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?

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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.