Parsing raids in FFXIV is a scam

[FFXIVuseryo]

Background:

So parsing makes sense in a game like WoW because you can actually see damage over time inside a raid setting. In FFXIV the devs went out of their way to mask individual damage over time effects in raids. Meaning that parses inherently became fugazi. You always see one tick on a target no matter the number or potency of damage over time effects. To put the cherry on top; fflogs is incapable of seeing people's gear. So not only is parsing in FFXIV a simulator at best; it is a very bad simulator, because they cannot see your gear at all. People seem to dislike this fact. And I feel like this is bad for the game's health. People are using data and performance to judge jobs and combinations when the data is very very wrong.

People then use this data to pick on jobs calling them memes. When the data itself is just worthless because many of the meme jobs are actually used in world first prog teams. People then make the argument that "It is the best we have" and that "Math is not wrong". First of all; the best we have is very bad because devs want it that way. Second, math is wrong if it is imagining data that is not given to it. What do you guys think? and I understand there is much money involved in calling simulators parses and so it threatens alot of people when you say that their parsers are actually just very bad simulators.

Edit: Some rough estimated values. Let me know if they need to be corrected.

- The difference between world's highest dps and world's 99th highest dps is around 3.5% to 4.5% for most jobs
- Around 9% of bard's damage is DOT damage
- Around 5% of black mage's damage is DOT damage
- Around 5% of dragoon's damage is DOT damage
- Around 5% of Samurai's damage is DOT damage


SMN finds out that his dots are completely inaccurate and inflated in ACT. The lead developer (Or PR person? not sure) responds by saying that DOTs are simulated by ACT.

Screenshot of the app:




Any updates to the app. Reading game memory and so on does not make the dot damage accessible as it is never sent to the clients. So unless SE changes their stance on sharing data nothing will change the inaccuracy of ACT and FFlogs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...damage_in_act/

Another response by the same person

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...uide_wplugins/

There are hundreds of posts on the subject

*This does not include the RDPS which is raid-dps. Raid dps is even more laughable because how do you calculate the damage gained from reduced healing required via a properly timed debuff? when dots themselves are estimated and you start estimating their raid contribution and contribution of raid buffs; the whole thing becomes even more misleading. They did this because basically they had no other way to explain how jobs that were doing much less damage were actually clearing faster. Dancer for example.

Parsing is incapable of seeing actual DOT damage. Incapable of seeing critical strike, direct hit or a regular hit. It therefore has no way to tell what actually happened to a dot ability and thus assumes that it always behaves a certain way. This inherently creates a bias in favor of non-consistent jobs that have crit or direct hit builds over determination. Not only can it not tell what happened to a DOT ability, it also assumes the player's actual crit, direct hit and potency which is also wrong because there is no capability to see gear.




My personal problem with parsing in FFXIV:

I use Details! in wow and I love it. I want more data not less. I want to know who messed up and where so that I can help them. In FFXIV it is illegal to talk about ACT or parsing. You can google it and will find hundreds of people getting banned for mentioning someone's dps. There are also videos on youtube for directors discussing parsers.

it is bad because it is simming data that is not what actually happened. And this simmed data is then used to silently kick, harass and bully people without even telling them why. Because of the TOS people can't even discuss why someone's sim values were lower than others. This makes parsing even more toxic than it is in games where parsing is legal. But the fact that our parser in FF is a SIM makes it so that you will see someone doing more damage than others yet being kicked because they simmed lower.

Edit: I do not believe fflogs developers intentionally scamming people. I believe their app is being used to mislead players by other players. And it is used inaccurately as a replacement for real 100% accurate data which it is not. And it seems to work in their favor financially. The inaccuracy of fflogs however is hidden by the community because many people stand to lose from that idea.

EDIT:

Going to explain what I am saying in simpler terms. Imagine a shopkeeper promises you that every day you visit him he will either give you a glass of juice or not. He guarantees you that you will get a glasses of juice 150 days out of 300. You either get a 0 glass of juice or 1 glass of juice. Now imagine that your doctor says you have an ultra rare case of hyperactive scurvy. And there is a juice shortage. To survive this disease and live to see tomorrow you must drink atleast half a glass of juice. Now your friend has this scurvy too. So the only place you can get juice is at that very shop.

An FFXIV version of a parser would say that you would get half of a glass of juice daily. It tells you that because it is guessing your average from past events. So fflogs is basically saying you never die from scurvy and your friend always dies from scurvy. Now if you go to the shop keeper you may get 0 glasses of juice and thus you both die. Or you can go to the shop and get one glass of juice; saving you both. This means FFlogs was always wrong because you either get a glass of juice or you do not, it is never a percentage or 50%.

If 9% of your damage is dot damage. Crit enhances it by 100% making you do 9% more damage. A direct hit enhances it making you do 25% more damage. If you crit and dhit all uses of this ability then you will do 9% more damage from the crit and 2.25% more damage from the DHIT. If your crit rate and direct hit rate are both 50% then fflogs will sim your values and tell you that you always do 5.62% more damage. In reality however you can also not crit or dhit any of those abilities. Causing a raid wipe, griefing and lost time. The variance between nocrit nodhit vs crit and dhit is 11.25%. FFlogs is off by 5.62%.

Raid dps makes this even more complicated. Now you have a neighbor hand you a card which says the shop keeper will give you 25% of a glass half the time, based on the color of the shirt the shopkeeper is wearing

Now fflogs takes your values and processes them for a while before posting them up. This reminds me that during college research labs there would be people who messed up measurements and took down incorrect values. Either that or they were lazy and did not pay attention. They would go home and do formulae and calculations until they came up with measurement values which not only made sense but also matched their peers. But were their values correct? did they actually learn how to do the measurements properly? answer to that is no.

People who are claiming that fflogs uses good models to sim dot data are actually supporting my argument. A model is a SIM, not a parser. Parsers are not suppose to give sim values. That's what sims are for.

People who are saying the app has been updated over the years and is better at giving different people same values via formulae that are being updated: parsers don't use formulae that's what sims are for. It just means the app is getting better at giving out consistent but incorrect values to different people in a raid setting.

Edit: To the app developers repeatedly stating FFXIV is not a hostile environment for 3rd party apps:

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...0c5d56cb2e4547

[Echo of Soul]

Parsing in any game is really fucking cringe and you should stop doing it.

[FFXIVuseryo]

Parsing in any game is really fucking cringe and you should stop doing it.

I have no problem with parsing. I think it is a very useful analysis tool. Though I do respect your opinion and understand where it is coming from. What I do have a problem with is scammers advertising half-baked imaginative simulators as parsers and then these parsers being used to bully people inside the game. This is exactly why the devs masked raid's dot damage in the first place; they did not want toxicity and bullying in the game.

[Aucald]

Having a non-toxic DPS environment in FF14 is one of my favorite things about it, and I'm willing to trade on the idea of not being able to single out specific people in favor of disbanding from an underperforming group if need be. I wouldn't be opposed to more completely hiding damage values from the client and almost completely removing the ability to use DPS meters in all MMOs - while I do enjoy seeing my name up there in the rankings, that enjoyment is entirely eclipsed by just how much less toxic of an environment you can have when that information isn't readily available.

[kaminaris]

Why do you post opinion about things you have no idea about? Yes its not 100% accurate but its accurate enough and this is what I've checked myself. Its within 5% error margin.

Plugin doesn't need your gear to get actual potency.

[Caprias]

Only very few dps jobs have huge dots, samurai is the only one afaik, for the others like BRD and BLM it's a very tiny amount of their overall damage.
And as kaminaris said it's pretty accurate.

It's not great for sure but how is an overall error margin of less than 1% "a scam".

Your burner account and all your comments in ""good faith"" so far on the other hand...

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Having raided extremes and savage with a FC during ShB, parsing is usually unnecessary. This game is very easy when it comes to your rotation. 95% of the time you don't fail a boss because people weren't pushing their buttons in the perfect order. It is almost always because someone stood in an AoE or something and that wiped the raid. In FFXIV, everyone has to execute every mechanic perfectly for 8 minutes straight, and only then do you win. Not very fun IMO. FFXIV is more punishing than WoW in that regard, because while in WoW your individual DPS is critical because of how tightly tuned the fight is, the raid doesn't wipe if you screw up a mechanic or two.

[Shiira]

What a ridiculous opinion, half the classes lack dots completely, and the rest do the majority of their damage from other sources.
If anyone is getting bullied for bad parses in game it probably isn't because their dots are being estimated poorly.

When I parse badly as black mage its not because my thunder was estimated badly that pull, its because I cast fewer fire 4s than I should have done.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

they did not want toxicity and bullying in the game.

Trying to obfuscate parsing in some attempt to "prevent toxicity" is a vain attempt, and often counterintuitive. The playerbase will find other ways to "judge" player performance, be it factual or perceived or completely imaginary. And in FFXIV's case, trying to hush up parsing only leads to an echochamber of glass where people are fragile and have meltdowns over someone merely giving them a tip, and experienced players can't help the group because they're walking on eggshells or keeping their mouth shout.

[Echo of Soul]

Trying to obfuscate parsing in some attempt to "prevent toxicity" is a vain attempt, and often counterintuitive. The playerbase will find other ways to "judge" player performance, be it factual or perceived or completely imaginary. And in FFXIV's case, trying to hush up parsing only leads to an echochamber of glass where people are fragile and have meltdowns over someone merely giving them a tip, and experienced players can't help the group because they're walking on eggshells or keeping their mouth shout.

So why is it working then? If it's so pointless then why is the toxicity so low? Huh??

[Ghost of Cow]

So why is it working then? If it's so pointless then why is the toxicity so low? Huh??

In my experience pugging it really isn't that low. People find all sorts of ways to be rude to pugs, just because they can't straight up say "DPS low" doesn't mean they can't say anything.

Parsing in XIV is just weird anyway. The game isn't full of harsh DPS checks, the logs can't separate people by gear level so it's just going to be overgeared people inflating the percentages, the logs aren't always highly reliable, and the community drives all sorts of weird views on it (Like the whole thing with adds being ignored because "omg someone might pad and only single target matters in this game anyway!")

It's really just there for weird flexes. It can be fun to mess around with a little bit, but I would never take it seriously.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

You can't have a competitive PVE atmosphere if you can't view output metrics.
People only focus on the negative, but that's silly. In order to be the best you can be at the game, you use tools like this to measure your success and analyze how it can improve.

If they want to make a casual-first game, that's on them. If you play the game and expect otherwise, that's on you.
You know what you are playing when you log in.

[threads]

fflogs has been a scam since they remade the entire site to accommodate whiny dancers. now you get 4 different dps numbers every fight.

[FFXIVuseryo]

Having raided extremes and savage with a FC during ShB, parsing is usually unnecessary. This game is very easy when it comes to your rotation. 95% of the time you don't fail a boss because people weren't pushing their buttons in the perfect order. It is almost always because someone stood in an AoE or something and that wiped the raid. In FFXIV, everyone has to execute every mechanic perfectly for 8 minutes straight, and only then do you win. Not very fun IMO. FFXIV is more punishing than WoW in that regard, because while in WoW your individual DPS is critical because of how tightly tuned the fight is, the raid doesn't wipe if you screw up a mechanic or two.

I agree completely. And I think it is intentional by the devs

Trying to obfuscate parsing in some attempt to "prevent toxicity" is a vain attempt, and often counterintuitive. The playerbase will find other ways to "judge" player performance, be it factual or perceived or completely imaginary. And in FFXIV's case, trying to hush up parsing only leads to an echochamber of glass where people are fragile and have meltdowns over someone merely giving them a tip, and experienced players can't help the group because they're walking on eggshells or keeping their mouth shout.

I agree too. What I disagree with is something imaginative being used to bully or compare people. Either give me all the data or at least 99%. And maybe call it a simulator so people aren't tricked into believing things that aren't real.

In my experience pugging it really isn't that low. People find all sorts of ways to be rude to pugs, just because they can't straight up say "DPS low" doesn't mean they can't say anything.

Parsing in XIV is just weird anyway. The game isn't full of harsh DPS checks, the logs can't separate people by gear level so it's just going to be overgeared people inflating the percentages, the logs aren't always highly reliable, and the community drives all sorts of weird views on it (Like the whole thing with adds being ignored because "omg someone might pad and only single target matters in this game anyway!")

It's really just there for weird flexes. It can be fun to mess around with a little bit, but I would never take it seriously.

They change the formulae all the time and have no one to answer to. And yes the dps checks in the game aren't harsh at all.

Why do you post opinion about things you have no idea about? Yes its not 100% accurate but its accurate enough and this is what I've checked myself. Its within 5% error margin.

Plugin doesn't need your gear to get actual potency.

They do need your gear to see your actual potency otherwise they are estimating (determination). They also need gear to see your crit chance, direct hit change and even tenacity. I would agree that 5% is trivial if the parses were not taken seriously. Considering how seriously they are taken; 5% is the difference between night and day. People farm for months trying to achieve .5% higher dps. It's the difference between #1 and #99. Most of the average raiders fall within 5-7% of each other's dps numbers.


I just respect something like stone, sky and sea. Because at least it is giving you some factual actual values.

[Ilnez]

Parsing in any game is really fucking cringe and you should stop doing it.

Found the grey parser who mysteriously gets kicked from every high end group and can't figure out why.

[Ghost of Cow]

Found the grey parser who mysteriously gets kicked from every high end group and can't figure out why.

But...but I thought there was never any toxicity over meters?!

[Raven]

If there is any type of addon that need to be blocked in every game possible its damage / healing meters.

[Saradain]

But...but I thought there was never any toxicity over meters?!

Removing a hindrance that brings the entire team down in a team-based content is not toxicity.

[bloodykiller86]

Having a non-toxic DPS environment in FF14 is one of my favorite things about it, and I'm willing to trade on the idea of not being able to single out specific people in favor of disbanding from an underperforming group if need be. I wouldn't be opposed to more completely hiding damage values from the client and almost completely removing the ability to use DPS meters in all MMOs - while I do enjoy seeing my name up there in the rankings, that enjoyment is entirely eclipsed by just how much less toxic of an environment you can have when that information isn't readily available.

yeah no fuck that lol DPS at a high level is what i actually enjoy about wow, if i cant see my performance i would lose so much interest in the game. min maxing has always been a part of the game, people being toxic is just a people problem in general that can be fixed with better community rules. like i was in a 12 SoA yesterday and these people were really in there not knowing mechanics for the 3rd boss......i was a bit upset but i didnt call them out saying theyre trash or anything lol

[Aucald]

yeah no fuck that lol DPS at a high level is what i actually enjoy about wow, if i cant see my performance i would lose so much interest in the game. min maxing has always been a part of the game, people being toxic is just a people problem in general that can be fixed with better community rules. like i was in a 12 SoA yesterday and these people were really in there not knowing mechanics for the 3rd boss......i was a bit upset but i didnt call them out saying theyre trash or anything lol

Different strokes for different folks, as they say. There's no real way to a fix "people problem" outside of just turning off comms period, and that's probably not a fix most people are interested in for what's supposed to be a community-oriented type of offering (such as an MMO). Devaluing the avenues by which people are actively toxic, such as fixation on DPS meters, seems like the next best approach to me, but YMMV.