In my guild, we were parsing damage from the early days. Not much in classic, but in Kunark we parsed enough to know that discing melee were outdamaging wizards even on 32k hp dragons. Of course in Velious using the bane spells, it was easy enough to count the number of spells that landed and multiply it by 2,000. Often melee still outdamaged the wizards even with the bane spells, and crushed lure using wizards. Casters got a significant boost in Luclin, but even in PoP a well geared rogue would beat a wizard on low ac gods. This stuff influenced our recruiting decisions.
I still have some of my old logs, including my Velious era mist panther logs. I recall Kruegen parsing on that mob and getting different results than mine which I attributed to the samples being too short. Stats in EQ were so subtle that you needed a lot of data to determine anything with a degree of certainty. I recall a mob in Shadowhaven that couldn't be killed or attack back that we used to parse on. Also the underwater frog in Lake Rathe that was added in Ykesha I believe. I would autoattack overnight on those; 8+ hour logs. I could tell you my exact procs per minute. People used to give me their login info so I could log and parse for them.
I have something of a dichotomy on this issue in that, if I were to make a game, I would hide as much of the math as possible-- including damage numbers of all spells and melee hits, stat points, even hit points. I would definitely want my game to feel like a world to immerse yourself in rather than plugging stats into spreadsheets to figure out the best min/max gear; if for no other reason than to be different from every other game out there. This also allows for some new gameplay. Take healing for example; if you make figuring out who needs to be healed and for how much part of the challenge of the game, it lets you make combat slower (as opposed to the current trend of tanks dying in 3 seconds) without trivializing it. It would also make healing more entertaining as you would be looking at the battle instead of hit point meters.
However parsing the numbers is how you discover balance issues in games. For years in EQ, I would get shit from a lot of people who refused to believe me when I said that warriors were outdamaging wizards. Even up to PoP, I would 2 box both classes in an exp group scenario, post the data, and some idiot FoH wizard would ridicule me and post his own log with his melee spending more time with autoattack off than on, and most of the delusional wizards on Graffe would take his side because he had the FoH tag and they didn't want to believe their 5 year old characters still sucked dick in single target killing exp grinds. You can't trust the #1 uber guild, and you certainly can't trust the developers. Hard objective data is necessary.
Btw, they added spell damage to third party logs sometime in PoP I believe. I still have many logs from that era with spell damage in them.
Also, regarding third person cameras, I used third person cameras a lot in EQ simply because of the advantages they gave. I would meditate in the middle of roaming mobs and move away from mobs coming at me from behind as I could see in all directions in some camera views; I bet it looked like showeqing to people who saw me doing that. I would also agree that forcing the game in first person adds to the immersion and challenge. Shame no devs have the balls nowadays to do something like that.
