DPS Meters, Parsing, Toxicity, and The MMO Culture Around Self-Improvement and Shaming

One of my favorite and also least-favorite topics has cropped up again over the last few weeks, on blogs I follow and in the broader communities of games I follow and/or play, like FFXIV and WoW. That topic is the eternal debate starter of DPS meters and parsing.

To start with, I think this topic fascinates me for a few reasons. Firstly, I absolutely talk out of both sides of my mouth on these things – I use them, I like them, I generally find them to be helpful from both a group composition perspective in a leadership role and from a self-improvement perspective as an individual player, but I also find that they enable some awful behavior in others and sometimes in myself – name and shames, a sense of hopelessness about clearing content in a given group, and the like. I find the spread of opinions on the topic interesting but also sometimes tedious – it’s fine if you personally don’t like them and I find arguments against them interesting, but I also think there’s a point to which the argument becomes specious – that such tools “ruin” the games they are present in, said not at a personal level, but at a global level, speaking for everyone ever.

After reading excellent and interesting posts on the matter from both Shintar and Bhagpuss and letting it simmer for a minute (most of the week really, since the last week here in the US has been a real drain), I think I want to add my voice to the discussion, starting with a statement I will work from for most of this post:

Damage Meters are Value-Neutral

A lot of discussion around DPS meters and parse-culture in general starts from what is, I believe, a fundamentally-flawed premise – that DPS meters are inherently toxic tools that can only bring about negative outcomes. And, to be fair, if you are in a group where that data is used less to coach and inform and more to ostracize and shame, I can understand having that perspective. I disagree with it, having been on the receiving end of both praise and prodding, but I can understand why someone might build a worldview around that idea.

My thing is this – no one that actually makes such tools sets out on a course to shame the underperformers or to create an objectively-worse atmosphere for players. These tools are intended to help a growing PvE content scene in most cases – if you hit an enrage timer, it can be helpful to a group or leader to understand why that is happening. Likewise, as a player, learning how you are doing and focusing on that data to drive self-improvement is a value-add, and it has the bonus of showing the improvement you get from new gear or changes to your playstyle and rotation.

However, I would say these tools are value-neutral because they themselves do nothing more than expose this data to you in an easily-readable format. They don’t tell you that you can do better, or that a teammate is doing worse – they simply give you a number representative of the average amount of something you are doing per second, whether that something is damage output, damage intake for tanks, or healing output. The tools themselves do not drive the improvements nor do they themselves create the toxicity – they merely show the data in a way that can be easily read and acted upon, for better or for worse.

Thus, I think my first major conclusion is that chasing after damage meters isn’t really addressing the issues most players discuss. The tools themselves just open up the data – it is what is done with that data that creates the stigma and polarized responses.

Damage Meters Can Be Helpful

I personally use damage meters or real-time parsers for the sake of self-improvement, mostly. At a certain point of content, especially in modern MMOs, you bear a responsibility to yourself and to the groups you play with to meet performance guidelines of some sort. I know that statement alone will ruffle feathers, but it is pretty universally true across the genre – high-end content is made around the assumption of a baseline of performance that each player must meet for the content to be beaten, and if you cannot meet those guidelines for yourself, that is a point that can cause painful progress not just for you but everyone you play with. A lack of performance can even cause a group to be incapable of clearing a given encounter or piece of content, and while the process of getting better at a piece of content is iterative and requires a group sometimes putting forth hours of effort on a single fight, that process can be upended in frustration if individual players are not meeting their end of the deal.

All of this sounds severe, so let me say that I understand that we are ultimately talking about boss fights in a video game and not something life-changingly important here, but I’ve also seen people burn out on a game they genuinely love because hitting the wall a lot changes their interactions with it. Hell, it happens to me, and there is a handful of games I’ve put down and walked away from because I couldn’t get past certain obstacles or challenges. Being able to review my own performance in real time and to see the variations pull-to-pull in boss fights from changes to rotation, playstyle, aggressiveness, and the like is a good thing for me.

The other side of this is, of course, the group leader’s POV. In most MMO scenarios where DPS meters are called into question, a full group of players is involved and there is a question to be asked – what can the group do to ensure content completion? I think the reality is that a part of that process is asking if individual players can bring more to the table – if you have a player that is underperforming relative to their gear, then it bears asking if that player can do better at their class/spec/job to shrink the discrepancy between theoretical performance and actual. A good group leader can do this in a way that is not minimizing or shaming, but instead collaborative and worthwhile. If you have the means to stop yourself from hitting the wall over and over again in growing frustration, would you take it? I believe that most people would, and a part of that in a collaborative team-play setting is acknowledging that everyone has to be able to bring enough to the table to meet the checks of a given piece of content. I can call out a failed mechanic visually, but a failure to meet a DPS check might be something that hides under the surface until nearing the completion of a 10 minute raid fight, and while it is more opaque than a movement check being failed, not meeting DPS requirements is still a problem with execution.

I guess to distill this down simply, my stance for the good of DPS meters is this: knowing how I am doing helps me improve and see improvement in myself, and knowing how my group is doing in a leadership role lets me make adjustments and coach where possible to bring up the group to pass difficult checks without endlessly smashing the wall in frustration or having to make multiple 10+ minute pulls to get to the same outcome with growing frustration.

Damage Meters Can Be Harmful

I’m not idealistic enough to pretend that damage meters and such tools are not also vectors for community awfulness, however. A big part of the reason that so many people distrust them as tools is because of what they enable – the worst elements of the community to be assholes to other players.

An MMO is at its zenith in my eyes when it enables a collaborative, team-play experience that can’t be emulated in most other genres. I want to be in the trenches with my team, killing the hardest bosses and sharing in the rewards, and I want there to be a sense of camaraderie and shared investment that lifts each other up – the rising tide that lifts all boats. A focus on performance at an individual level can dampen that, from a little to a lot.

One of my core beefs with the current design of World of Warcraft’s raiding content is that it places a lot of pressure on obvious individual performance, both in terms of damage throughput but also in terms of mechanical execution, such that a single player messing up a mechanic or being a slow learner can create an avalanche of less-recoverable failures leading to a wipe. One of the consequences this has had on the community of the game is that players can often find themselves being ardent assholes to those in their groups who are more prone to struggle, instead of being good teammates who seek to raise up the team. In fact, this is a key reason that my FOMO from my series of WoW posts in March never materialized in me re-subscribing to that game – I saw firsthand as people I know were pushed to a different raid team because of people being dicks to them without an apology, and it put my idealized, FOMO-laden version of the game against the harsh reality of what WoW has become – a dick-waving contest where the biggest shitheads often feel the most empowered and where team cohesion and group dynamics are so often tossed to the side in favor of a glorified pissing contest where those who can’t keep up are simply left behind and scorned. It sucks (and is worthy of a post of its own at some point soon, I think), and points about DPS done are just more fuel for that same fire.

I can also sympathize with people who are kicked from or excluded from group activities because of their performance. Now, I want to walk a fine line here – to a certain point, I think that excluding an underperformer to make a fight go from impossible to possible sucks, but is understandable (1 person’s hurt feelings versus 7-29 other people) and I think that a solid group lead understands the point at which it is necessary over when it is just being a dick. An anecdote I told in my post about new raid content in FFXIV talked about Endsinger’s Aria and how the groups my FC put together for it weren’t getting the fight done, and how one week it largely boiled down to a player doing drastically less DPS than a baseline level 90 of their job should be doing – and for me, that is a case where you would ask the underperforming player to practice and get better at juggling their rotation with the mechanics of the fight in order to meet the baseline expectation of the fight itself before bringing them along for more attempts, where on the other hand, asking people doing 5k DPS against a theoretical potential of 7-8k to sit out would be more dickish (because the 5k is likely still going to be able to clear the fight and meets the minimum checks). No one wants to be excluded, and that is totally understandable, but I think if things are communicated level-headed and fairly, you can deliver that message without making it a complete shitshow.

Outside of other players and group leads using that data in ways that can be seen as negative, though, I think there is a component of self-driven insanity that some people can reach with DPS meters, where they try to drive up their own performance at all costs and it ultimately pushes them off the cliff in regards to their interest in and passion for a given game. I find this interesting because I had an element of it in raiding during Shadowlands – at a certain point, a journey of self-improvement means looking at everything you are doing and pushing to do all of it better, and the weight of that can be strengthening but can also be crushing. In WoW, rotations are built on the back of procs and resource building and can end up being priority systems more than actual rotations. Havoc Demon Hunter is very much that way, in that the core rotation is a builder and spender with very basic and minimal gameplay, but then there are cooldowns that get stuck in when available and questions about when you pool resources versus spending them as available, and the layers of intricacy this adds creates a situation where you might actually have a fundamentally good understanding of your spec only to find that your execution is still lacking (not to mention the changing impact of external bonuses like trinket procs, Shards of Domination when those were a thing, and tier set bonuses). In FFXIV, combos make rotations more rigid to a point, but you still need to be familiar with your job’s opener, how to synchronize your gameplay to 1 and 2 minute burst windows and raid cooldowns, and how to adapt your rotation and burst around the contours of a fight design to maximize performance.

Self-improvement is the name of the game, but sometimes people will react poorly and over-emphasize their own mistakes instead of course-correcting properly, and sometimes that is driven from internal pressure while other times it is external pressure pushing that response, and I think that sometimes both forms of pressure come from bad places or with ill intentions, and easy access to performance data helps drive that, whether it is the intention of tool designers or not.

So What Role Do Players Have In This?

I think if you’ve read the whole post to this point, I’ve threaded a needle about my opinion on meters as tools – that they are value-neutral and most of the response to them for or against is driven by player action based on the data they provide.

So why is that?

Well, I think that like any access to data, what people do with it determines its usefulness or lack thereof. If people are harassing, shaming, or slamming other players for low DPS/HPS or high DTPS (I’ve literally never seen someone use DTPS as a measure to insult a tank, but I bet it has happened!), that is obviously not okay or good. I think that a responsible framework for players to work within is to offer guidance to steer a player towards self-improvement in environments where that is possible – where you know the other player, have a vested interest in them getting better at the game, and where they’ve responded positively to that coaching and performance evaluation. I think in most static, guild, or team environments, that is something that should be pushing down from the leadership roles in the group and not up from other players, because players not in a leadership role doing it feels like meter-maiding and passive-aggressive more often than not. I think that in most group settings for challenging content short of random matchmade groups, that performance should be on-the-table as a valid reason that someone might be excluded, but that should most often be a last resort and not the first stop.

Why is that? Well, I think the part that a lot of people who dislike damage meters bristle at is that it can tell you and others when you’re doing really well, but also when you’re doing poorly. No one wants to be exposed as bad at the game, or even have to compute what that means for their play. Ultimately, I don’t think a single damage meter is enough to say someone is bad at the game, either, excuse my pithy one-liner. However, I think it is a misconception, often coming from a desire for self-protection, to say that damage meters are guaranteed toxicity or elitism. Because there is a middle-ground that I think most players want, which is to be in a group that is good enough to clear the content.

I’ve done a lot of messy-ass boss fights in my time in both WoW and FFXIV, where people have died to simple avoidable mechanics, done damage far below their potential based on gear and current design/balance, and yet we still squeak over the finish line in the end. My FFLogs average of best Savage parses this tier is just under 31st percentile, and my SoD average in WoW was 61st percentile – not amazing, but not awful there as I have a literal decade more WoW experience! When I use damage meters, it is mostly for self-improvement – I drove my parses in WoW way up over the course of Shadowlands and I am proud of the work I put in there, even if it now comes with a twinge of sunken cost fallacy to look at, and I’ve been doing the same in FFXIV, pushing my parses higher with each week of reclears, mostly. At the same time, do I hate grey parsing but getting kills? Not really, no – it means that there is some sanctity to the goal as personal. I’ve had grey parses while being the highest or nearly highest DPS in a given group, and in casual content in FFXIV, my parses are far higher, because against the playerbase as a whole, my 12 parse in Savage becomes an 80 parse in normal content. I’ve been endeavoring to improve my DPS performance for myself, not because it has led to me being excluded from groups (because it hasn’t), but just for the sake of seeing how much better I can personally get at the game.

I don’t mind a clear with some mess and some mistakes, because the word is right there near the start of the sentence – clear. If you kill the boss and that’s the goal the group set out to accomplish, then really, who cares? If you’re trying to parse or focused on a speedkill, then it matters more, but for most groups in most forms of content, if the boss falls over it doesn’t bother me if half the raid also falls over. In the moment it might be more stressful or challenging, but a good recovery is a story all the same. Hell, just last night I did some Endsinger’s Aria pulls in FFXIV where 6 out of 8 players died on a single pull and we failed the tower mechanic giving everyone a vulnerability stack, and we still killed the fight! Stuff like that becomes fun stories, and so who cares that my parse was probably bad for that pull (I haven’t even put it on FFLogs to see!).

However, and this is where I risk a controversial opinion, at a certain point of content in most MMOs, you do have a responsibility to the other players in a group to play to a certain level of competency. I would never say you have to purple-parse, beat everyone on DPS, or be an absolute mechanical wunderkind, just that you need to be able to adapt, to perform while adapting, and to learn from mistakes. It is perfectly reasonable to ask you as an individual player to do better – whether that means improving your mechanical execution against a fight or yes, improving your DPS, those are things that you as a player owe to a group giving their time to the team, and that they also owe to you. You could argue that a DPS meter is the only way that players can assess performance in the moment, but it really isn’t – veteran MMO players, especially with hundreds of hours into a single title, can often tell if you’re doing well or not by watching you. I don’t say that to scare you into thinking that the Eye of Sauron is constantly gazing upon you, but to state that a lot of players (I see this most commonly among your average FFXIV player) who say the only way you can see how someone is doing is through parsing are wrong and missing the point.

And in certain settings and teams, needing to improve is a thing that has to happen on your time, not on the group’s time. I’ve been raiding in FFXIV for almost 6 months now through the Party Finder in-game, and while the group disbanding to reform without a player not meeting expectations is not very common, it does happen, and to be honest, it is fair in many cases. As someone who has raid led, it sucks to make that call, but the question is one of scale – how many players are you willing to frustrate, 1 or 8? That’s never going to make being booted sting less, I know, but at the same time, when you are doing hard content that is gated by performance checks, you need to be willing to improve to meet the standard, as does anyone else in the group. The trick here is that a base level of competency can be relatively easy to come by – running a few dungeons at the current level cap to play with the openers, running the normal versions of raids to rotation check and run through a scaled-down version of the encounter to see the speedbumps thrown in your way – in FFXIV, it is actually pretty easy to get the practice since so little is locked behind a once-a-week limit or needing a raid lockout saved. But I think it is unfair for a single player not performing to expect the group to bend to their will and needs -at that point of progression, everyone needs to bring something to the table, and it never really needs to be a fully-optimized 99th percentile playstyle, but instead a willingness to learn and adapt to the encounter coupled with a baseline understanding of the rotation, opener options, and how your job/spec/class interact with the group as a whole.

But trapped in that thought is an important qualifier – at that point of progression. An MSQ dungeon, normal raid, even Alliance Raid, or in WoW things like Heroic dungeons, Normal raids, and low-level keys don’t require players to be optimized and running at their best, and in that content, DPS meters as group measures just don’t make much sense. For individual performance or improvement, sure, but I’ve cleared current Expert roulette dungeons in FFXIV with a player forced to do an AoE rotation in order to not crash another player, with a zero DPS healer, with other DPS that are vastly underperforming, tanks undermitigating (or not mitigating incoming damage at all) and with weird issues and deaths all around. Is it always fun? Maybe not, but I’m also not there with randoms to push the limits of performance – I’m just there to get a roulette bonus and have a little fun, and sometimes the weird things that happen are more amusing than a smooth run anyways. If you’re a performance snob in matchmade content or simple stuff, you are just being a dick most of the time, especially because doing so means going out of your way to publicize that you notice a player’s weird missteps. Even if you run a roulette with FC members or people you know, it’s easy to cross a line between helpful or fun banter and just being an asshole.

Lastly, there’s an important cultural effect that the game developer has on the culture around parsing, DPS meters, and the behavior that emerges from that data. WoW is basically the wild west of this kind of thing, where discussing underperformance in blunt and unhelpful terms is not typically a TOS violation or the kind of thing that gets a suspension or ban, so players pop off way more there. I think it is a failure of leadership on Blizzard’s part that players feel safe to be assholes, and in a guild/raid group environment, it represents a similar failure of leadership if you allow people to be shitheads to others over performance with no repercussions. Square Enix’s approach to such things (don’t ask/don’t tell in-game) is better to a point, because it means toxicity over damage numbers is punishable with whatever measures are seen as fit, but then it also leads to a grey area where people misunderstand what tools are capable of (and leads to blown out reports and exaggerations of “cheating”) and also interpret any feedback over performance as crossing some TOS line, when a lot of skilled players can tell you’re not doing well without a tool. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or cutting-edge parser to tell you that a boss fight taking forever might be because the healer is standing still waiting for damage instead of filling the empty time with damage spells, and the whole point of the (admittedly otherwise busted) Mentor program in the game is that people can help course-correct gently when they see such things in the course of their gameplay.

In the end, what I find true is this – damage meters themselves are not a problem in the purest sense of the word, but the attitudes and behaviors that emerge around them and the data provided can be. Likewise, I think there is a vast gulf between toxic use of said data and valid usage of it to help a group clear content and improve, and it is not immediately negative if someone points out that you can do better – the approach and tact matter too. That means that sometimes, you or I might get left out of a group or left unconsidered for some high-end content in the MMOs of our choosing, and that sucks, but at a certain point, when the content difficulty increases, players do need to be capable of closer to 100% of what their class/job/spec can do, never truly 100%, but if you want to Savage raid an end-tier boss while not knowing the basic opener for your job, or you want to run Mythic Plus keys around 15 or higher without knowing how to properly play for trash versus a boss and get more usage of your big cooldowns, it is something you have to learn, and it is reasonable when done properly to ask you to learn on lower content or outside the main group until you can bring that skill level up to a baseline.

Even more simply, the problem is a social one with social solutions. MMOs, am I right?

(Also I think the option to limit the ability for randoms to see your performance is maybe a good option and something that should work okay thanks bye)

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