/r/ffxivdiscussion Reddit Poll: Do you want anti-cheat in FFXIV?

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

This would be one of my biggest concerns with implementing something like this.

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Or you know....the devs should have those accessibility and disability needs implemented into the base game? I dont understand how both FFXIV and World of Warcraft have this weird stepping on glass attitude about addons when they can just do more of taking those requested features and putting them into the game, completely negating the need to have to download 3rd party software for it.

Look, I get it. The dev team's resources are spread thin, especially with many of these individuals adhering to strict schedules but you figure the amount of time it takes to make a simple addon feature and plug it into the game shouldnt realistically take like...more than a week? Heck I imagine this shit can be done in a few days at best.

This whole addon thing is so stupid. Just have this stuff in the game and then you wont have to worry about pissing off people about QoL, instead of just pissing off the big booty mods and cheaters who dont care about integrity and really we shouldnt try to cater to these people anyway.

For games that do have anti-cheat or anti-tamper software on them by SE they have used Denuvo which is a particularly invasive and resource consuming piece of software. Denuvo has been reported to have excessive write operations to storage components which can significantly shorten the lifespan of solid-state drives.

I mean as Yoshida says you can always unsub from his game and move on

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

Or you know....the devs should have those accessibility and disability needs implemented into the base game? I dont understand how both FFXIV and World of Warcraft have this weird stepping on glass attitude about addons when they can just do more of taking those requested features and putting them into the game, completely negating the need to have to download 3rd party software for it.

Look, I get it. The dev team's resources are spread thin, especially with many of these individuals adhering to strict schedules but you figure the amount of time it takes to make a simple addon feature and plug it into the game shouldnt realistically take like...more than a week? Heck I imagine this shit can be done in a few days at best.

This whole addon thing is so stupid. Just have this stuff in the game and then you wont have to worry about pissing off people about QoL, instead of just pissing off the big booty mods and cheaters who dont care about integrity and really we shouldnt try to cater to these people anyway.

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They should, yes. I don't think anyone is saying otherwise.

The point is that the game at this particular point is just not disability-friendly, and beyond a certain point there are always people that will accomplish it better.

Obviously, the preference would be that these features are made native, as this would not leave a big disparity between what those on consoles can do, and cannot do in relation to PC players.

Continually supporting disabled players would require a pretty significant amount of work, both in the development time, and in research itself.

Hey Howdy, I was the person who supplied the stats on how many people use Auto-Markers in that thread, but I'll post my 2 cents here.

I am someone who does not use plugins, and I raid with a group of people who are like-minded in that regard. Generally, it does not bother me if people use plugins if everyone they are playing with are O.K. with it. After all, if everyone you're playing with are fine with it, who am I an unrelated person, to yell at you. Obviously when plugins present a problem in a game like FFXIV, it is often when people do it in scenarios where there isn't that collective consent (e.g. cheating in fall guys competitively, or secretly using things in PF without the other players knowing).

That being said, as someone who doesn't use plugins, if they added an anti-cheat tomorrow that worked perfectly with no issues (heck even if that anti cheat somehow magically only targeted the "worst" plugins) it's not like it would magically improve my experience in the game whatsoever.

To that end, I would much rather that they spend the resources identifying *why* people use these plugins and addressing the underlying frustrations and issues that drive people to use them.

Auto-Markers, for example, aren't used for every mechanic in the game or fights they are in, they aren't even used in every Ultimate. They are used because in 3 of the Ultimates there are particularly Janky/Frustrating mechanics that both have incredibly high variance due to things like snapshots and ping and are designed in a way to be frustrating for Party Finder. Often these mechanics, such as Titan Gaols, aren't even the hardest or most interesting mechanics in the fight, they are simply the most janky and frustrating. I would much rather they go in and *change* Titan Gaols to make it better for *everyone* rather than just implement an Anti-Cheat.

We see this phenomenon with a lot of other plugins as well. Some other recent examples I can think of: NoClippy/XIVAlexander rose in popularity after they released an update that made ninja a lot more frustrating to play for a week or two for players who had high enough pings. GShade VFX Filters/EasyEyes had an explosion in popularity (to the point of being mentioned in PF) after fights like Pandemonium 3 were released that were incredibly frustrating to do if you were red color blind.

To that end, rather than spending whatever limited resources they have implementing an Anti Cheat that would just anger a lot of the people using plugins to make their cat faces more yass-ified or w/e, I would rather see them actually adjust content after its released in response to how players play it.

I don't. Anticheats aren't the answer for this game in my opinion.

The answer is just better server-side detection (for example, if someone teleports from one side of the world to the other) or implementing the features from them.

Where I think implementing the features from them will not work is if it's not fast enough or good enough to catch up with the most popular ones. In some cases it may not be realistic for SE to do the same thing but instead to do something similar that wouldn't ruin the game, but these efforts do help because then people will think what's the point downloading these things? They will especially think "what's the point downloading it" when they get a new PC and have to reinstall everything.

No as most tend to catch more innocent bystanders than actual cheaters. The devs would also need to constantly try to updated it at the same pace as cheat software is being updated to get around the anti-vheat software. That would have a bigger chance at taking away time and resources from other parts of the game.

I used to be against Anti-cheats due primarily to performance concerns, but over the years I've become increasingly in-favor of seeing Square Enix take measures to crack down on cheaters in FF14. The growing acceptance and reliance of cheating tools in the raiding community has definitely had a negative impact on my enthusiasm for the game. The whole 'Mind your own business' schtick doesn't really work out, because in a cooperative game the effect of your teammates cheating ends up having a very real impact on your experience. If raiding in this game devolves into the addon-soup that WoW has become over the years, I could easily see myself leaving altogether.

I also think people underestimate how much of an opportunity barrier anti-cheats present to the average player.

The amount of people willing to run plugins on a totally unprotected game is naturally much larger than the amount of players willing to rely on shady bypass methods to cheat in a protected game, particularly one where they have sunk a lot of time/money into their account. Back in my days of hosting GMod dedicated servers, the instances of cheaters on VAC secured servers were exponentially lower, despite VAC being totally trivial to bypass. For the vast majority of players, the risk simply isn't worth it. In an ideal world, it would be nice to see SE implement detection methods that don't rely on a third-party anticheat. In any case, Square needs to do SOMETHING, as the situation is totally out of hand.

One of the issues is, even if reported, often nothing happens. Because most GM's can't check it, or are not allowed to.

We still have level bots under the map teleporting around since 2.0. We still have crafting bots crafting all day and auto-adjusting prices. We still have gatherers walking the optimal path from one node to the next etc. We have people that collected 20000 hoards in deep dungeons in a few days according to achievement logs (some tools can display them even if hidden).

If there are no consequences, there is no deterrence against continuing.

They already banned waymarks during a fight. I wouldn't be surprised if they ban markings in all savage and ultimate content. But there will be always workarounds as long as combat data is easily parsable and not encrypted somehow.

Disclaimer: Nothing in my post should be construed as supporting plugins.

But FFXIV is known across the internet as being a "modder's game". Social media is flooded with modded screenshots and discussions about plugins. The most popular plugins have been downloaded millions of times. The #1 rule, don't talk about modding, is constantly broken in-game and outside of it. Countless people have "Mare Lamentorum" in their search info. This is the heart and soul of FFXIV in 2023. Do I like it? No, because I came from 2016 and not 2023. Many people are different. They came to FFXIV because it was the only MMO that allowed unlimited plugins. This is what Yoshida's life work is about. He created a follow-up to the most successful social sim of all time: No, not WoW, but Second Life.

About "anti-cheat": No one will read this, but there are two distinct vulnerabilities that exist only in FFXIV: the lack of server-side sanity checks and allowing third-party launchers with a third-party API. The first never should've been the case since 1.0. And the latter is baffling as to how it's possible. Other games like Second Life allow third-party launchers that use the existing API. FFXIV is the only online game that I have found that allows you to completely subvert the existing code with an entire API that exists totally outside of bounds. It's a legitimate cheat tool not because of how it's used, but because of what it can do. It can manipulate everything going to and from your client. This is not normal in online games. There are rules to keep things fair, because it's online, not offline. This isn't Skyrim.

The lack of sanity checks and the existence of an entire client-side API to hack this game should be seen as critical vulnerabilities because they are. That's a fact. You can say the game is so broken that fixing it is pointless, but you wouldn't dare criticize the game, would you?

Fortunately, fixing this doesn't require an "anti-cheat". It doesn't need Easy Anti-Cheat or a rootkit. It just needs Square Enix to stop being lazy and fix the vulnerabilities that already exist.