If someone wants a personal DPS meter for themselves to have a look at their own output. Go ahead.
But if it gets used to judge others? kitten. OFF. I’ve seen too much toxic & elitist behaviour in other MMOs (from Star Trek Online, to Rift, to Neverwinter) when combat meters on group level got introduced. Those who say a group-based DPS meter isn’t a bad idea in itself are intentionally ignorant. ANet should build an own DPS meter which can standard measure your own DPS and only if others allow their DPS to be measured, also track others, allow people to buy it in the cash shop to cover the development costs and forbid any of the others. DPS meters are often too toxic in general widespread usage for uncontrolled use.
DPS meters are not toxic. Players are toxic.
Toxic players will be toxic with or without DPS meters.
Without DPS meters people will use other things to exclude and kick people. Including things that have a lot less to do with a player’s skill in specific raids than their DPS. Like their AP or their LI (since LI can be earned in any raid, LI is not a good indicator at experience at a specific raid). Or worse: their bias towards a particular class – Johnny playing Toxic’s hated class would likely be kicked if there were any issues, even if Johnny wasn’t the one causing the problem.
I’ll bite here.
The amount of naturally toxic players is, from my own observations, lower then the amount of toxic players when the DPS meter gets introduced. As I said, I don’t mind if people want to check their own DPS. Go right ahead. But the amount of people who suddenly do become toxic when they have a tool like the DPS meter which they can measure others with without their consent, or another ‘parse’? Suddenly increases every kittening time.
Hell, the game Star Trek Online (which has plenty of other flaws to start with though) basically died because the developers were idiotic enough to listen almost solely to the DPS crowd. I don’t mind if people want to have fun in their own ways – it’s still a game. But the second you knowingly and intentionally start spoiling the fun for others for me all bets are off. And with the introduction of group-wide, non-permission requested DPS meters? That so far always attracted the worst of the worst behaviour. Raiders before this introduction already had a bad name in this game as elitist pricks when it comes to PUGs and other type of partially-/non-formatted groups. Now add the group-wide DPS meter to that mix, and you are on a highway to hell.
Also as others noted – using a DPS meter, due to all the different possible class formats, is just stupid to measure effectiveness. And I doubt people are willing to get into the cookiecutter format if they dislike it just to join a raid.
On that note, things like this lead to enforced cookiecutter behaviour. If people choose consciously for an cookiecutter format and stick with it, but don’t like how it plays, it’s just self-inflicted poisoning. But at no point should you be forced to use a cookiecutter build just to take part in one of the parts of the game. It screws with all the fundamentals of gaming, and is assholish to the max. Besides that, enforced cookiecutter formatting always leads to disaster for the game it is impacted upon.
Sure, I can probably pick a few people in this topic who I could probably trust with reasonable use of the meter without screwing over others. But guess what? Most of the people you can’t.
Also – for those who like raiding – do you want to see ANet continue developing raids? Because if wrong behaviour gets out of hand like it has in other games after the introduction of uncontrolled DPS meters, you can expect the amount of new raids to drop even further. At some point it will just become uninteresting for a developer to develop for a group which probably will be relative vocal, but too small partially due to its own doing if there’s no check and balance against use of tools like those. I can guarantee you that much.
Edit: Typo. V, not f
(edited by BenjaminMS.6710)