Parsers add replayability for casual players

[Roeshel]

It's about the mentality of the players, which then gets applied to roulettes in this game and in these forums (which I've been reading from certain 'pro-parser' players here a lot ... complaining about level 77 tanks, for example)

what's wrong with expecting that a level 77 tank, who has spent 10+ hours on leveling said class, to play their class at a decent level?

Define 'decent level' without referring to a parser.

You can't have it both ways. Either a parser is only used for weeding out end-game players, or it is used for weeding out players you'll 'tolerate' in non-end-game roulette.

Huh? You know exactly why that 77lvl tank got called out. Yet you just kept defending bad play. He couldn't take the aggro of 3 mobs. You know that this is not halfway decent, I bet you have kicked tanks for that. I am certain of it cuz you are a hypocrite. Just pretending to be nice to people. In fact, you are one of the many who use passive-aggressiveness to express themselves. It must be a living hell, always hiding your evil intends behind nice words.

[DPZ2]

Huh? You know exactly why that 77lvl tank got called out. Yet you just kept defending bad play. He couldn't take the aggro of 3 mobs. You know that this is not halfway decent, I bet you have kicked tanks for that. I am certain of it cuz you are a hypocrite. Just pretending to be nice to people. In fact, you are one of the many who use passive-aggressiveness to express themselves. It must be a living hell, always hiding your evil intends behind nice words.

There was nothing I read in the original post mentioning why they were calling out a level 77 tank (was that you?) as an example for needing a parser.

In any case, if the behavior is observable without a parser, why does it necessitate a parser in-game, exactly?

[Shurrikhan]

There was nothing I read in the original post mentioning why they were calling out a level 77 tank (was that you?) as an example for needing a parser.

In any case, if the behavior is observable without a parser, why does it necessitate a parser in-game, exactly?

Forgive the repetition, but I feel the previous answers left something to be desired and, as I've not yet expended so much energy in this thread as to be exhausted by such attempts, I would like to try once more to explain this.

First, though, some context -- namely, the original post you mentioned and those which contextualize it. Note that my views here don't entirely align with Roeshel's, but I believe I can at least fairly examine the contexts of his posts.

Calling someone, who is bad, bad is not verbal abuse. It is part of recognizing the problem. Players that play bad bring frustration, especially if they are unwilling to learn. Everything becomes difficult when they are around. I couldn't care one bit if you think that you are being attacked, harassed or insulted when someone tells the truth. The same way you don't care about your party members. A level 77 paladin that can't take the aggro of four mobs in casual content is just bad. Once he understands that simple truth, only then can he start improving.

This is why we won't get parsers. People who think like this ruin any chance of getting even private parsers built into the game. SE obviously doesn't want players pointing out each others bad parses.
And fyi, I'm not talking about giving advice on skill rotation, mechanics, or whatever because that can be beneficial. I'm talking parses - pure numbers. I'd personally like a parser, but I know some people won't shut up about other people's numbers.

?

If we had official parsers I wouldn't need to tell someone who is underperforming that they are underperforming. You are not making sense. As I already said, that recognizing the problem is the first step that needs to be taken if one wants to improve. If you by level 77 have not realized that you are utterly bad at your job as a tank then you need to be told that. Don't take it personally, maybe try talking with people to figure out how you can play your job better instead of hiding behind your screen, not responding to any question or advice given. I don't have to keep you in the dungeon, I did it because you were on your msq.

We have here (and in nearby posts, though for sake of brevity I've not copied them all) three larger claims that, while each individually complex, should not be conflated (nor taken as held by some monolithic "pro-parser" platform):

1. Basic qualitative evaluation (such as in doing "good" or "bad") should not be taken as attack against one's character; nor, therefore, should those evaluations be held to the level of scrutiny by which broader condemnation, scorn, or insult ought be held.

   This claim does not include whether calling someone "bad" insofar as their present performance in concerned is in fact insulting to their person, but merely that, in the context of group responsibilities, it ought not be treated as such. It's worth noting that in that context, so long as the content is of roughly appropriate difficulty for the party's lvl and ilvl, one's performance is inversely correlative with the remainder of the party's stress (of a sort few would ever look forward to), and most players wish to minimize unsought stress, whether directly or indirectly (e.g., altruism or via some vague idea of returns on what would otherwise be altruism).
   
   Note, though, many "pro-parsers" here have placed limitations upon this claim, such as by restricting it to only when the intent and likely consequence of that evaluation are themselves good (likely to produce a favorable outcome, not solely in the short-term, for the recipient or, at least, for one's party).
   * I, myself, am among that group, and consider tact a further factor. Though, I must admit that tact, to the extent it serves functions beyond reaching favorable outcome for the recipient, is largely self-serving; I merely think that stressors tends to affect us less when we feel better about one another and that, even while politeness can be facetious, practicing that politeness can often foster good feelings, if only incidentally.

2. When a party is failing to meet requirements or reasonable expectations (e.g., a level 77 tank failing to even hold aggro or a group failing Titania's DPS check), it is helpful for discussion not to be bogged down by the direct process itself of establishing the facts surrounding that failing. Parsers, even limited as they've been in the form of ACT or the like, significantly aid in this.

   It's worth noting here the larger goal to which a parser may adhere, such as in providing, ideally, as comprehensive a coverage among those bases or facets of fact as can be conveniently absorbed. (Convenience here does not prevent stress altogether; a very limited parser like ACT's, for instance, does demand attention to contexts, such as a tank screwing over its melee DPS through positioning or negatively synergetic pulls.) Yet, there is also some benefit to be gained from a basic, irrefutable starting point, from which those contexts can be discussed with accordant weight. For instance, if, clearly, none of the other melee DPS (who are presently far too homogenous to warrant further breakdown) were screwed over by the tank's actions, then the tank's movement, pulls, etc., such would make clear that the tank's pulling or positioning, itself, would not be a significant context, while cooldown desync from having died may loom large, especially on a job for which that impact is especially large. A parser cannot replace game knowledge; it is merely a table from/at which to situate discussion, having replaced and thereby abridged a process of guesswork to then more quickly, if needed, find lucrative threads.
   
   On this note, I think you'll find that many "pro-parser" posts here have phrased parsers' affordances in ways that open their position up to (sometimes unintended) strawmanning, mostly through the idea that parsers are somehow a cure-all. While an ideal parser can come very, very near such, the community's experience is limited primarily to ACT, or what they imagine ACT is like. Some of those posters will then correct this idea to indicate that, no, a parser does not occlude the need for context, but in fact provides a frame of reference by which those contexts themselves might be contextualized (which may be increasingly or decreasingly adhered to as fights become more throughput-centered or mechanics-centered), effectively finding what the biggest pain points are. Others, though, have not separated this from the social dimensions within parsing, which has, sadly, led much of this discussion in circles. (That is not to say the social dimensions do not themselves need to be discussed, only that conflating these areas has done us no favors.)

3. Players improve only after having acknowledged that they have a need and/or significant space to improve, and (the use of) parsers can stimulate that acknowledgement.

   This I must disagree with, and I feel many of the "pro-parsers" here would as well. While there is some vague, philosophical sense by which this may ring true (that one only actively seeks improvement after having comes to term with a need), one of the benefits I see as most unique to parsers is that it can solidify incidental improvement or "passive" experimentation (when one flubs an opener and just runs with it, for instance, and then sees the results and finds that the alternate opener might actually have some unique value to it). It gives some substance to one's experimentation, to when things "feel right" or "feel off", and around which one may find new ways to engage with their play at an additional derivative level, without being drawn out of game to charts, theorycrafting, guides, or the like.
   
   Parsers might signal needs to improve in a way that is uniquely concrete, convenient, and/or actionable, but they are not unique in being able to signal that need. Most situations that demand improvement are also visible to those with knowledge of the job in question without any need for a parser, so long as the content is easy enough to allow that kind of distraction (which may appear worth one's attention upon first incidentally noticing a mistake, upon the first wipe, or --with a parser-- at any given moment). Where the social environment allows, correction can occur almost identically with or without a parser; the parser only gives uniquely convenient means by which to tell players what to look out for, just as a mistake might guide one's eyes to the parser in the first place to see whether the mistake's likely to be trivial in the long run.

Again, these claims should not be taken as representative of the whole of a "pro-parser" platform. There is no such platform, after all, as there is no unified "pro-parser" group. Even the most basic reasons for wanting parsers vary greatly, from wanting to open up more of the game to others (in terms of means of engagement), to bridging to reducing player conflicts (e.g., by conveniencing and somewhat standardizing evaluations of performance as to have fewer cases of gross underpreparation or underengagement), to making the playing field more fair for PS players, so on and so forth. I have listed out these three to show how they are ultimately separate, even as seen within a single turn of discourse.

This is also partly why the request to show "why a parser is necessary" to solve the problem of the example level 77 tank who can't hold aggro is baffling to many here -- especially to those who have continued to state that a parser is not thus necessary to point out there mistakes, but instead simply gives more access to the kind of player who'd already want to try to pull themselves out of their (comparatively far less deep) hole. There's an intersection here between parsers and their affordances and the sort of social environment or situations we come across in group content that makes parsers feel especially relevant. That does not mean that parsers are meant to address every example therein. Far more of their intersections are less direct.

Or, in this particular case, the level 77 tank was never given as a example of what a parser could directly and uniquely solve, but merely a conflict which a parser could (A) get people out of more quickly and (B) help induce a change in social environment by which such conflicts more rarely occur.
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I'd like here to talk further about that "social environment" into which discussions of parsers so often intersects. I apologize if this comes off as ranting; I've not had times to organize my thoughts and need to type this out quickly before work.

I mentioned above that discussion of parsers often finds itself balanced against discussions of the social environment. To one side, it often (for no side here is monolithic) seems that much of what parsers could provide would seem less necessary if the social environment were more open to discourse surrounding improvement; after all, (in)convenience would be a smaller barrier to entry into that discourse if that discourse were already less alienated / more natural. To the other side, it would often seem that any increase in means by which players may butt heads (whatever the net positive may be) is inherently undesirable, especially or at least if those means follow a frame of reference that would seem to serve some small group (at the assumed expense of all others). I feel that latter fear has been attached to parsers unreasonably and to ultimately toxic and exclusive results.

Let us start with one of the ways in which the concept of parsing is most often interacted with in typical practice: DF run advice/requests. Somehow, there has formed an increasingly held myth that few if any mistakes could be noticed without a parser and that advice must therefore be consequent to parsing and therefore to whatever assumptions one holds about parsing (e.g., as despicably oligarchical, hierarchical, etc.). Yet, we rarely seem to question who actually loses out from those assumptions. Who, I wish we'd ask, are excluded as a result of stigmatizing information access and what all is associated with it? I think careful consideration of these potential actors can already show who, overall, does not benefit, so I will skip to the end: above all, this kind of stigmatization most hurts those players who want to engage in more of the game, not necessarily in terms of content, but the ways in which the game itself might be engaged with. We can ascribe this quality, by correlation, to the casual-midcore or not-quite-Savage or whatever other unfortunately stratified group, but my guess is that this describes a lot of people who (1) could get more enjoyment out of the game if its underlying systems of combat felt more pertinent or rewarding to them in their actual play and yet (2) are not so invested in doing any and all content (or, all upper-difficulty content) that they would seek out self-improvement for extrinsic ends. This is quite likely a group larger than your hardcore players, but whom are currently partly occluded.

Let me put it another way, returning to the sort of social impact this parser-hardcore conflation has on our more or less "daily" or "typical" interactions across battle content broadly. So long as the community maintains the myth that poor play is uniquely detectable by parsers (rather than parsers merely providing a longer-viewing counterpoint to our own attention), then the social environment will be held hostage to some extent by parser's legality. Often, this is due instead to some intentional conflation; I think we can be reasonably certain that many of those who, upon receiving even very tactful and specific advise, retort with a threatened report for suspicion of ToA infringement do not honestly think parsers uniquely caused their being given unwanted advice.

Nonetheless, however, that superstition (in the literal sense of a notion which, through its consequent procedures, maintains itself) has caused certain inertias that are, to my mind at least, fairly toxic. If the assumption is that one can only notice one another's mistakes because of a parser, even when the advice is far too specific to have come without careful attention well beyond an automated number-cruncher, and parsers are themselves seen as somewhere somewhere between icky grey, banned, and satanic, then even the idea of helping one another takes significant flak. Similarly, as parsing becomes increasingly conflated with elitism, and elitism as something which exists only from tautological reasons and to tautological ends (I am elitist because I am elite and I became elite only because I was elitist and so I could be elite), it reframes any forms of helping one another through increased engagement with their play, itself, as self-serving, cliquey, or otherwise nefariously agenda-based. That should not be the case. And, above all, it hurts those who want to engage with all the game has to offer, to the limits of their acceptable stress levels.

In part, that's because parsers and tools which can similarly convenience experimentation and, thereby, learning can reduce the stress of that engagement or give it a more symbolic and therefore investing experience (see friendly competition, setting new personal bests, etc). But it's also because there are areas separable between the very self-paced learning that occurs with parser usage over time and the more varied and far less player-paced anxieties that may go into Savage/Ultimate content, for instance. To limit a tool of use to, and means of engagement for, many just because its absolute need is only seen at the highest levels, for which only a smaller part of that "many" will have lasting interest, is unnecessarily exclusive.

People who come to enjoy hardcore content for the most part do so because they find that content at least as intrinsically enjoyable as the rest, likely because it satisfies a unique means of engagement (e.g. those means which are only felt when the tuning is such as to make your various tips and tricks acquired, and your attention to your play in any given moment, feel pertinent and rewarded). But note the "come to". Enjoying more difficult content is an acquired taste, not an irreconcilable one. It depends first on having enjoyed combat itself to the point of enjoying self-improvement. Not all, even then, who enjoy improving their performance will ultimately enjoy the further stressors of hardcore content. And that's totally fine. Scratching that gameplay-rewarded itch to the fullest degree requires specific content (Savage, Ultimate, etc.), but we don't need to scratch an itch we don't have to that extent. But at the same time, it's a bit ridiculous to think that the only ones who enjoy self-improvement or engaging with the finer systems of the game's combat are solely the "hardcore" players. And I hate that the costs to that whole potential group, just because they don't so neatly fit some sort of mythical "casual"-"hardcore" binary, goes totally uncared about -- let alone that binaries such as that, in defining themselves so often by their assumed opposition ("I am casual [because I'm sure as heck not one of those hardcore ****s]" or the inverse) just kind of creates a more sickly, more volatile playing field for everyone, eager to jump at (the throat of) any tools or artifacts that seem synecdochal of either side.

[/rant]