Personal DPS is not a good comparison tool because it can be affected by many things (commonly known as padding). That’s why I would like the default page to be guild speed as speedkills are the result of the whole team being great and pulling their weight and not the everyone catering to a single person.
As an addition to that change I would add an info window to the search icon because some people don’t know it exists (atleast I didn’t until recently), something along the lines of:
“Want to compare your group to others? Select your team composition here”
(Also a small addition I would like to see is that we can edit the search without having to redo it but that’s optional).
I think that would be a good change to allow for more accurate comparison for the “broad masses” that don’t know how to or don’t want to sift through each log, and maybe don’t know that comparing to speed kills gives a more accurate representation of what they should aim for.
I agree with this. Guild Speed is a much better measure for both skill and as an overall ranking page. I don’t know if its the same for WoW but the amount of padding you can do for a single players DPS in XIV is huge, there was a big reddit post, some what jokingly, about a group who decided to see how much they could pad a Black Mage: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/53rh33/i_made_an_unfunny_thing_about_fflogs_parsing/
Personal DPS Ranking should of course stay but switching Guild Speed to the default would be nice. If it did switch over it might be nice to have the party composition and raid DPS in the ranking page too.
Guild speed, while good to show the overall DPS of the group, is still susceptible to padding in the form of beneficial party set-ups. This can force players who see the fastest times to feel like they have to change to a job that they may not like in order to compete or “be as good” as the parses they are seeing.
I personally feel like it is fine the way it is right now and more effort should go on educating people and giving them the right information. Telling them that anything above 70 - 80% is technically good in comparison to what the average is and that they can improve if they look at realistic non-padded parses which can be located easily with the search function. This way they can set up their own group set-up and see what others in the same position are pulling.
The problem of people thinking they have to switch jobs isn’t realistic because no one would play ninja with the way it is now, but that’s not the case. Most people play the jobs that are fun to them anyway and those that don’t know perfectly well why they are playing said job.
That’s why I suggested to add that info window to the search bar. There’s nothing you can do about people running optimal composition or not, but you can filter out groups that do and compare it to a group that has the same composition as yours.
And once you do that and more importantly, once people know about it besides having to dig through other sites with some subcommands it will hopefully deliver a more accurate representation.
Another option would be to compare total raid DPS but that could be padded as well, for example letting ads spawn in a5s, so that isn’t ideal.