They Should Add An Official Damage Meter With One Condition

[Sebazy]

If you seemed halfway useful, theyd keep you until you were holding them back from clearing content.

No offence but either you're paranoid AF or you suck to raid with if that's your actual experience.

- How good your damage numbers are is now softly endorsed by the Devs as a metric to judge another player by.

As opposed to judging a player by their ilvl, achievements, pets, mounts, glamour, choice of race etcetc?

- An increase of players being greedy dps. There are already a lot of players who use a parser and behave stupidly in groups to get big numbers, then rage out when they get a junk parse because someone didnt DP them or use their buffs right.

I suspect try hards like that already have numbers in front of them.

- Failure Verification: I.E it is now reasonable to demand someone link their personal meter when a group hits enrage to check to see whos weakest link. Afterall, you cant call it harassment to see their numbers if SE makes that information available. Much like it is not harassment to kick someone from group if their gear is suboptimal for a fight. If there are no meteres (and assuming no parser), it becomes a lot harder to pinpoint whos coming up short with DPS. Blame is spread a bit more evenly. Furthermore, with no meters present, the Devs can justify banning people who kicked someone by their DPS numbers means youre using a tool to see that and that is against ToS. That argument becomes a lot harder to make when you provide a tool which shows that. Oh and for iLvL issue, I and many players almost always avoid people who set an iLvL with a lot of these fights because its usually someone looking to get carried by getting overgeared people in the group who usually have cleared the content. Also iLvL isnt an accurate metric of a players abilty or true gear potential. You can get 590 i lvl just by farming tomes, and you may end up doing less output than a player in 588 gear if theyre using crafted but optimized equipment.

That's a lot of words to try and handwave away the responsibility of someone potentially holding back the rest of the group if they are hitting enrage. For the most part that's not really an issue in the overwhelming majority of Savage content and it certainly isn't in Extremes, but every now and again we get an E8S that really requires the entire group to be on the ball with damage. Being able to spot where the issue lays is the first step in solving it.

- a DPS meter in of itself is actually somewhat useless. See how much DPS you do is contextual to a lot of factors: Fight, Group Composition, length of Fight, How well you know your rotation, how well others know their rotation, buff window allignment, etc. Just showing a DPS number can lead to a lot of misunderstandings of ones performance. Pair that with Verification issues that may (and probably will) crop up, you can have people getting mad at a player because they think theyre doing poorly when in reality there's a lot of other factors going on.

A fair point, and the reason why I've often suggested that SE look at using Potency per second as a metric instead. However, DPS is still an important tool to learn the importance of 2 minute alignment etc.

- The unforeseen trends: Online communities with anything that has a difficulty curve that limits who can do said content will always have some level of elitism, toxicity, and bragging, either from those with huge egos, or those envious of other players' successes. How they display this can vary from game to game. Adding in a DPS meter, even a personal one, is going to feed this issue in some capacity, that is almost a guarantee, because adding any tool or feature which allows people to measure their ability is going to contribute to competition, bragging, elitism, envy, and toxicity.

It's been said a million times but I'll repeat it again, a toxic individual will use whatever tools they have to hand to attack their target. If it's not a parser, it'll be something else in the list.

[Elesh]

Also, for the OP, stating that "there are no valid arguments" doesnt mean its a true statements. There are plenty of realistic and valid arguments why in game Parsers are a bad thing.

You're ascribing morality to a tool. That's like saying 'knives are bad because someone killed someone with a knife'. Parsers are a tool. Full stop. They're a tool. They, themselves, are not good or bad.

What is good or bad is how they are used, and how they are moderated. Which is the real thing that needs to be considered.

But lets humor the idea of an in-game parser, what can we expect?
<snip>

You just described most of the 'bad use cases' - but those can be mitigated by messaging and moderation. Going back to the knife example... we don't allow people to bring sharpened knives to certain places because there's not a lot of justification for them in those places. We punish people for using knives in certain ways as a deterrent to keep people from abusing the tool.

Same thing with parsers. By having firm messaging about how you can and cannot use the parse tool, by designing the parse tool to be positioned appropriately(ie. with a focus on your own personal numbers rather than others) and by having rules with specific punishments to deter misuse... you can mitigate the negative impact of them.

You describe the worst case scenario as if it's impossible to prevent... but it IS preventable. Knowing that those are the 'worst case scenarios', the team can come up with solutions to mitigate them.

ex. If the team makes it clear that it is against the rules to press someone to show their parse and that such behaviour is punishable... they make it clear that you shouldn't do that. They could also add a 'report for parse abuse' option to the in-game reports that would submit the chatlog for review to make it easier to report... just as one possible option.

The tool itself is not bad. The tool is meant for people to self-evaluate to help themselves understand where they fit in the game and how well they're performing. It can be used for bad... but to believe we can't have a tool because it could be used for bad is a level of pessimism I'm not comfortable with.

[CosmicCoqui]

You're ascribing morality to a tool. That's like saying 'knives are bad because someone killed someone with a knife'. Parsers are a tool. Full stop. They're a tool. They, themselves, are not good or bad.

What is good or bad is how they are used, and how they are moderated. Which is the real thing that needs to be considered.



You just described most of the 'bad use cases' - but those can be mitigated by messaging and moderation. Going back to the knife example... we don't allow people to bring sharpened knives to certain places because there's not a lot of justification for them in those places. We punish people for using knives in certain ways as a deterrent to keep people from abusing the tool.

Same thing with parsers. By having firm messaging about how you can and cannot use the parse tool, by designing the parse tool to be positioned appropriately(ie. with a focus on your own personal numbers rather than others) and by having rules with specific punishments to deter misuse... you can mitigate the negative impact of them.

You describe the worst case scenario as if it's impossible to prevent... but it IS preventable. Knowing that those are the 'worst case scenarios', the team can come up with solutions to mitigate them.

ex. If the team makes it clear that it is against the rules to press someone to show their parse and that such behaviour is punishable... they make it clear that you shouldn't do that. They could also add a 'report for parse abuse' option to the in-game reports that would submit the chatlog for review to make it easier to report... just as one possible option.

The tool itself is not bad. The tool is meant for people to self-evaluate to help themselves understand where they fit in the game and how well they're performing. It can be used for bad... but to believe we can't have a tool because it could be used for bad is a level of pessimism I'm not comfortable with.

Because it has been used for bad in other games that have built in parsers already. It's the reason why Yoshi does not want it here because he has seen it in other games. That last bit of your statement "we can't have a tool because it could be used for bad is a level of pessimism I'm not comfortable with" completely ignores that fact. It always leads to toxicity no matter what. With one being officially added, parse harassment would result in a few day suspension versus the current possible instant ban.

[Sebazy]

If Official Damage Meter was a thing then expect a lot of PF's saying: "Link your Damage meter on this fight."

Good luck trying to get in the newest content if you are a little slow to keep up with the speed runners.

Being consistent, dependable and level headed will always get you a raid spot somewhere if you're actually willing to put some effort in.

Groups that have enjoyed long term stability will look at far more than just the colour of someone's logs.

[Leifei]

100% this. the ones crying for ACT don't understand all the bullying that would occur as a direct result of endorsing parses as a measurement for competency in raids/trials. Noooooo thank you. I much prefer having a game where new players can pick up a savage trial and actually learn it, instead of being treated like trash because they havent memorized every single detail of a fight for maximum dps upkeep.

Having a parsing tool doesn't make someone an asshole. People are going to be assholes if that's their nature. I'm in a savage static with cool people. If someone's numbers are low, we help each other out. No one is shamed. Blaming parsing for bullying is like blaming a car for the person purposely running over a cat.

[Semirhage]

Realistic arguments? The arguments against parsers are either self-contradictory, explicitly ignore inconvenient facts that nullify their concerns, are based on feelycraft "I'd be judged by other people" paranoia, or outright hallucinations of an imaginary person who is explicitly reportable under the rules anyway.

The only argument that has any weight is that numbers by themselves don't help you determine what exactly is going on. And even that argument is considerably weakened by the solution to that concern: those concerns are alleviated by, oh, I don't know, comparing them to other peoples' performance in a place that I'll call...FFRecords. Or uptime/performance analysis tools. You know, those horrible evil things the anti-parsers think are even worse than the idea of adding a parser, because heaven forbid you COMPARE yourself to something. Ewww.

I have yet to see a single argument against parsers that isn't a flimsy veil for "I don't want to improve or allow other people to see that I have room to improve".

[Saraide]

Realistic arguments? The arguments against parsers are either self-contradictory, explicitly ignore inconvenient facts that nullify their concerns, are based on feelycraft "I'd be judged by other people" paranoia, or outright hallucinations of an imaginary person who is explicitly reportable under the rules anyway.

The only argument that has any weight is that numbers by themselves don't help you determine what exactly is going on. And even that argument is considerably weakened by the solution to that concern: those concerns are alleviated by, oh, I don't know, comparing them to other peoples' performance in a place that I'll call...FFRecords. Or uptime/performance analysis tools. You know, those horrible evil things the anti-parsers think are even worse than the idea of adding a parser, because heaven forbid you COMPARE yourself to something. Ewww.

I have yet to see a single argument against parsers that isn't a flimsy veil for "I don't want to improve or allow other people to see that I have room to improve".

I honestly do not think the devs are both able and willing to provide something as good as we have now with ACT, fflogs and xivanalysis. At most we would get a subpar product covering some bare minimum functions that would have to rediscover much that has been solved ages ago and everyone would just keep using ACT anyway. That sounds like a bunch of wasted effort to me. I'd rather have the written ToS be refined to focus less on harmless third party tools so even the rule lawyers in the room are encouraged to shut up for once.

[Ivtrix]

I would personally like to thank those who keep screaming that dps checks are toxic until they are pink in the face for providing me with quality content to continue reading on the regular. Keep it up!

[Klytania]

Anyway add a damage meter

[LisSquid]

I am so mediocre with such mediocre dps and performance and feel like if I lived in the same world as the anti-parsers I'd have been beaten behind a 7-11 for my greens by now.