Third party software

[Wolfund]

I mean, there's a scale isn't there. Plenty of people just use ACT, all that does is read combat logs and turn it into a human readable format. Or plugins that help compensate for packet loss, which just simulates "living in California or Japan" for most players.

I don't agree with the kinds of mods that give new visual indicators for mechanics (I actually find them distracting and annoying, and they make it more difficult for me to learn content) but I don't think people who use them are really a big deal. They still have to execute the mechanics and play thier jobs, after all.

With some pen and paper, a dummy, a chronometer, and a calculator.

[HyoMinPark]

With some pen and paper, a dummy, a chronometer, and a calculator.

Anyone that uses the “you can just do it manually” argument I have to wonder: did you ever use a calculator when you were in school for your math or science classes? Or did you do all the work by hand?

A parser is a calculator. At its most basic level. No different from those TI-83s or TI-84s you may have used in school; or even a more basic Casio calculator. They just streamline a process, which isn’t inherently a bad thing. I really wish people would stop acting like it is.

[KariTheFox]

With some pen and paper, a dummy, a chronometer, and a calculator.

Assuming you're not joking, I'd like to try running a little thought experiment with everyone who has a strictly anti-parser viewpoint.

I want to figure out my damage per second during a period of say, 8 minutes. First, I do exactly what you say, hit the training dummy for 8 minutes, then with a pen and paper and a calculator, I calculate what my dps was over those 8 minutes. These calculations probably take a fair bit of time, 8 minutes is a lot of GcDs to add up.

So, I do it again. But this time, instead of using a pen and paper, I simply use my computer to copy and paste the entire combat log into a notepad file. Then, instead of doing the calculations myself, I send that file to my friend, he's much better at math than I am, and can calculate my dps much faster than I can.

Next time, my friend sends me a little computer script. He's not only better at math than me, but also a pretty good programmer. He tells me that instead of sending my combat logs to him, all I have to do is have this script he wrote read them, and it'll calculate my dps for me. All on my own computer and everything.

Next, I decide that I don't want to have to copy and paste these combat logs every time I want to calculate my dps. So I ask my friend, he tells me to use a screen capturing program, and run another script of his. That script will "read" my combat log in real time and transcribe it to a notepad file, which the then first script will read and calculate, just like before. Now, this works fine, I can even look at my dps in real time if I really wanted to.

Next, my friend tells me that he realized that using a screen capture program to read my combat log introduces a lot of unnecessary overhead. It would be a lot easier and simpler to just read the incoming network traffic that carried the combat log to my cilent, more accurate too, since sometimes the combat log in your cilent can leave things out.

Now finally, my friend then bundles his scripts up into one program, that can read incoming network data of combat logs, and then calculates the dps of players that are in those combat logs. I'm vastly oversimplifing, and might have some details wrong, but at this point we have pretty much arrived at the base functionality of parsing programs.

My question, at what point of this process did I do something wrong? Was it copy and pasting my combat logs to a notepad file? Was it having a third party use those logs to calculate my dps? Was it having a script on my computer do those calculations? Was it capturing the output of my combat log in real time? Was it reading incoming network traffic? Or was it somehow, doing all of those things at once?