fflogs and privacy

[BigCheez]

While the numbers website is a useful tool in some cases, the unfortunate reality is that it also makes some people act like insufferable tools. It enables people to make dumb statements like:

- "You don't even raid, so you can't talk."
- "You don't have 99s, so you're not a good player."
- "You don't do ultimates, so I'm right and you're wrong."

But let's be real here, would there really be any loss to making everyone on the site anonymous and only display the names of people who have opted in? If you're just using the site for self-improvement and learning, do you really need to see the name, world, datacenter and raiding history of that zero percentile PCT that died 15 times in Jeuno?

I'd rather they just removed rankings for dungeons, normal raids and alliance raids so that casual players aren't randomly dragged in to people's logs for things that there isn't any real value in logging anyway. I have no idea why they even have rankings for them. You can still use all of the useful analytics tools without rankings, so IDK what the value is supposed to be. You can upload a log of someone hitting a striking dummy in a housing ward if you're just wanting to run it through XIV Analysis or whatever to nail down issues in rotation.

Extreme trials are kind of pointless too TBH but having rankings at least makes mount farming a bit less monotonous and encourages people to push damage and farm faster.

If someone is making absolute judgements about a player based on their "best %" for fights, that should tell you everything you need to know though. I know people who have ok logs but prog faster and more consistently than I do and I know people who have a lot of 99s but are legitimately monkey brained and can't function without a raid leader spoon feeding them until they've already cleared 10+ times.

FFlogs needs to be the way it is otherwise its a free list of players who break the ToS lmao

I hadn't actually considered this, lmao. It would still be difficult to prove that someone else didn't upload the log or that someone didn't send you the file for you to upload, but yeah, it would become a bit more sussy.