As many are noting, we have years of anecdotal evidence from other games showing that, while some would use them to improve the game, the vocal majority would just use them as a tool to incite drama, encourage exclusionary behavior, and put people down. I realize some of that happens already, but it isnt something Anet should support in any way.
As useful as the information might be, the positives simply do not outweigh the negatives.
I’d agree with this also.
While I would want to have it mainly so I can tweak my own performance and build. I would also use it to see how others are performing and would form negative opinions about under performing individuals. Its human nature and thus serves as a divisive tool. Currently, if a group under performs you shrug it off since you can’t really pinpoint who the weak links are and in the end you benefit from it by having less stress.
GW2 is a game made for casuals so that any random group of people can join together and beat content. Content is made with this in mind and doesn’t require people to be running only the most optimal builds to beat it and I prefer it stay that way. Having a DPS meter encourages elitism and I’m guilty of this myself when I played WoW.
Of course raid leaders could request that you share that information, but then it is YOUR choice to share it.
My Opinion
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Problem with this is already evident in the current game.
Lfg: Ping gear on join.
Player: I don’t want to.
Group: kicks player.Then someone says, well you should read. Eventually 90% of the ad postings say ping gear or run meta build. So now, the player has only one choice if they want to do the content. Ping their gear or can’t do the content because there are barely any ads that don’t ask for them to ping their gear. Also, profession limitations as well:
LFG: No necro or ranger.
Player: But they’re my main character!
Group: kicks player.There will be lfg ads saying, your personal DPS rating must be greater than ____ to join us. That kinda sounds somewhat ok for raids but players won’t use it just for raids. It will leak into various lfg ads. When everyone does the same thing, new solutions are not always found. People become content with the status quo and new solutions to harder content are only found by a minority of players. Then this information is eventually shared or leaked to the community. But again, I understand how it will be useful in raids but not in other areas of the game.
In both of your lcases, you joined a party that wants to enforce their rules and you ignored them, joining regardless and then complaining about a justified kick, instead of making your own group or joining one which happily accepts you.
People starting “have at least x dps”-groups would probably just as horrible as “metazerk only 10k+ AP”-groups, not because they’re meta build-users, but most of those blindly copy them without looking at synergies between traits, why those traits were picked, other viable traits/weapons/utilities you might swap in for specific encounters…
I’d love a proper DPS meter so it could help me understand where I’m doing mistakes, what works especially well against a specific boss etc.
Being afraid of “DPS meter abuse” is quite silly imo, considering there are tons of people out there not caring in the slightest about minmaxing, which is their choice. If you don’t, that’s cool, there’s lots of people who share your mindset and which probably like to play with you. If there’s a group which wants to be efficient and minmaxes their class (at least to a certain extend) and you don’t want to do this, why try to squeeze in regardless?