One, it’s nothing like that. No one goes to WCL to just randomnly browse logs as an afternoon distractions and no one will get the algorithm to suggest your log, ever.
Two, your driveway basketball video would be lucky to get 30 views on Youtube, unless you fell on your face in a most painful way possible.
I never said that it was ever the case that information from instanced content in WoW wasn’t tracked. I was just totally ignorant of that fact (or the extent of the tracking) for like the first year or so I played the game. Now, I’m not.
All I want to do is explore a huge fantasy world, collect things, and slay the occasional dragon so to speak. I never signed up for any third-party tracking/grading system that compares my in-game performance on both my good days and my bad with millions of strangers and don’t think that I should have to opt out of one. That kind of thing is great for competitive players, but I’m not and never will be a competitive WoW player.
And the story they tell is “People who care about logs are playing a spreadsheet, not the game.”
Every game with a pass/fail state can be optimized to some degree and WoW is no different. As it turns out, there are many people who enjoy the theorycraft of that goes into finding those optimal solutions and still others who enjoy succeeding at the technical execution needed to pull that kind of play off. That’s not something we should be demeaning.
Are you telling me that you’ve never once tried to think of a strategy that would give you the best odds of winning a game? Is strategizing inherently anti-fun?
It sounds like what you are doing is not content that gets logged.
So whats the issue?
It sounds like they are playing a game. They just aren’t wanting others to carry them through trickier content.
The only site used by the overwhelming majority of the playerbase for logging does, in fact, have an opt-out system.
Needless thread.
I think something that doesn’t get brought up often enough in these discussions…
I don’t think it’s super controversial to say that people who are aiming to do more difficult group content do want to perform some sort of vetting to make sure that the people they group with can actually handle that level of content. Long before logs existed, people did it through gearscore addons or checking achievements.
Even if all logs vanished over night, you would not stop people trying to filter the skill levels of the people joining their groups. They will always find another way to do so. Human ingenuity is funny like that when faced with a problem that’s in high demand.
As it stands, I’m not even sure how feasible it is to make logs disappear in the first place. You can’t unring a bell and logs are such an integral part of high level play in this game. As they should be! They’re an extremely valuable tool for improvement both on a personal level to improve your own play and on a group level to debug what’s going wrong in raid and to come up with a solution. I don’t think we should be taking away a tool that’s so key to growth in the game.
Improving log literacy for the general masses is something I can get behind, since there’s a lot of people who don’t really use logs correctly or misunderstand what the logs actually mean. The worst of it being the people who treat logs like a scoreboard.
Ultimately though, if you’re being rejected from groups because you have bad logs then the solution isn’t to find a way to hide your performance, it’s to get better logs. Use those same logs to learn how to improve so that they can no longer be used against you. If that’s not something you want to put in the effort to do that’s fine, no one can tell you how to play. But no one is obligated to carry someone who willfully refuses to improve to the performance level that high level content requires.
So just ignore it. No one’s gonna bring up your logs to you.
according to your logs, you may not be quite mighty enough to slay a dragon
You aren’t wrong. Gearscore existed long before warcraflogs. You could also look up their achievements.
Then the good old come to ogrimmar for inspection.
Still though to my original post, we’ve gotten to a point where people are misusing logs (either because they don’t know how to read them properly or can’t be bothered to).
You’ve never gotten a grey parse because half the raid was dead but you know mechanics and stayed alive long enough to struggle through the boss? When was the last time you looked at how long the encounter lasted?
So now as a player (pugger) I have to go do reclears, not just for loot, but to pad my warcraftlogs? But I also should wait until I am at or near BiS for my ilvl, since the scoring only takes ilvl into account.
Again logs in and of itself isn’t bad. Denying someone who is 5 full clears deep due to logs is.
Back when I raid led (authenticator makes that impossible), I look for folks who “know the fights”. Multiple clears is a good indicator of that. I’ve even taken people at their word that they saw the vid, as long as they agree that I will replace them if it becomes an issue.
DPS isn’t an issue until it becomes an issue (you hit an enrage in Sludgefist, or a fight takes inordinately long meaning you lose by attrition (overwhelmed with orbs, puddles, etc.).
You expressly give permission for any other client to record your combat actions when you log into the game, join a group, etc. If you don’t want that information collected, it’s just as simple as don’t play. The combat system is open to everyone, equally, no one can opt-out.
The cat is out of the bag at this point, there is likely no way this will ever change without a massive uproar from the player base who relies on logs for legit purposes rather than to DPS shame or call people out for their mistakes or poor play.
If the group leader can’t understand that overhealing a fight produces lower parses than actually healing a fight with the right number of healers, then that’s just a poor raid leader and I wouldn’t put much stock in anything they say.
Surprise, over-healing the fight, also reduces the DPS parses as well because the fight lasts longer and some players have significantly longer stints of non-cooldown windows, resulting in lower overall throughput numbers as well. Again if the raid leader doesn’t get that, I wouldn’t put much stock in their position.
The only way anyone parses on fights where you over-heal is if a DPS cheeses some mechanic, and that’s just an outlier situation.
Imagine paying $15 a month, to let some random stranger on the internet live in your head rent free lol.
actually
no
you quite literally don’t
you only have a right to access to servers provided you’ve not been actioned for violation of the eula or tos
all characters and data pertaining to them are loaned to you by blizzard and can be revoked at any time, for any/no reason
No I haven’t. I exclusively raid with my guild so if half the raid is dead we’re gonna call a wipe unless the boss has sub 10% left.
Granted I haven’t pugged in a while but I don’t think you need to put that much effort into playing the game of parses. If you’re a good quality player, that will show out over your career as you average out your runs with good groups and bad groups. In fact, it’s very difficult for one bad group to tank your parse since warcraftlogs advertises your best attempts. If you’re a solid player who knows your class, you’ll regularly get blue or even purple parses. You don’t really need to split hairs like unless you’re trying to turn a purple parse into an orange one. So long as you patch up your major issues using a toll like warcraftanalyzer, logs shouldn’t hold you back even if you’re pugging.
I agree with you in principle but there does come a point where low DPS becomes a liability. There’s a lot of problems in WoW that you can solve by just killing it before it becomes a problem. Higher DPS means you push dangerous phases sooner, skip bad overlaps, and provide fewer opportunities for players to make fatal mistakes. In short, shorter fights are safer fights.
When one of my raiders asks me if it is better to do big damage or to survive every mechanic I tell them it’s a trick question because the correct answer is both. Good raiders should be looking for ways to maximize their own damage while still following mechanics. That means minimizing movement required to handle a mechanic, minimizing how much time mechanics force you to disconnect from the boss, and planning your cooldowns for maximum effectiveness throughout the fight. Ideally you do this at the same time as you’re learning the mechanics and how to survive them. If not, then it means that your growth as a raider doesn’t stop just because you’re not dying anymore.
Truthfully, when I’m recruiting for a raid team, I prefer raiders who are able to take the most away from a wipe over those who have a lot of clears. I would prefer the raider who only take 5 wipes to get a new fight he hasn’t seen before to a place where he can reliably purple parse it and not die over the one who has 7 clears but took 30 wipes to get there.
But this is all academic. I don’t think I’m the type of player you’re referring to since I don’t really think that your parse signifies a major problem unless it’s consistently gray or low green. Parses that low don’t happen unless you spent a lot of time dead or you fundamentally misunderstand your class. If it happens once or twice, whatever. We’ve all had bad days (or had bad groups). If it’s happening on all your fights, I’m gonna raise an eyebrow.
How many people do that level of introspection? Most people look at the summary page and call it a day.
Most pug kills probably aren’t particularly clean, nor are they particularly short. The faster the boss goes down, the higher your dps log is likely to be.
I mean true, but in a pug scenario, wipes are often out of your control. You would have to truly be drilling down to see that he jumped off or stood in the bad after X number of players were already dead.
Again, that is not the level of analysis any pug raid leader is doing. It would take forever to fill.
So yes, logs are an incredibly useful tool. That isn’t how it is being used though (for typical GF groups) .
do yall even know how logs / parsing works i’m just wondering because i’m reading this and i’m really confused what in the world yall are talking about
ok listen bro no one cares about parses. i’m sorry, the content you’re touching, NO one cares if you grey parse. lets just get that out the way.
if ur raid team is good you will have high parses by DEFAULT because the boss is dying in 4 minutes.
Heroic casual guilds do not care about parses, nor will any social raiding guild that just gets together to have fun a few times a week.
The fact that your logs are public literally means nothing to 99.9999999999999999999999999999% of the content in the game.
It’s not even worth THINKING about.
No one has EVER mentioned to you a thing about your logs, I can almost bet that. And if there is a scenario where someone is bringing up your logs, you’re probably not ready for the content you’re signing up for IF someone EVER says something to you.
Logs may as well be private right now for yall, because literally nothing changes. No one brings up your logs, no i don’t believe your fake story about how you queued up for a normal raid and he checked your logs and called you a bunch of bad names and that’s what’s wrong with the community.
That’s true. Like I said, I haven’t PuG’d in years. These days I use logs in my capacity as a raid leader and a mentor for my guild.
Since they are a very powerful and useful tool when used properly, I’m loathe to pursue any solution that involves fundamentally breaking them for people who use them as an improvement tool. I’d love to find ways to improve log literacy for the community as a whole. Though even though my guild does log workshops for our members, we can’t really do that for the whole community and I’m suspicious that the only people interested in learning that sort of thing would be the people who are already approaching logs the right way in the first place.
Guess you haven’t seen the pugs for an end boss that says in the description even “checking logs”. I can link AOTC, but if they see my logs I don’t tend to get invited. However groups I do get into, I don’t get kicked from.
(don’t assume this is my main, because it isn’t, I pug Heroic raids and M+15’s)
I said normal raid specifically. An AOTC group is not the content these people do.
Okay, but I made this thread. And I want to hide my logs because I rather get invited over my ilvl/achievements, and not be judged for my bad parses from groups over healing. By over healing, we use 3 healers in 10m even when we don’t need that much heals. I usually get 85-90% in DPS as a healer just because I cast DPS spells because we don’t need 3 heals so my healing looks terrible.