FFXIV Biggest Disease....Parsing

[LeonKeyh]

Yes it is a disease I say because more people than not use the info to cry to the devs because their tank does 3% less damage than another tank even tho they have heals and more mitigation/ group utility and then the devs turn every job into something a 3 year old can play for "balance" or because its too hard to have to pick one out of two skills to weave in-between GCDs or because its not super easy to maintain uptime on something. You can tell you are getting better at the game without DPS meters or logs. I just want people to stop optimizing the fun out of the game.

Spoken like someone who doesnt even know anyone with a parser. "more people than not"? Really?

While the second quote sums it up. To add:

Parsers aren't the ones causing changes to the game that everyone has issues with; It's turbocasuals. "Parsers" don't want the maximum amount of DPS to be easier to reach because then they don't have anything to work on.

Any "parser" that would complain about 3% less damage on a job that has more mitigation (which is a minority) would be told by the majority of parsers that they're dumb because of the other job differences.

The closest thing to your example MIGHT be "parsers" arguing whether a 3% damage difference is actually made up by the mitigation/healing that is being discussed.

"More people than not" is just a make believe world though.

[Dreamsoap]

u know, my BiS WHM was booted from a P4S reclear because the cohealer looked me up and said i never healed part 2

they completely ignored full orange parses on my main job for a competency check

anyway, i just laughed it off, it was pretty funny XD

oh this week i was called a parsing healer on my sage in p4s because i was not GCD healing to save the party from the next raidwide, yeah that aoe shield + pepsis is gonna help us survive from 20% HP

This is my love/hate relationship with healing savage. You're judged on competency via dps. But if you don't gcd heal (only needed on my sage when people didnt do mechanics) you're also a shit healer. I'm so tired of it. I can't dps on p3s ever because no one survives FoA. So I look like a shitty healer even though I carried groups through via gcd spam.

[Ronduwil]

Sure, because they don't care about parsing. They just don't.

They care, but they know that trying to do something about it is futile. As Yoshi-P said, what's the difference between a parser and an excel spreadsheet that you cut and pasted your client-generated logs into? How far can they go to try and regulate what you're running on your computer? He said that they'd rather give players their privacy and rely on their honor than waste time and goodwill trying to police everyone's personal computer.

Posting someone's logs on the internet, however, is a different story, and he explicitly said that they will ban for that on the pretext of harassment, not because the player was parsing. He also said that they deliberately left ACT-style functionality out of the game because they didn't want to encourage players to blame each other for not clearing content. He said that games shouldn't exclusively be about efficiency. It's a refreshing departure from the way that the Blizzard development team acts, to be quite honest.

I personally feel that it would be nice to have an in-game parser that shows your stats and your stats only. I think that would give players who want to improve their performance the tools they need to do so without encouraging the bullying that comes along with team-wide parsers.

[Saraide]

They care, but they know that trying to do something about it is futile. As Yoshi-P said, what's the difference between a parser and an excel spreadsheet that you cut and pasted your client-generated logs into? How far can they go to try and regulate what you're running on your computer? He said that they'd rather give players their privacy and rely on their honor than waste time and goodwill trying to police everyone's personal computer.

Posting someone's logs on the internet, however, is a different story, and he explicitly said that they will ban for that on the pretext of harassment, not because the player was parsing. He also said that they deliberately left ACT-style functionality out of the game because they didn't want to encourage players to blame each other for not clearing content. He said that games shouldn't exclusively be about efficiency. It's a refreshing departure from the way that the Blizzard development team acts, to be quite honest.

I personally feel that it would be nice to have an in-game parser that shows your stats and your stats only. I think that would give players who want to improve their performance the tools they need to do so without encouraging the bullying that comes along with team-wide parsers.

This approach gates out toxic people who have no idea how to read logs and no idea about the game in general from wielding them as weapons, while allowing smarter and less toxic people to keep a tab on their own performance and who they should definitely silently kick from their party. Yea it sucks to get silently kicked when you have genuinely no idea what mistakes you are making but there will never be a perfect solution because people simply arent perfect beings.

Usually if you are in any content where parsing even happens with any semblance of seriousness and you ask someone on how to improve, chances are someone will point you at any half decent guide out there (usually towards the resources of the balance discord).

[Liam_Harper]

He also said that they deliberately left ACT-style functionality out of the game because they didn't want to encourage players to blame each other for not clearing content.

The biggest problem with that is that it's exactly what players do, blame each other when they don't clear content. Except now it's based on misconceptions. Players who are largely at fault for their groups not clearing blaming the group and actually believing they're in the right, but no one can disprove them because the only method to display performance is banned.

[ForteNightshade]

FFlogs and other sites should definitely be "Opt-In" not "Opt-Out". If they are a just a tool for self improvment then other peoples data shouldn't matter at all..

If Bill does a search for Gary and Gary hasnt registered on fflogs or opted in it should just say "This player isn't registered" instead of a "This player is hiding their data" There's a big difference between those two messages.

There really isn't. Someone who hasn't registered on FFlogs will be viewed with the same stigma as someone hiding their logs. At the end of the day, FFlogs is treated as your raid resume. Good groups won't use it as the end all be all when potentially looking to recruit. However, many want some sort of reference point to go over. Say you're looking for a semi-hardcore group but have never parsed above 50%. Even with a solid mechanical consistency, those types of groups want players who can equally push damage alongside handling mechanics. In all probability, the players simply won't have the same goals. In fact, I'll cite a friend of mine who parses above average. He literally only cares about clearing even if it's entirely scuffed. Which is great. He and I wouldn't gel well in a group together because I really couldn't care less about clearing Savage "just for the weekly" once we've finished prog. I want to optimize as that's the aspect of Savage I enjoy most. I don't have any qualms if we wipe because someone messed up and it caused deaths to spiral.

FFlogs is simply a tool. Some players misuse it but the tool itself isn't to blame. Nor is it a disease. The sheer irony is FFlogs keeps Savage alive. Without an Ultimate, there simply isn't a point for people to even run it outside of the initial gear.

It should also be noted pretty much nobody cares about logs below Savage. At least in terms of good players you'd actually want to be around. Even Ultimate parses are generally thought of as more of a cool meme than a serious goal. Having three EX Primals uploaded won't mean a thing unless you're trying to jump into a hider tier midcore group. Then they'll likely want to see some degree of experience.

Parsing just seems to be the extension of a bigger problem this community has, which is trying to coach and teach players who have no interest in being taught, just focus on yourself and your own play.
If parsing really is for personal improvement, then people really shouldn't be turning it on in roulettes or normal content and just leave it to PF content and their static, but a lot of people definitely don't use it like that.

This line of logic would suffice... if this weren't a team game. Your performance in Savage will impact my goals of clearing. A tank who refuses to mitigate forces their healers to either accommodate their poor play or comment on it. They literally can't improve if they're having to constantly baby tanks or DPS who couldn't care less. And who is often played for the DPS dying despite said DPS eating their fourth vuln stack? Just this week I argued with a Bard in P1S because they didn't want to flex and dismissively said "I don't care about a number on a website." Basically, they couldn't care less if the tanks suffered a 30% damage down all because they couldn't be bothered to learn how to do the mechanic properly. Do I actually care about the parse? Not really. I even rejoined that same party after they booted the Bard despite them no longer having a Prange. For me, it's the principle of demanding others to accommodate your laziness.
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In the end SE is largely to blame for creating this DPS centric mentality amongst the playerbase because there's literally nothing else to focus on. As a tank, I barely have any genuine tanking responsibilities. Every boss auto-positions, does infrequent and entirely scripted busters and aggro management is a joke. Healers have it even worse. Nothing below the Savage level necessities any kind of healing. Even Savage itself barely does. Hence why they're constantly complaining about their boring nuke spam "rotation." When the support roles aren't evaluated on their ability to tank or heal, respectively, but rather on their efficiency at being a gimped DPS. It's hardly a wonder why parse metrics have become so pervasive at the Savage level. And this is entirely on SE not the playerbase.

[Ronduwil]

The biggest problem with that is that it's exactly what players do, blame each other when they don't clear content. Except now it's based on misconceptions. Players who are largely at fault for their groups not clearing blaming the group and actually believing they're in the right, but no one can disprove them because the only method to display performance is banned.

Players are going to suck sometimes, and sadly there's nothing SE can do about that. What they can do, however, is not actively encourage that behavior the way that Blizzard does. They go even further, banning the behavior when it can be proven. That's better than doing nothing. It's way better than what Blizzard's done, which is to actively encourage and reward that behavior. M+ dungeons in WoW drop half the loot if you don't make the timer. On top of that, failing the timer degrades the key that was used to start the dungeon, impacting not only the quantity of loot for the current run, but also the quality of the loot in future runs. If you think players get mad at each other in this game because they keep wiping in Savage raids, just imagine your daily MSQ denying you tomestones because one player stood in the bad stuff too many times and another player was still learning their rotation.

But that's not all they've done. They keep track of everyone's runs and give them an in-game score based on their successes and failures. So if you run with a new or unskilled player, not only are you degrading your loot; you're also trashing the personal in-game score that others are going to use to include/exclude you from their runs. I could never imagine Yoshi-P signing onto something like that in this game, and that's why I'm playing it.

It's one thing to tolerate bad actors who operate under the radar. It's quite another to glorify and encourage them. Maybe I'm more supportive of SE in this regard than I should be simply because I've seen how much worse it could be.

[Ronduwil]

Healers have it even worse. Nothing below the Savage level necessities any kind of healing.

Players keep saying that, but I swear I see a tank die in the roulette almost every night because they're under the delusion that they can pull three packs with no mitigation and duck around a corner with no worries. Some fights I barely have time to keep my dot on the boss because players are taking so much damage. If you're always running with fully geared players who have been clearing the roulette every single day for the last five years, you would understandably have this perception, but as somenoe who always queues with random players, I don't feel underutilized as a healer. It's rare to clear even a level 50 alliance raid in the roulette without seeing several deaths. A periodic Medica II may suffice for experienced players, but for other players it's just a start. There's only one rescue button, and it has a lengthy cooldown.

[TaleraRistain]

there is only bigger disease in f14 than parsing and that is people complaining about it despite being literally unaffected by it. Bonus points if those players dont even do the content where the parsing happens.

Because parsing isn't staying in that content. It's bleeding down into casual content. I've seen people on these forums who say they parse alliance raids and normal raids and dungeons and judge people about it. Wanna parse for someone's own benefit, fine. But there's zero reason to obsess over numbers in casual content. That makes someone less flexible to react to the idiosyncrasies that happen in a given run because they're more focused on tunnel visioning those arbitrary numbers than being a good teammate.

[ForteNightshade]

The biggest problem with that is that it's exactly what players do, blame each other when they don't clear content. Except now it's based on misconceptions. Players who are largely at fault for their groups not clearing blaming the group and actually believing they're in the right, but no one can disprove them because the only method to display performance is banned.

Just to provide an example of why this stance simply doesn't work the way Yoshida intended, I'll cite my TEA prog last year. We hit Perfect Alexander enrage five times; twice with only a tank death and three times with zero deaths. Now I cleared this fight on release yet in this group we had people with dungeon BiS and three people (later four) rocking relics. There's absolutely zero chance we should be even remotely close to enrage in a deathless run. Clearly the DPS aren't doing their job since it's an enrage after all, yes? Turns out the healers had no mitigation blame whatsoever and were tripping over each other—to the point we lost 4k overall DPS from them alone. Once that was addressed, we cleared before the tanks got jailed.

Without FFlogs, there's literally no way for us to have pinpointed what exactly was the problem. Maybe it gets brought up that the healers aren't synergizing their heals well but how many pulls do we lose blaming the DPS for something outside their control?

This is far from a rare occurrence either. I've been accused of being the lowest DPS despite my little abacus showing I was the highest. I've seen healers pulling 1k DPS demand the group needs to "do more damage". And we have the hilarious meme of a certain Primal tank who was accused of not using any mitigation on his P3S tether buster despite it clearly showing in his twitch clip that he had Nebula, Rampart and Camouflage rolling all while he sat at 30k HP. He even linked the damn FFlogs mitigation chart in party chat just to prove his point when they insisted he had no CDs up. He was then accused of being toxic for linking to that website and threatened with a report.

But yes, parsing and FFlogs are always toxic.