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See, we had a semi-casual team, most of us pretty good (some of us pushing ourselves pretty hard because we wanted to see how good we could get) and there to clear, but on our own terms, with friends. We agreed to keep the toxicity away from the static, so it was allowed to log the fights, but we weren't supposed to bring up the logs unless there was a huuuuge issue that couldn't be resolved otherwise (to read between the lines: we weren't supposed to bring up the logs at all).

We had two healers: SCH and WHM. We have recently parted ways with a toxic AST, so our FC leader and off-tank's spouse joined us as the SCH. The first two fights went okay, the atmosphere was much better, but we really started to struggle on Fatebreaker. There was something up with the healing, people kept dying because they weren't healed enough and the SCH insisted that he was doing everything right, so it must be the WHM's fault. The WHM, bless his soul, took this to heart, and kept putting in more and more effort and adjusting his gameplay until we finally cleared the fight.

Only to then get completely walled right at the start of Shiva. Again, the same issue: something was up with the healing. The WHM was at his wits end, he was becoming and anxious wreck because he already changed everything that could be changed about his gameplay and it was not enough, people kept dying. So he asked the raid leader and I to check his logs to see where he could adjust more to overcome this hurdle. He was debating stopping raiding altogether because he felt like he was such a bad player and letting us all down.

We looked at his log, didn't see anything that looked off at a glance, but just in case, we pulled up the SCH's logs as well to see what he was doing different. That's how we found out that the SCH was doing less than nothing all this time. We looked back on the previous fights too and our WHM was practically solo-healing the entire tier, sweating blood to keep us alive, all the while the SCH was doing the bare minimum, using maybe 20% of his available resources, and pointing fingers about how the WHM was at fault all along. He made zero attempts to put in even a little more effort, adjust his healing or try to improve even after he saw how tough it was on our WHM. If anything, he upped his blame game about how the WHM's anxiety over the situation made him a worse healer.

It was a huge uproar and a big break in the FC when we brought that to light. I was the one to present the proof and the SCH and his spouse still refuse to talk to me to this day.

I've been through the spectrum of raiding in the ff community (from FC-organized casual groups to hardcore week one PF clears and ultimate raiding) and the logs matter soooo much less than people think.

On a casual level? Nobody will look at your logs, especially in PF. If you are playing so much worse than everybody else, then that will be very obvious even without the logs, because you will be eating shit on the mechanics or somebody will look at your character and notice that you are doing something very, very wrong, the same way people will notice in a dungeon if the healer doesn't use any dps abilities, the BLM is casting only ice or the bard doesn't use any songs (all things I have ran into in the game that I didn't need a dps meter to notice).

On a semi-hardcore level? At that point people will look at your logs to see if you have past experience or not, but you are not getting into even a slightly more serious static without them talking to you first and usually doing a tryout too. At that level, most people already know that the most reliable, mechanically consistent player can have absolutely trash logs (it used to be a running joke in one of my previous groups that we could only clear the Spider House of Fuck You (Pandaemonium) if the off-tank died at least twice) and the most insufferable jackass that would drive the party insane can have god-tier logs.

And when you get to the really hardcore groups? Unless you are doing something really niche, like speed clears or specifically parsing runs, then your logs matter even less. It's pretty normal to see hardcore groups where some people will have a profile of all pink (meaning they were in the top 1% of players logged) and some people have average to middling logs, because none of the fights require everybody to be firing 100% on all cylinders all the time and mechanical consistency and good team play are more important than raw damage.

The dps logs are unreliable anyway. Early on, when a tier is new, they are super dependent on getting gear (which means either good luck on loot rolls in PF or being the highest damage dealers and getting priority in an organized group) and by the time everybody has geared up all the way then the hardcore players will have outgeared the fight already, so you need to do shenanigans like strategically holding dps or use suboptimal strategies to give specific members the chance at a top parse.

Are there people who take logs way too seriously? Yeah. Just like there are people who take role-playing way too seriously. There are jackasses who fixate on the most meaningless performative shit everywhere and I don't think there's much meaningful difference between the guy who rejected my application for his static because my pareses weren't pink and the person who booted me last minute from an RP event because my WoL is a Dzemael cousin and that broke their personal rules around canon-headcanon interactions. Not my loss. There are always other statics and other RP events and I wouldn't want to waste my time on these people anyway.

In my personal experience, fflogs has a good system, where logs are private or at least semi-hidden unless you personally chose to share them and it enables other tools like xivanalysis which can be really useful for personal improvement if you are into that stuff. The other site I'm less enthused about because the way it presents and portions information makes it much easier to abuse imo (and it makes me wonder about the priorities of the people managing the site, but that's a grumble for another day) and that mod where you can "rate the people in your PF" is an absolute travesty that I hope will get nuked from orbit soon, but unless the in-game raiding culture has drastically changed in the past year since I last raided seriously, then the existence of logs/the dps meter is not in and of itself a problem (it would probably be a different case if it was officially endorsed, but it's not.) It's a tool that a great majority of the raiding community uses for self-improvement and to show off if they've done really well on a fight. There would be toxicity in the raiding community with or without it, because raiding is a time consuming, often frustrating hobby for tryhard losers who are willing to put way too much time into overcoming made up obstacles in a video game.

Blaming the negative aspects of the community on the existence of logging is missing the forest for the trees and if it alone was enough to deter you from ever trying out raids because you are sure somebody will use it against you?

Asdrubael vect, the spider in the center of a thousand webs

Anyway apparently Mr. Eclipse made 5000 years' worth of solar eclipse graphics, which you can find the simpler versions of here

A response written by Hussie about his past racist and ableist works, and the update to the unfortunate look of the recent Class symbols.