They Should Add An Official Damage Meter With One Condition

[Shurrikhan]

Or just add one no strings attached.

A greater point of concern regarding toxicity:

Imagine four possible situations:

1. Everyone has the available information about each other's throughput, framed in such a way as not to favor luck or gear, such as by all three among offensive relative potency per second (not counting for external buffs), secondary throughputs (such as damage actively mitigated, healed, and/or boosted), and % uptime (darkening to yellow, gold, orange, red-orange and finally red with portion of time spent dead). There is no question of who is doing how much, or what their relative value is, only why a given player might be falling short or another doing comparatively well.
   
   
2. No one has convenient throughput information. The best anyone can guess is from ballpark correlatives such as whether another player seems to be performing their rotation correctly or by taking other signs of failure as indicators of failure in throughput. Margin for error in any such guess is rather high. Does this, though, stop them from pointing fingers when information is replaced with suspicion?
   
   
3. Everyone has access to convenient throughput information, but only for themselves save in that they see also their portion of total raid damage dealt. The latter allows them some small degree of comparison by which to see if they are doing what is expected of them. Again, though, does this prevent suspicion when things go south? Because this information is entirely personal despite its otherwise relative convenience, none can verify it even if anyone were to share it. Does this produce a less toxic state?
   
   
4. Everyone has access to convenient throughput information, but truly only for themselves. It can even less be verified despite its being convenient information, right there to seemingly determine whom is, say, screwed over by positioning or movement over a given mechanic to the detriment of a DPS check. Again, does this obfuscation --locking the question of how a sticking point can be fixed behind a further step of even identifying who or what is hurting-- produce a less toxic state than if we simply had direct but thorough (context-comprehensive) information?

_____________________


The first thing you tend to see from games without parsers, even if an illegal third-party variety, is a huge degree more fixation on following guides to the letter in place of practical experimentation, and for a straightforward reason: Outside extremely fine difficulty gradients of solo fights, there is then simply no way to empirically test performance. Superstitions, misconceptions, and misconstruement all abound, mostly unchecked, to the degree that truly high performance is still technically necessary (or even to the degree that players think that some content, somewhere, someday, will require it).

The second is that fingers only point harder in the absence of complete information. This compounds even worse with the frequency of half-understood fixation upon guides or similarly half-baked home-brewed rotation (more often a sign of coincident comfort than understanding or competency), in turn increased by denying players access to in-practice performance information, essentially locking such to just the spreadsheets of theory-crafters for an especially "elitist dystopia" as the younglings might call it today.

The third, if ever one has played a game in which one can easily gather information about their and their party's performance, is that points of disconnect or conflict (such as someone attempting Savage when they've yet to clear Normal or, in similar WoW terms, a +12 when they've yet to do a +5, or one expecting their party to help them despite their lack of preparation or their party expecting them instead not to waste their time by signing up for something their grossly unprepared for) don't somehow only show up upon their being more clearly evidenced. The problem exists regardless -- and all the more often when players are kept, whether actively or tacitly, in the dark about how they're actually doing.

Finally, you find that in games where being informed is a bannable offense (and it, not just any form of bad behavior separate from it, technically is bannable in XIV, for instance), the method of dealing with a given shortfall is less often to address it and help the given player or rework the strategy as not to leave the odd player out than to simply disband. When one can be reported just for being 'suspiciously' cognizant of who is most hurting (even if, with enough knowledge of the fight, eyeballing the problem would have drawn most to a similar conclusion), it becomes that much riskier to attempt any specific solutions.


Tl;dr: A full, but well-made parser tends to produce less toxicity than either any lack of parsers (complete or "official") or an incomplete or personal one.

[Adeacia]

And how do people know, that they failed? In a group of 8 players? Who knows if the entire group failed or just a single person?
How can you tell, without a meter, if someone is doing its job?

Clearing content and doing a good job are 2 different things.

When I did savage, I could tell when my dps wasn't good enough without some meter or anyone else telling me. I've even adjusted my rotation mid fight to a better one for higher dps, and yes I DID know it was better. I've also been able to tell when other players put out low dps without anything telling me. It's not all that hard when you are looking for it. The exact player I saw as having crap dps actually dropped out after a few pulls since they knew it as well.

Why is it so hard for people to figure out basic things?

[Caitlyn]

When I did savage, I could tell when my dps wasn't good enough without some meter or anyone else telling me.

Which indicators are you using to prove that?

[Kaurhz]

I think the closest they should come to incorporating this feature is to involve it in Stone Sky Sea as a means of seeing hard numbers associated with the attempt, in addition to a ratings-based system that could possibly be measured against other players in a private/anonymized fashion.

The problem with trying to incorporate it in the game otherwise against live encounters is that, unlike a certain website that allows you to do a relatively speaking deep analysis of performance in the said encounter to actually identify areas where you messed up. A feature supported natively within the game is only really going to be a surface-level assessment of performance, which doesn't actually give any meaningful data for those intending to improve (Aside from saying they currently aren't playing adequately enough) -- In reality, the power of the information doesn't really solely on the number itself, but the ability to do a fairly deep analysis of your performance -- Or the performance of the group. This aside, if it did have features similar to a certain 2 websites then I can only see that it would effectively turn into a community-mandated thing, regardless of how the developers feel about it personally, just due to an emphasis on the game having actual damage-checks in the game. I just can't see it having any useful meaning to actually be useful beyond "Big numbur guud", "Small numbur no guud" - I don't think I really see it as being a viable alternative.

Ultimately the developers would have it be a feature that is essentially privatized, which would in reality be a stark contrast to how a lot of people in the community would feel about it. In a sense, it would be a requirement for the community that you produce logs -- This point in itself has numerous potential issues that would occur as a result.

[Zachia]

To those wanting dps meters and more things that will tell you who to kick or abuse in your party to make yourselves feel better. There is the perfect community that does that, where you can feel entitled to make others feel less than dirt for wasting your time for not being the most optimal dps in game. "If you want Recount, World of Warcraft Mythic Plus is there waiting for you."

[Kirundo]

To those wanting dps meters and more things that will tell you who to kick or abuse in your party to make yourselves feel better. There is the perfect community that does that, where you can feel entitled to make others feel less than dirt for wasting your time for not being the most optimal dps in game. "If you want Recount, World of Warcraft Mythic Plus is there waiting for you."

That's the definition of a strawman argument

[Zachia]

Lets be real honest with ourselves here. If people didn't abuse dps meter add-ons in other MMORPG's and weren't extremely rude, disrespectful, or outright harassing than Yoshi-P and his team would never have a legit reason to not have them in game. But because people do abuse it just like anything else in the world, and some people can't control themselves, everyone is "punished" to prevent it from happening again.

[Shurrikhan]

If people didn't abuse dps meter add-ons in other MMORPG's

Please exemplify? I've seen far more toxicity over throughput in this game than across 13 years of WoW, in GW2, in NWN, B&S, etc., all games with performance metrics.

At best, the toxicity in XIV simply sometimes gets hidden by parties just disbanding when they get someone clearly underperforming/underprepared, rather than daring to offer advice on anything even tangentially to do with throughput for fear of being called out for parsing -- essentially wasting 7 extra people's time in requeuing, of all things, instead of even helping someone out. As someone who likes helping out in learning parties, etc., that state of things really sucks.


Heck, the last time I've had someone pulling well under their own weight in M+ (over in WoW), we stayed for a couple extra keys on our alts, postponing play on our mains, until he'd gotten a feel for how to manage throughput as melee even when the tank needs to kite (due to the Necrotic Affix). He didn't have a parser downloaded at the moment and just asked us to post numbers, for boss and overall, after each checkpoint, so we did, and gave class-specific pointers where we could while between fights (and on any wipes) and between runs.

Being informed =/= Being toxic. There's no part of being an ass, even, that's facilitated or encouraged by having a better grasp of the situation.

[hagare]

Yes, and they will be regardless of features put into the game.

This is relevant only if parsers would cause people to be dicks when they otherwise wouldn't, or that blinding people to their performance would somehow stop them from questioning others' performance when shit hits the fan (e.g., a DPS check is failed). Yet there is no evidence to suggest either is the case.

(In reality, it merely tends to shift the question merely from "What can we do to improve it" (locked behind these layers of blindfolds first from no sanctioned data and second from even eyeballed knowledge being threatenable with reports) to, first, what can be improved. It simply adds a prior, and arguably far more humiliating, step to the original one, or replaces solutions with disbandment.)

(Can't get called out for having potentially parsed if your solution to the problem is just to replace everyone and roll the dice again, after all. At least it's not "discriminatory" or likely to be reportable if you waste 8 players' time instead of helping the one in need. Modern grey-area solutions for modern blindfolded-under-threat-of-ban problems.)

And giving them parsers is giving them more things to be dicks about.
Let's not weaponize dicks even more yeah.