They Should Add An Official Damage Meter With One Condition

[Caitlyn]

That is why they created the Stone, Sky, Sea dummies. It's so you know if you can DPS at the level you want or not.

Which is kinda useless, because no boss fight is 3 mins long and doesnt have any mechanics, attacks, something to heal or mitigate. The SSS is just a lame excuse for people who think they can handle Ex or Savage, just because they barely beat the SSS.

[OM3GA-Z3RO]

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.

[Padudu]

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.

You already have people who will lock you out of parties either through ilvl or they will check your logs lol. I joined the tier super late, first time ever clearing current content, and have had no issues with people locking me out. That's because I either made PFs outlying clear expectations of the fight OR I just join PFs similar to my needs/current progress. It would hardly change anything

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

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.

Then don't join the speed runners? Make your own PF/join other with similar needs?

You make it sound like majority of PF folks are speed runners only.

[Saraide]

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.

Or they would just do what they are already doing: set an ilvl gate, set PF to duty complete and kick people who are underperforming. Because that's way easier and gets the same results. This scenario yoship was warning us about is an unrealistic one. You can also always host your own PFs without any of that for a more laid back and carefree approach. The existence of parsers does not suddenly make formerly untoxic people into toxic ones.

[Liam_Harper]

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

I used to PF in WoW all the time and never got asked to link my damage meter, nor did I have decent logs to show. I never got kicked from a group for low damage either, despite playing on a laptop with a touchpad for a mouse for 4 years, because I simply did the basics of my class and contributed, which was more than enough.

"A lot of" PF's is just scaremongering without anything to back it up. Besides, what would be stopping you and the countless hundreds of thousands of players who are either on console or don't like parsers to group up together?

I never understand this fear that ALL parties will start locking out people based on dps. Are the players who don't parse a tiny 5% minority or something, and if they were then why would the game cater only to them? It doesn't make sense whichever way you look at it.

[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.

[Melichoir]

I used to PF in WoW all the time and never got asked to link my damage meter, nor did I have decent logs to show. I never got kicked from a group for low damage either, despite playing on a laptop with a touchpad for a mouse for 4 years, because I simply did the basics of my class and contributed, which was more than enough.

No, they often enough asked you to link your achieve when applying for groups or new content. Oh, and half the groups you did get into didnt need to ask for your meter logs, they had a meter themselves and could see your dps and kick accordingly. If you seemed halfway useful, theyd keep you until you were holding them back from clearing content.

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 may not like those reasons or even agree, but the arguments are generally well formulated.

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

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

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

YoshiP is already meeting us halfway with this issue, and people still witch about it. The simple fact is addons and parsers are against ToS, but the Devs and GMs do not have any clue if youre using one unless you make it known. If youre concerned with your own performance, you could (*not saying you should*) easily run one yourself and keep that information personal. You dont need to upload it to websites or anything. They have generally turned a blind eye to it unless you harass other people using the tool OR youre just being so blatent in flaunting ToS like streaming to thousands of people that you are indeed using these addons in game.

[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.