“DPS meters would promote toxic behavior.” I have to ask: do you truly, truly believe that the kind of people who would use DPS meters exclusively to make others miserable are the same kind of people that, before them, were paragons of fair play and fun? Do you actually think, deep down, that DPS meters, and those alone, are what will tip the scales and suddenly cause once thoughtful, patient players to become raging jerks? If so, I cannot stop you. But I have no idea how you could have such a view.
DPS meters are a tool that measure your effectiveness in a combat scenario, the end. They measure your performance, and as such, allow you, and possibly others, to gauge whether or not you can contribute enough to the group to meet your goal. Is it fun finding out you can’t perform up to snuff? Does it feel good learning you’re the weakest link, and you have to change how you play or be replaced with a player who can do better? Of course not. No one would like that, and only a liar would say they wouldn’t mind. But an equally valid question, I feel, is this: how fair is it if say, 7 or 8 or even 9 of the people in the raid are performing their hearts out, working hard towards success, doing everything they can to meet the goal, but they’re being held back by one or a few players who just don’t care? Who play with stats they know hardly contribute, using weapons or traits that only help THEM survive, rather than output the support or damage necessary to win? If we look at this problem purely mathematically, clearly the second scenario is much worse. Several people are sacrificing their hard work because a few people can’t be kitten d, or perhaps don’t even know they’re not performing well in the first place.
DPS meters would and will, if implemented, get people kicked. It will cause hurt feelings in guilds, and perhaps even make some friends get mad at each other. But is it because a DPS meter exists, or because the people using it now know that the people they were grouping with were simply riding off of their hard work all the time, and understandably, can’t be bothered to play with someone who doesn’t care to work anywhere near as hard as them?
Patient players who want to help others get better exist, and would continue to do so if a DPS meter would. Jerks who will take any excuse to hurt another player already exist, and would continue to do so if DPS meters existed. Literally the only thing that would change if DPS meters were in game would be that we’d have hard data on how we are performing as players. Which you absolutely cannot deny would help players complete raids, considering our best way to identify weak links now is “spend several encounters watching certain players like a hawk trying to discern weakness and then make a decision based on data that will always be anecdotal at best, and biased at worst.”
On a tangentially related note, I agree with Zudet—I believe the reason why Anet is so against dps meters is it will allow us to see quite clearly how unbalanced their game is. Since again, all we can really do at the moment is speculate, and the meters would allow us hard evidence to finally say things like “This class/build, even when being performed perfectly, is 10k dps behind everyone else. Anet wtf”
On a closing note: there’s literally hundreds of thousands of millions of people who play this game. There’s also a block function. If someone is using a dps meter to be a jerk, block them and start your own. If they’re using it to make a fair point about how you’re not contributing and you’re mad about that, sorry—You’re just being selfish.
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