Integrity sensored? Conspiracy?

[Selindrile]

While I'm never a fan of censorship, and wish the previous post still existed so that it could be discussed openly, I can't agree with most of the conclusions drawn here, I personally believe that a large portion of things that violate the ToS aren't actually detrimental to the game and it's players overall as a whole, in fact quite the opposite, though of course some things certainly are detrimental, painting them all with the same brush seems very off base. While I wish we could discuss openly what might and not be good things to target to affect change, I don't want to speak in specifics for obvious reasons, just wanted to throw in my vague two cents here, for what it's worth.

[Jerbob]

I don't think we should not have these things just because RMT abuse them. They should do something about the RMT themselves, or take steps to make them less abusable. I don't want to see another case of bad apples ruining something that works perfectly fine with legitimate people.

I agree with this sentiment entirely. Of course, the difficulty is that it requires consistent, direct action against the abusers of those systems. That's something I'd like to see more of.

I personally believe that a large portion of things that violate the ToS aren't actually detrimental to the game and it's players overall as a whole, in fact quite the opposite, though of course some things certainly are detrimental, painting them all with the same brush seems very off base.

I can’t agree with this unfortunately.

For each thing that violates the ToS, we should ask whether it confer an advantage upon the user, no matter how small, that cannot be precisely replicated by another player without the same setup. The answer to this, for the vast majority of cases, is going to be yes - an advantage is gained. Why go to the trouble of using some tool if there is no benefit? Perhaps there are a very small number of purely aesthetic things that don't confer a benefit other than "ooh shiny", but these are going to be vanishingly small in the greater context of ToS violations. And, of course, anything that improves shininess while simultaneously increasing game engine performance is an advantage to the player too.

The benefit can be minor - hypothetical examples like something that speeds up moving gear around various inventories, or streamlines some aspect of the user interface, etc. One could argue that there's no mechanical benefit to these examples, but that's not true. They save time. They save faffing around in menus. Most critically, they allow the player to allocate their attention to more important things. It's a small thing, but lots of small things together make a huge difference.

And I think we all know that some of the ToS violations that a lot of people use as a matter of course are not just time saving things. They make a mechanical difference to how people can play the game - they simplify actions, speed up this or that, add new functionality, improve other functionality.

These "small things" are intrinsically damaging because they are objectively, absolutely unfair. An advantage is gained by possessing them over players that don't. A distinct, measurable advantage. And they stack up to make a very significant net advantage.

Beyond that, they are absolutely affecting the development of the game. SE has to watch us to see how to balance new content. If people are cheating to make the game easier, SE reasonably ramps up the challenge. Now the game is harder for people who aren't cheating. The gap widens. The cheaters gain a further advantage. More cheats are developed. More cheats are seen as "mandatory". The scale of the cheating increases. The gap widens further.

This is particularly true when a given aspect of the game is a bit clunky, and people cheat to streamline or bypass it. If people talk about how Aspect Y of the game is terrible and needs fixing, if they make enough noise about it, there's a chance something will be done about it. If the majority of the population takes it upon themselves to cheat in order to avoid Aspect Y, nothing will be done to fix it. And the minority who aren't cheating suffer, because Aspect Y becomes yet another source of advantage for cheaters.

I hear a lot of justification for why Thing X isn't cheating. The cold hard fact is that Thing X always grants an advantage. That's why people use it. That is cheating, and gaining an advantage is damaging to others and to the game as a whole.

[Selindrile]

I hear a lot of justification for why Thing X isn't cheating. The cold hard fact is that Thing X always grants an advantage. That's why people use it. That is cheating, and gaining an advantage is damaging to others and to the game as a whole.

For what it's worth I never made a statement one way or another on what is "cheating", what is and isn't "cheating" is purely up to SE to decide, cheating is a disallowed act, pure and simple, and of course people only do things that they perceive to give them an advantage, in some form or another, over not doing a thing. The only thing I mentioned that would be a reasonable debate is "does said thing harm the community or game as a whole" or not, you have to remember when people were banned for idling with Carbuncle out, passively farming materials with no third party tools, or my friend who was thrown in GM jail for engaging a campaign defense object to skillup and then going afk, having no clue that such would be considered cheating, "cheating" does not always need to be synonymous with third party software. And before FFXI had an official windowed mode, or lockstyle existed, or the ability to display party member's TP, or ability to see your own buff durations, using other things to gain these abilities would definitely be considered cheating, but now they are part of the game, so clearly SE decided that these acts themselves were not always damaging to the game as a whole, or else they would not have been implemented into the client.

[Jerbob]

You have to remember when people were banned for idling with Carbuncle out, passively farming materials with no third party tools, or my friend who was thrown in GM jail for engaging a campaign defense object to skillup and then going afk, having no clue that such would be considered cheating, "cheating" does not always need to be synonymous with third party software.

These are certainly interesting cases. However, they are likely classified by SE as "unintended exploitation of legitimate game mechanics" or something along those lines. As you've stated, whether these are "cheating" or not, they are different to what I was talking about - I was referring exclusively to third party tool usage when I used the word "cheating". That doesn't mean your examples deserve any less discussion - just that I think that discussion is a different one. I should have defined my vocabulary more carefully, sorry.

And before FFXI had an official windowed mode, or lockstyle existed, or the ability to display party member's TP, or ability to see your own buff durations, using other things to gain these abilities would definitely be considered cheating, but now they are part of the game, so clearly SE decided that these acts themselves were not always damaging to the game as a whole, or else they would not have been implemented to the client.

These features are only damaging to the game if they are not available to everyone. That is the fundamental point I'm trying to convey.

I agree that all of the examples you give would be considered cheating. We were lucky that, despite widespread cheating employed by players to create these features independently, SE decided to incorporate them into the game anyway. We're lucky that everyone can enjoy these features now. The existence of these features became legitimate when everyone could use them without breaking the ToS.

But we should not make the mistake of thinking that cheating is actually beneficial to the game, suggesting that gives SE a template to follow when creating updates. I see a lot of people say that, and it's absolute nonsense. The number of ways people cheat in this game is vast - obviously SE is going to come up with the same stuff as some of those cheats. And this thinking ignores the vast number of enhancements to the game cheaters use that SE hasn't adopted.

I don't meant to say that every instance of cheating becomes harmless if they're legitimised by SE, of course, but in these examples (and potentially in many others), no harm is done, and player experiences are enhanced, if they are freely accessible to all.

From a personal perspective, the introduction of equipsets completely revolutionised the game for me. I can't imagine life without them now. I can do so much more. I've directly experienced first hand how much of an impact this sort of thing has on my capabilities as a player. And knowing that this is still a fraction of what cheaters can achieve makes it very clear to me that cheating creates a vast gulf in ability between players, because I can compare my experiences before and after equipsets.

This is what I mean by damage. Division in the ceiling of player capability caused by cheating. This affects development. This affects game experience for people playing legitimately.

Of course, this is mostly invisible to people who are cheating because SE is now developing using the statistics they generate, because they are the majority. They get to stay ahead of the curve for free. It's only when a subset of cheaters is confident enough in the status quo of abuse that they can start doing things that make even casual cheaters squirm that a majority starts raising an outcry - and the bar of what's "acceptable" and what isn't just keeps dropping.

A few years ago no-one would have dared to use cure bots in the same party as the type of people I play with. Certainly they existed among some groups, but now they're so widespread that no-one one bats an eyelid, at any level of play. The crafting cheat is just another consequence of years of people claiming that cheat after cheat doesn't "really affect gameplay". It does, and this is what we're left with.

[Alhanelem]

While I'm never a fan of censorship, and wish the previous post still existed so that it could be discussed openly, I can't agree with most of the conclusions drawn here, I personally believe that a large portion of things that violate the ToS aren't actually detrimental to the game and it's players overall as a whole, in fact quite the opposite, though of course some things certainly are detrimental, painting them all with the same brush seems very off base. While I wish we could discuss openly what might and not be good things to target to affect change, I don't want to speak in specifics for obvious reasons, just wanted to throw in my vague two cents here, for what it's worth.

Part of the reason I feel like this isn't as bad as it's made out to be (DOESNT MEAN IT SHOULDN"T BE ADDRESSED, just means the impact could have been a lot worse if this was going on more in a different time) is just because we do so much stuff in the game either solo or just with known friends these days (especially outside of Asura, where what community remains is much more close knit and mainly consists of circles of friends who had been on the same server forever). There is less dependence on random people- gil is fairly easily obtained without even dealing on the AH these days. Because of this I know all or most of my gil is completely legitimate because the vast majority of it was earned from my own actions and not from trade or any other external source, and I know quite a few people in the same boat, we only buy from the AH what we really need to, and the stuff we do buy isn't typically the stuff most likely to be contaiminated. Also not being on Asura helps a lot (Sorry, Asura, but it's true) here as the RMT tend to stick to where the most people are. of the most recent incidents of duping/cheating, nearly all of it was confined to Asura.

That being said, of course I want everyone to have a great experience, so a close look really needs to be taken at this for everyone's sake.