DPS parsing can come in many forms with different uses in game. The majority of what I've seen, and where it truly matters, is in Boss or Raid fights that depend on a certain amount of sustained DPS to succeed. So naturally most of the conversations will be highlighting this subject.
I notice there are a few of you jumping on the band wagon about real everyday experiences (Krixus's original quote), so why don't you talk about them in detail and change the pattern of what you are seeing! Fair question is it not?
Liav said:A nice person isn't otherwise going to become an asshole because you gave him a parsing program. Likewise, an asshole isn't going to become a stand-up guy because you took his log parsing away from him. People are going to be good or bad independent of what tools they have available to them. The best thing you can do is just keep the toxic elements as far away from you as possible, and they're going to exist regardless.
Toxicity exists in every form of competition.
Wolfsong said:
True, but why give them even more ammunition?
I see that reasoning a lot, and it always bewilders me. The whole "well, they're going to be jerks anyway, so what's the difference?"
The answer to that argument is so self-evident that I have a difficult time believing people are actually serious when they pose it.
The answer is: If someone's already prone to being a jackass, or harassing others, empowering them by giving them more ways to do so is not a good solution. The idea is to limit the avenues they have to behave that way. Not open more lanes for them to do so.
If a neighborhood bully who routinely bullies other kids, whacking them with sticks, says he would really like a baseball bat... are you going to say "well, why not give him a baseball bat? It's not like refusing him one is going to make him a good kid"? I'd hope not. It's the same principle at work.
A middle-ground solution: Official support of personal parsers only, with the option of sharing that data with others left up to the individual. If others try to pressure or bully them into sharing it, kick them from the group on those grounds, etc... they can be reported and penalized for it. That's the only way to find a middle-ground. Those who insist on wanting to see everyone's data at all times won't like it, but it isn't all about pleasing them. Those who don't want parsers at all won't like it, but it's not all about pleasing them, either.
Saying "just keep them as far away from you as possible", again, sounds great on its face. But when you're in an environment where you're thrown together with a bunch of different people, not always necessarily from your own circle/group of friends... that's not always going to be possible. I played FFXI for almost 8 years, and did my damndest to stay away from that type. Regardless, sometimes it's just not possible. You don't always get to choose who you're grouped with - and what do you then? Leave the group and essentially stunt your own enjoyment just to avoid the shitty behavior of others? Further, when you're in a group with that type, and they're kicked... it can take a long time to replace them. Hence, many leaders will simply choose to "deal with them" so they don't have to sit around waiting for a replacement.
Again, it's a lovely sounding "perfect world" solution - but it never stands up for long in the face of actual reality.
Lol, no. Punishing players for copy & pasting chat into their text box is ridiculous. I'm not trying to be rude but it's just patently ridiculous. Should we start banning people for saying "holy ****, I just got a backstab crit for 1400!" too?
I can understand not giving players tools that directly allows them to piss people off. However, a parsing program has no inherently malicious purpose for existing.
I think you're being a bit unfair in your portrayal of people who enjoy parsing. MMOs more often than not come down to playing with numbers and math. Take away my ability to parse and I'll just do it myself with timestamps and a calculator.
some of this can be eliminated by the nature oif the encounters. obviously, more damge is always better, but hard dps checks or enrage timers (which i dont like) cause more of the "minimum dps or gtfo" attitude. ":ohhh, you're a ranger, we need a rogue, sorry" . if encounters focus more on group play and what each class can bring to the table rather than just how much damage you X class can do, all the better.
personal experience, i have seen people that are just straight 'bad' at their class. even worse, a person who insists they are playing, yet the dps meter shows they have done nothing but auto attack the whole time. some people like to troll and make others fail because it amuses them. ive seen people intentionally break CC and insist they didnt, pull extra mobs, etc. the 'dps meter makes people jerks' is flawed in that sense. some people just like to be a dick, or are lazy and want to be carried.
its a tough nut to crack. a group with less than 'optimal' damage dealers should have as good a chance as at clearing an encounter as an optimal one - if played well. there shoul always be a way. dps is slow? its ok because X class can help refill the healers mana..etc.
in summary, i guess making encounters where dps isnt the be all, end all, would go a long ways to curtailing dps meter 'bullying' (cant believe i typed that )
I had often the situation, that in a boss fight some dps players went afk. Or they stood in the fire and died because they knew, the fight will last 10 minutes or longer. And they can go afk, come back when the boss is dead and loot. Without dps checks the chance is high that the healers will be blamed when the group/raid wipes. Because they will run out of mana or other ressources if the dps is not high enough.
Greetings
Larirawiel said:I had often the situation, that in a boss fight some dps players went afk. Or they stood in the fire and died because they knew, the fight will last 10 minutes or longer. And they can go afk, come back when the boss is dead and loot. Without dps checks the chance is high that the healers will be blamed when the group/raid wipes. Because they will run out of mana or other ressources if the dps is not high enough.
Greetings
That is definitely something the guild or raid leaders need to manage, not the game mate! Sadly, people can be lazy/selfish/asshats and these things will happen with or without a dps meter, it is up to the groups, raids, guilds and community to deal with those people appropriately by ignoring them, kicking them from groups/raids, telling them it is not ok to go AFK or intentionally die, block them from loot until they change their behaviour if needed but it is not a problem for the game to manage, dps information is critical for a lot of us to be the best we can be on our character, it is vital information for raid leaders/guild leaders to know what classes are best in X situations etc.
Information isn't the problem, human behaviour is and that can be managed appropriately by the masses :)
Yes, the guild leader could manage this. But often, there is no guild leader because it is a random group etc. And a guild leader will need some tools to track such things.
IMHO it is a bad game design, that some roles are forced to play very well because their fails are a single point of failure - and other roles not. I think the more difficult encounters should be only beatable when all players play well. I do not expect mechanics like: the boss will make 10x more damage after 10 minutes or something. But the encounter could spawn adds. And the adds must be killed as fast as possible because too much adds = wipe. This would be also a hard dps check but it would not feel so synthetic like a simple enrage timer.
Greetings
Larirawiel said:Yes, the guild leader could manage this. But often, there is no guild leader because it is a random group etc. And a guild leader will need some tools to track such things.
IMHO it is a bad game design, that some roles are forced to play very well because their fails are a single point of failure - and other roles not. I think the more difficult encounters should be only beatable when all players play well. I do not expect mechanics like: the boss will make 10x more damage after 10 minutes or something. But the encounter could spawn adds. And the adds must be killed as fast as possible because too much adds = wipe. This would be also a hard dps check but it would not feel so synthetic like a simple enrage timer.
Greetings
I agree, although I get pretty bored of dealing with adds as well as a DPS.
I like fights that require you to do unique things to influence the fight, kind of like a puzzle, but not quite. For instance, a stealthed mob will spawn somewhere that only a see-stealth class can see, and those players need to kill it in 15 seconds or something bad happens. That kind of stuff is neat.
Add waves feel as artificial as enrage timers, to me, when they're used copiously.
Man, how many of you all hated the raids being forced to be the top 5 for all dps, spamming buttons to race to the top?
The people that mattered where the pullers, MT, ST, Healers, and crowd control. Also i should mention raid leaders.
Everyone else just spammed to be in the top.
So long as the data can be looked at after the fact, I dont have a problem with Parsing. But I dont like the idea of having a real time DPS-ometer in the corner of the UI.
I liked it on raids, after the event was done and the raid was starting to cool down and the leaders were tallying DKP or whatnot, to have another leader then offer te numbers was fun. They started with the mages first and anounce like the top 3, and then a genral average for the others, and of other classes wante to know they would ask.
it fostered amiable competition and opportunities for sly jokes.
Crazzie said:Man, how many of you all hated the raids being forced to be the top 5 for all dps, spamming buttons to race to the top?
The people that mattered where the pullers, MT, ST, Healers, and crowd control. Also i should mention raid leaders.
Everyone else just spammed to be in the top.
Yeah cool, let's just undermine eachother's accomplishments in games by making baseless generalizations about eachother's roles.
- A guy who played a Monk and could pull and DPS competitively
Manouk said:So long as the data can be looked at after the fact, I dont have a problem with Parsing. But I dont like the idea of having a real time DPS-ometer in the corner of the UI.
I liked it on raids, after the event was done and the raid was starting to cool down and the leaders were tallying DKP or whatnot, to have another leader then offer te numbers was fun. They started with the mages first and anounce like the top 3, and then a genral average for the others, and of other classes wante to know they would ask.
it fostered amiable competition and opportunities for sly jokes.
Doesn't work like that, though.
If the information is available you can't stop people from making tools to access it in real time. There's nothing a guild officer can do to get information about DPS that I can't do myself.
Liav said:
Doesn't work like that, though.
If the information is available you can't stop people from making tools to access it in real time. There's nothing a guild officer can do to get information about DPS that I can't do myself.
As this pertains to the topic at hand, the DPS meter, there is a difference between a simple add on that everybody and their brother can get from the UI shop and what guild leaders/raid leaders/persistent people would come up with on their own. People had access to DPS logs/parsers long before there were DPS meters on everyone's shopping guide at the UI store. I don't see why VR would do anything to prevent that. In my experience with Rift(only game I was involved with heavily that I have a before/after DPS meter viewpoint), the DPS meter within the UI met with much more resistance than any of the combat log parsers(that even had overlays that you could see while in game) ever did.
FierinaFuryfist said:Liav said:Doesn't work like that, though.
If the information is available you can't stop people from making tools to access it in real time. There's nothing a guild officer can do to get information about DPS that I can't do myself.
As this pertains to the topic at hand, the DPS meter, there is a difference between a simple add on that everybody and their brother can get from the UI shop and what guild leaders/raid leaders/persistent people would come up with on their own. People had access to DPS logs/parsers long before there were DPS meters on everyone's shopping guide at the UI store. I don't see why VR would do anything to prevent that. In my experience with Rift(only game I was involved with heavily that I have a before/after DPS meter viewpoint), the DPS meter within the UI met with much more resistance than any of the combat log parsers(that even had overlays that you could see while in game) ever did.
Sure, but how much of that resistance is actually valid?
When I played RIFT shortly after launch, I opted to use ACT instead of an in-game API meter for numerous reasons. Even beyond a superficial level though, they both served largely the same function. In RIFT, everyone and their brother could just google "advaned combat tracker" and have the most powerful log parsing engine I've ever seen at their disposal.
It's just kind of strange to me how two things that are functionally identical (ACT is way better, though) can be met with varying levels of resistance, just because one is sponsored by the developers and more easily accessible.
Liav said:
Sure, but how much of that resistance is actually valid?
When I played RIFT shortly after launch, I opted to use ACT instead of an in-game API meter for numerous reasons. Even beyond a superficial level though, they both served largely the same function. In RIFT, everyone and their brother could just google "advaned combat tracker" and have the most powerful log parsing engine I've ever seen at their disposal.
It's just kind of strange to me how two things that are functionally identical (ACT is way better, though) can be met with varying levels of resistance, just because one is sponsored by the developers and more easily accessible.
The non UI parsers were a bit more tricky to set up and required a bit of thought. I had no trouble with them - the one before ACT but then I went with ACT - but I would see questions in general chat about it so obviously others did. The general idea was for the reduction of potential elitism/shaming when you reduce the number of candidates for there to be a nuisance. Say 5% of DPS Meter/parser users are the bad seeds(number pulled out of thin air). If external parsers have a 25% usage rate by all players on a server, and UI addon Meters have 50% usage rate, you double the chances of bad seeds. Less overall users means less chance for there to be a nuisance. The way humans are, the more obstacles in their way, the less likely they are to do something. I would also argue that there would be less external parser users being a nuisance because they understand it better, but that's an opinion I have about the chances of someone being an idiot generally reflecting on their maturity level.
People like the ones this game is attracting well before even a Beta launch are the kinds who would have very little problems setting up an external parser. From what I can tell we would also not be the ones causing a nuisance but more likely to be helping others to understand game mechanics and improve. That's why no matter what we get for this game(UI or external), I don't think it will be like some other games where people got kicked out of an XP group because they didn't have the right talent spec or weapon choice.
FierinaFuryfist said:
People like the ones this game is attracting well before even a Beta launch are the kinds who would have very little problems setting up an external parser. From what I can tell we would also not be the ones causing a nuisance but more likely to be helping others to understand game mechanics and improve. That's why no matter what we get for this game(UI or external), I don't think it will be like some other games where people got kicked out of an XP group because they didn't have the right talent spec or weapon choice.
Ha! I'm one of those useless nerds. I can slay dragons, but if MMO's didn't come with installation wizards, I'd still be playing Windows 97 Minesweeper.
FierinaFuryfist said:The non UI parsers were a bit more tricky to set up and required a bit of thought. I had no trouble with them - the one before ACT but then I went with ACT - but I would see questions in general chat about it so obviously others did. The general idea was for the reduction of potential elitism/shaming when you reduce the number of candidates for there to be a nuisance. Say 5% of DPS Meter/parser users are the bad seeds(number pulled out of thin air). If external parsers have a 25% usage rate by all players on a server, and UI addon Meters have 50% usage rate, you double the chances of bad seeds. Less overall users means less chance for there to be a nuisance. The way humans are, the more obstacles in their way, the less likely they are to do something. I would also argue that there would be less external parser users being a nuisance because they understand it better, but that's an opinion I have about the chances of someone being an idiot generally reflecting on their maturity level.
People like the ones this game is attracting well before even a Beta launch are the kinds who would have very little problems setting up an external parser. From what I can tell we would also not be the ones causing a nuisance but more likely to be helping others to understand game mechanics and improve. That's why no matter what we get for this game(UI or external), I don't think it will be like some other games where people got kicked out of an XP group because they didn't have the right talent spec or weapon choice.
I understand what you're saying, yeah, and I mostly agree.
Reducing the candidate pool will have a proportional effect on the number of people being shitty about a given feature.
My complaint is that this train of logic only leads in one direction, which is removing it entirely to mitigate the candidate pool as much as practically possible. Stopping anywhere before this endpoint in your efforts to mitigate the candidate pool can only be arbitrary, so I personally don't agree with this.
I agree with your latter paragraph, though, in that I think that the fundamental tenets of the game simply aren't going to attract a large amount of those annoying people to begin with, regardless of the availability of parsing.
Dullahan said:I will have a basic parsing utility complete by day 2 of alpha. Hope that doesn't make people sad. Promise I won't judge you if you group with me.
I don't know why it's such a controversy.
It seems to stem from the incorrect assumption that giving people access to a data set will corrupt them. I highly doubt anyone who wasn't an asshole already became an asshole after parsing a text file.
werzul said:some of this can be eliminated by the nature oif the encounters. obviously, more damge is always better, but hard dps checks or enrage timers (which i dont like) cause more of the "minimum dps or gtfo" attitude. ":ohhh, you're a ranger, we need a rogue, sorry" . if encounters focus more on group play and what each class can bring to the table rather than just how much damage you X class can do, all the better.
personal experience, i have seen people that are just straight 'bad' at their class. even worse, a person who insists they are playing, yet the dps meter shows they have done nothing but auto attack the whole time. some people like to troll and make others fail because it amuses them. ive seen people intentionally break CC and insist they didnt, pull extra mobs, etc. the 'dps meter makes people jerks' is flawed in that sense. some people just like to be a dick, or are lazy and want to be carried.
its a tough nut to crack. a group with less than 'optimal' damage dealers should have as good a chance as at clearing an encounter as an optimal one - if played well. there shoul always be a way. dps is slow? its ok because X class can help refill the healers mana..etc.
in summary, i guess making encounters where dps isnt the be all, end all, would go a long ways to curtailing dps meter 'bullying' (cant believe i typed that )
I know I have experienced people just going totally nuts when your gear or DPS was not up to snuff or their expected number. I have used them in the past but mostly for my own progression. In raids and such I would run the tools I had to see how e as a group were doing. I am not a player that needs to get to the end or kill the top boss. It’s the adventure and getting there that is fun. If I have to be governed by a DPS meter or be judged by them I won’t play long. Some of my most negative encounters with people in MMO’s has been around this very subject. I am not sure if it is the nature of people that comes out while gaming or they are just flat rude. I do find it curious to see how people react though.
I also noticed when playing WoW years ago the absolute stupidity these things generated. Forget the trying to figure out the boss fight or encounter just dps the target down as fast as possible. It has completely changed from my old EQ days and its not getting better in my opinion. Not to mention they types online that are absolutely not ashamed to lash out with the elite ego’s they have fostered. Kind of scary and not fun to experience. No one needs that in a game.
I would also wonder if there are other tools that would work better? I am not sure what that tool would be due to abuse of it would be immediate in today’s gaming worlds.
Anyone have other tools that would work here?
Ox
Ashenor said:As a long time high end raider, i 100% support either dps meters or parsing of some sort.
In a casual setting or guild i understand. At a higher end raiding guild i would expect all my members to want this info to help make themselves and others better.
Bring it on Dullahan.
That is my main beef with the DPS meter: A tool that belongs in the raiding scene(and doesn't get misused much here) gets brought to the XP grouping scene where it tends to be misused more often.
@Liav I see where you are coming from regarding the slippery slope of trying to reduce the candidate pool. Which is why I feel the parsing programs like ACT in Rift or whatever Dullahan brings to the table sets a fine standard for where that line needs to be set.
@ OX: Parsing log tools that are not a functional part of the UI are what tends to be the answer. These were around back in early EQ but the people who had them generally were responsible enough to use them.
Liav said:Lol, no. Punishing players for copy & pasting chat into their text box is ridiculous. I'm not trying to be rude but it's just patently ridiculous. Should we start banning people for saying "holy ****, I just got a backstab crit for 1400!" too?
Liav said:I can understand not giving players tools that directly allows them to piss people off. However, a parsing program has no inherently malicious purpose for existing.
I think you're being a bit unfair in your portrayal of people who enjoy parsing. MMOs more often than not come down to playing with numbers and math. Take away my ability to parse and I'll just do it myself with timestamps and a calculator.
Oxillion said:I also noticed when playing WoW years ago the absolute stupidity these things generated. Forget the trying to figure out the boss fight or encounter just dps the target down as fast as possible. It has completely changed from my old EQ days and its not getting better in my opinion.
True. But this attitude was not in WoW vanilla and it was not in the beginning of Burning crusade. It started exactly when Blizzard meant, everyone should get high end epics, even the biggest keyboard turners. The risk vs. reward principle was completly gone and then gearscore was the most important number to rate a player. I think, when the risk vs. reward principle is in the game then parsers are not a big problem.
Greetings