If there's a good place for a meter I think it could be there. Or maybe have it pop up when a player attacks a regular training dummy. Out of sight and out of mind until needed, and it could give players a decent idea of what they could be doing. Then they can work it into whatever mechanics they need to deal with. Not having to see their names publicly displayed with 3/7/23 others might also take some pressure off anyone who's a little uneasy in a party setting.

[Raelsar]

While it's definitely tempting to add such systems, especially if you're knee-deep into the endgame aspects... parsers and other performance-related tools do represent a slippery slope for player behaviours.

Just from my own experience playing WoW, it's evident that these led to the game pretty much becoming dominated by a performance-obsessed mindset that put optimization and efficiency above all else -- including actually enjoying your time playing the game. To make matters even worse, it bled into ALL levels of content; new players were not spared from the demands for optimization and efficiency, basically making that game unapproachable.

The current "detente" between FFXIV and parsers where a blind eye is turned to them if they aren't causing a problem despite being against the rules is probably the best situation that I can think of. Making it more widespread might make it easier for those who are concerned with a good performance, but it will be to the detriment of everyone else; the snowball effect couldn't be stopped.

---

I recall reading/hearing that the developers for FFXIV actually did consider implementing these tools at one point (may have been during one of the Live Letters)... but promptly stopped working on it when they saw it was affecting their own behaviour, namely making them more unpleasant to be around because of the strong competitive aspect they invariably start playing up. And again, from my own experience with WoW, I can actually attest to this. It was pretty much inevitable that I tried out using a damage meter... and I found myself being more and more of a jerk, and I wasn't liking it. I stopped using it pretty quickly after this realization, and I suspect Yoshi-P saw the exact same thing happening when his own team got a hold of them for FFXIV.

Needless to say, it's likely why he's dead-set against implementing them... they affect player behaviours and cause social problems.
Competition isn't always a good thing, especially when you're trying to work together.

[Mikey_R]

There are clearly 2 sides of the argument, one for savage and harder and one for the rest, or, to put it another way, one where your DPS/performance matters so that you can avoid hard enrages or ones where it doesn't matter, aka the fights will just go on and on with no hard enrage.

Going with the fights that contain a hard enrage, There is obviously some threshold that needs to be met. The problem is when this threshold is not met. How do you determine where the weak link is so that it can be fixed? If people die/mechanics aren't performed correctly, then it is an easy fix, however, what if noone dies and mechanics are all performed correctly? There is no easy way to determine player A is underperforming by a large margin. If you could determine this, you can then help the player if you can. However, if you are going into the harder content there is also the expectation that you know your job. Unfortunately, there are people who do not know how to play their job and still go in expecting to be able to clear it.

So, some sort of measure is needed for encounters with hard enrages. However, you then have the issue of, do you allow the whole party to see it, or just keep it private for the individual. This then goes back to what I said before. Is the underperforming member going to pipe up and say, yup, I'm the one holding you back. In my experience, that does not happen, which then means, in that encounter, the party as a whole is still ignorant to who or what is preventing the clear.

Yes, it is a weird area. I am hoping people do see both sides of the argument, it is just because they feel stronger in one way or the other, they fall on each side of the fence.

As for the comment on 'strong competitive aspect' and how it essentially made people feel bad, as a counter argument, when I used to go into savage and EX content actively, me and my co tank would always have a friendly competition about who could do the most DPS. It was a healthy competition between both of us, call it a rivalry if you will, however it pushed us to both try harder and be better players over time and there was never any bad blood between us. I'm not saying that because I did not experience the degrading behaviour, it doesn't happen, however, I am saying it does not always result in degrading behaviour.

[Xtrasweettea]

Hey, what's going on in this thread?

*enters a jungle underbrush*
*sees tracks of a few people who left long ago, probably the ones who started the jungle expedition*
*sees a few people sitting at camp talking past each other*
*sees a few people who are getting their ankles caught in Kafkatraps continuously*

Yep, another typical FF14 idea forum thread.