Would you be opposed to SE implementing a program to scan for addons/parsers?

I would have a giant problem with a company scanning my computer.

Those systems always get false positives and it's really none of their business to know what I have or to use my resources for their purposes.

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

That would make an already bad situation worse. The solution would be to improve the game and lessen the desire for these things. Perhaps make some mechanics easier to read, though not any easier to execute, as an example. Players shouldn't feel the need to zoom out excessively just to see what in the world is going on. Ultimate might be the focus at the moment, but it also shines a light on a lot of other issues, too.

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So far this hasn't been a problem in any Ultimate I've seen, but when people are using third party tools to play your game because they can't see what the heck is going on, that's when you realize your design choices are not the best.

And to properly illustrate your point: I'm colourblind enough to not be able to spot some colour differences. I can do Kampeos Harma because of shapes rather than colours. When people who can easily see both still screw up the mechanic, it's a sign that figuring out a way to understand the mechanic isn't a problem. Executing it is xD

But there are fights without that sort of foresight. As well as gameplay elements unrelated to combat (I can't see the gathering nodes very well, they're yellow on yellow). I had people who cleared Ultimates get utterly stuck at Construct 8 and I have to be the one telling them where to go. Dyscalculia is an actual thing, turns out, and not something people throw into the air to bail out of math class.

So allowing people to identify mechanics shouldn't be a problem. Especially not when the game has markers for most stuff rather than merely relying on minute details like animation tells, buffs or glowing castbars. Those are things that require special attention from everyone. But when the indicator is meant to be clearly visible, that's a mechanic that shouldn't be hard to identify. The challenge is on the execution, no matter how "pfft, easy" we may think it is.
So when that part becomes a problem due to design, there's likely going to be a need for ways to resolve this. Sometimes, yes, through the use of QoL tools.
An Ultimate player with some form of disability or problem shouldn't be penalized for using third party tools to help them match the level of everyone else, even if they are strictly forbidden. Because if there's no viable alternative in the game, what, should they just be expected to not engage in the content overall? It's not exactly fair.

And before someone says "Yeah well life ain't fair :A", need I remind you we're discussing an online videogame with regular updates, and under the assumption that tools that help with these things exist as alternatives?

Those tools existing is problematic, especially since they open the door for others that enable cheating. And those who want to cheat will do so, regardless of circumstance. But when lacking the alternative, making mechanics who by design should be easy to identify a bit more obvious for them, will mean these tools will have their audience.

I'll just also add, because I know some people have comprehension issues, cheating is cheating. And that is the problem. I'm just pointing out that this solution could harm more than just cheaters. And that a more viable solution, as Vahlnir pointed out, lies in how the fights are designed.

Not a fan of game companies installing spyware on my PC. Would be an easy out for me to uninstall FF14.

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Originally Posted by fantasiaaddict

The innocent have nothing to fear. I support it.

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The "innocent" have much to fear. Stagnation of QoL updates, nothing actually happening, unnecessary crashes, etc

I just want to point out that a lot of games have tried to have scanners that scan player systems for cheats and hacks. The result is never a success. Cheats and hacks continue to exist, while legitimate player experiences are frequently harmed. On an open system like the Windows, it is simply not going to work.

There are other things that can be done about third party tools. For example the zoom hack could possibly be countered by implementing say a culling box that allows players to see the skybox from inside the arena, but if a zoom hack is used to zoom out further than originally designed, then the player camera would naturally be outside the culling box that would cull everything in the arena, making the game display nothing at all.

I'm sure there are other programmic and level design techniques that can be used this way.

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Originally Posted by FireMage

The "innocent" have much to fear. Stagnation of QoL updates, nothing actually happening, unnecessary crashes, etc

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I really hate this "if you're innocent you should be fine with it" mindset. How about no, the majority of us aren't doing anything wrong so don't punish us because of a select few?

If they hold an offical World first race then I would be understand if they made those who wanted to take part to down a program to scan their PC, but even then it probably would not catch that really willing to cheat. I do think they should make it so all parties have to stream to take part though. Those that hide footage should not be considered part of the race, if you hide your progression then by no means should you be considered part of the valid race.

I'm in the middle as on one hand would it be nice if it felt as though they were doing more or did a better job with dealing with cheaters? Yeah, sure. On the other hand any time I hear people talk about these anti cheat software it just never seems to do the job and just ends up bogging down people's systems.

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Originally Posted by SannaR

I'm in the middle as on one hand would it be nice if it felt as though they were doing more or did a better job with dealing with cheaters? Yeah, sure. On the other hand any time I hear people talk about these anti cheat software it just never seems to do the job and just ends up bogging down people's systems.

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That's the issue tbh. Client side anti cheat software is just a general annoyance to everyone. It makes games less stable or lowers performance due to additional tasks and resource usage but doesn't actually stop people from cheating in any long term sense.

What would likely work better is more transparency in punishing the cheaters. Bonus points if they can make hilarious videos like that one Rust admin that goes around messing with the cheaters he finds lol.

Even if I was for it, they'd never actually implement it. I will always be in favor of game devs and communities looking for ways to stop cheaters, but automated anticheat software has proven to not be the way to do it in a large mmorpg environment such as this.

Anticheat software tends to have a better impact on games with smaller player groups in a single game instance, like FPS games or Arena pvp games; where these programs can have a tighter focus on what to look for with far fewer machines/clients it has to scan.

In the end, human/manual intervention just works better for FFXIV; it's not perfect, but it's much better then the hellscape of something like XIGNCODE3 or nProtect Gameguard.

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Originally Posted by SaitoHikari

I'm pretty sure Yoshi-P has enough experience playing MMOs to realize that adding any kind of scanning will only achieve 2 things.

1) It'll be a major annoyance to the entire playerbase, possibly resulting in performance drops

2) It'll push the entire third party scene underground, and start an arms race with them.

SE isn't going to do it, when there isn't really any benefit to having it, beyond just simply saying that they have it. They would sooner axe future development of Ultimate raids than to waste resources on this stuff.

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Many games scan for processes or for changes in their data files on launch. It doesn't really affect performance nor move apps "underground". Blizzard has a long-lasting experience with this - they banned assets change because aside from looks it could be used for cheating. They also look for running cheating/decompiling apps while the game is running. The downside is that some games go overboard and scan your system while having escalated permissions which allows them to do way more than described.

And hardcore competitive games often do not support non-default display aspect ratios.

It's kinda silly to me that this question comes up every couple months or so, someday people learn that stuff like anti cheat software is illegal in japan. Same as modding btw.

Until then we will probably have people ask for this over and over again, completely oblivious to the fact that SE can't do that out of multiple reasons, be it millions lost in stock and well subs cause it would destroy every community that freely advertises this game or well lawsuits cause anti cheat software (crazy i know not the whole world is just bound to US law lol) is maybe not that legal, especially in japan where...well...the game comes from.

But i have to say it is funny to see this discussion every time this happens.

Innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around, yes.

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Originally Posted by Ranaku

anti cheat software is illegal in japan.

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The FFXIV forums are the only place on the internet where this claim is brought up. Can you please provide a citation?

Also, it’s legal in Japan for a game to read its own files, per the post right above yours. Yoshida designed FFXIV around WoW. How is that possible if WoW is illegal in Japan?

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Originally Posted by xenahawk

Honestly i have nothing to hide so i wouldnt care if they did, let them scan away.

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you have absolutely no idea how anti-cheat software works

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Originally Posted by xenahawk

As long as it doesnt interfere with my quality of gaming like causing lag or whatever.

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believe me....
this will be the least of your concerns...

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Originally Posted by Ranaku

people learn that stuff like anti cheat software is illegal in japan.

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https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Li...eat_technology
Quite many Japanese developers there :p (Its a list of games that use somekind of anti-cheat programs)

I wouldn't mind to be honest.

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Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

I really hate this "if you're innocent you should be fine with it" mindset. How about no, the majority of us aren't doing anything wrong so don't punish us because of a select few?

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"Rather let a thousand innocent die than letting a single guilty one escape.", and all. Infamous quote from the Warhammer universe.

I can see that people like to have certain mods as a QoL update.
But if you give them a inch, others will take a mile and start making mods that begin to be straight up cheating, like seeing otherwise invisible AoE markers and such.

Would it be unfair for the QoL mod users to also be put under the hammer as the obviously cheating ones? Maybe.
Yet in my opinion they need to be all reeled back in and firmly reminded of the rules regarding mods and add-ons, and they should expect no mercy or leniency if they do get caught.

You saw it already regarding toxic chats and people who wouldn't stop being horny in their adventure plates. And SE will continue to grasp around the banhammer harder from now on.

SE is not HoYoVerse. This is different.

WoW has an anti cheat on its client and I have never heard of it causing any issues.

If blizzard can do it, pretty sure SE can do it as well.

Who would have thought, the rare thread on the forum that restores faith in humanity rather than drain it. Seeing so many people speak out against invasive anti cheat systems is a welcome change of pace!

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Originally Posted by Pratini

WoW has an anti cheat on its client and I have never heard of it causing any issues.

If blizzard can do it, pretty sure SE can do it as well.

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They undoubtedly could, but the performance issues are in my opinion the least important of problems that come with Anti Cheat software.

Privacy and security weigh far more heavily. And there, while Square Enix would undoubtedly do its best if they were to take such a step, even the the most well-intentioned devs' best efforts are simply not sufficient. Kernel-level anti cheat (which would be neccessary to prevent the code injection that most mods, custom launchers, fixes for XIV's awful netcode etc. are based around) will always be a security risk. Even if you trust a developer, to err is human, and when you operate on that level of system access, any error, problem, or weakness in the software can create a weakpoint that can be exploited by savvy criminals.
And attacks on uniform, widely deployed software scale incredibly well.

That makes points like this one...

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Originally Posted by fantasiaaddict

The innocent have nothing to fear. I support it.

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...so misguided. And while some people might even have no problems with criminals gaining access to information or data about them, rights are there to protect the vulnerable, which is why it is important to defend them on principle, making the whole "nothing to hide" argument so dangerous.

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Originally Posted by Pratini

If blizzard can do it, pretty sure SE can do it as well.

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Glamour dresser vs transmog, retainer system vs bank and simple market, promised add-ons but withdrew vs very active and creative add-on scene...there are things Blizzard did more than 10 years ago that FFXIV still is citing technical difficulties for.

The problem is... the argument that "players that are against a third-party checker have something to hide" is not a valid argument. It goes under the presumption that some other company should be allowed to see what's on our devices.

I don't invite police into my house daily to check that I'm not cooking meth. Nor should we invite SE into our computer.

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Originally Posted by fantasiaaddict

The innocent have nothing to fear. I support it.

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That is some downright dangerous thinking in general.

It's also worth mentioning that the cheaters will always find a way around stuff like this, Anti-Cheat software almost never works and digs hard into the RAM of a computer causing performance drops.

The most likely scenario is it "works" by driving most of the player base away due to needing an expensive computer to play without severe performance issues. Which would put FFXIV back in the same boat it would have been in 1.0

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Originally Posted by dspguy

The problem is... the argument that "players that are against a third-party checker have something to hide" is not a valid argument. It goes under the presumption that some other company should be allowed to see what's on our devices.

I don't invite police into my house daily to check that I'm not cooking meth. Nor should we invite SE into our computer.

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Likely you unwilling did already that with some programs and launchers that have the option to send your PC specs to analyze and perform surveys with it.

as soon as they do something like this, i will either A) my time playing ff is over or B) continuing playing it but run it in a vm. Nobody needs to know whats on your pc

Doesn't matter to me. I've played several games all my MMOing career of 20+ years that have used anti cheat software of various kinds. Never had an issue. People who claim to have an issue are a fraction of the playerbase and probably already have qualms with the game for various other reasons and using it as an excuse to just peel the final bandaid off. If people think enjoyers of the game will walk away in droves simply because anti-cheat software of any kind comes out, they are sorely mistaken. Most people who engage with online MMOs already interface with anti-cheat software almost 90% of the time.

Now the main issue is how effective it would be, which seems to have varying results depending on the company. I've known some games to have such tight security, hacking/botting/modding by and large went caput instantly and games benefitted from it. I've seen some that turn into an arms race and others that pretty much can never keep up with the mods/hacks and just affect legit players. The game doesn't survive on mods like something akin to WoW does so getting rid of them isn't gamebreaking. Visual mods and QoL stuff disappears for those that use them, but if we can't have people in the community responsibily using them (especially on the highest most publicized stage) then we probably don't deserve to have them at all.

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Originally Posted by CP2833787

That is some downright dangerous thinking in general.

It's also worth mentioning that the cheaters will always find a way around stuff like this, Anti-Cheat software almost never works and digs hard into the RAM of a computer causing performance drops.

The most likely scenario is it "works" by driving most of the player base away due to needing an expensive computer to play without severe performance issues. Which would put FFXIV back in the same boat it would have been in 1.0

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An expensive computer lol you are delusional. It doesn't cause the issues people claim and vast majority of games with anticheat the anticheat goes unnoticed not slowing anything. Now will it completely stop cheating, doubtful but it would act as deterrence

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Originally Posted by Mcg55ss

An expensive computer lol you are delusional. It doesn't cause the issues people claim and vast majority of games with anticheat the anticheat goes unnoticed not slowing anything. Now will it completely stop cheating, doubtful but it would act as deterrence

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From personal experience with them, yeah they do. Not while you're playing, but they act before when you launch it. Either way, you'd not only have someone circumvent the anticheat either way through some finnagling, you'll also risk disabling stuff that doesn't cause cheating but does still help people play the game. You know, the stuff SE is only implementing now because they realized people wouldn't stop using those tools since they couldn't get any decent alternative in-game? And all sorts of false flags just because "your firewall isn't configured correctly".

My biggest concern with them adding a program that does this isn't even privacy, this game is already held together with virtual duct tape and silly puddy, and I've noticed a steep decline in the game's overall performance since Endwalker dropped.

Adding an anticheat on top of it would make the game lag even more.


Would be fucking hilarious watching the mass fall out and salt among people obsessed with modding the game though, might be worth it just for that.

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

In order to do that, they would have to install an anti-cheat, because other than visually seeing it, there's no way for the game itself or its players to catch it. Add-ons and mods are all handled outside of the game's tracking limits, and the game is flawed by design at its core by allowing such things to be easily manipulated.

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Nothing wrong with anti-cheat systems Valve uses something alike it on steam.

I welcome it. Never used any addons incl Gshade or ACT even since I started XIV in 1.0. I see all unofficial addons and mods as a form of cheating no matter how little and not affects me gameplay. As what Yoshida says. Why make content if people cheat with Addons, aka Gameplay is being affected indirectly in some ways xD


Strike down harder on violators and permaban on 1st time violation. Its been said time and time again it is strictly forbidden so no need for a warning ban first. Enough is enough.
Addons was the reason I quit WOW i played from 2004 to 2011 as the amount of addons was becoming stupid and I worry XIV will become the same if not start punishing this abuse

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Originally Posted by Oizen

My biggest concern with them adding a program that does this isn't even privacy, this game is already held together with virtual duct tape and silly puddy, and I've noticed a steep decline in the game's overall performance since Endwalker dropped.

Adding an anticheat on top of it would make the game lag even more.


Would be fucking hilarious watching the mass fall out and salt among people obsessed with modding the game though, might be worth it just for that.

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If you are finding the game lagging and performing bad, I am sorry to say it is your own hardware and internet quality that is insufficient, as I personally have little to no lag issues running XIV on max settings 4K stable 60fps only dipping to 52fps in crowded Limsa etc

Possibly the best things for MMOs going forward would be for FF14 to come down hard and ban them. The game would collapse and all future MMOs made would look at it and see that mod support is the future of gaming.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

Possibly the best things for MMOs going forward would be for FF14 to come down hard and ban them. The game would collapse and all future MMOs made would look at it and see that mod support is the future of gaming.

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I see modders as a detriment to gaming personally but thats just me.

Well what SE CAN DO is you prevent the outlet of data and keep it classified behind locked doors and if people somehow breaks into the server.. their account will be instant flagged.

Don't let any information go out of the game to the PC other than visuals - delete the combat log for personal use meaning no data is going to be stored on your system.

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Originally Posted by Altera

I see modders as a detriment to gaming personally but thats just me.

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you must be fun at parties

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Originally Posted by Altera

If you are finding the game lagging and performing bad, I am sorry to say it is your own hardware and internet quality that is insufficient, as I personally have little to no lag issues running XIV on max settings 4K stable 60fps only dipping to 52fps in crowded Limsa etc

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Right.....

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Originally Posted by Arrius

Likely you unwilling did already that with some programs and launchers that have the option to send your PC specs to analyze and perform surveys with it.

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There is a difference between a massive corporation [most likely not SE themselves] having access to your data and a small fan run service and a small number of trusted players that are likely your friends having that access.

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Originally Posted by Altera

If you are finding the game lagging and performing bad, I am sorry to say it is your own hardware and internet quality that is insufficient, as I personally have little to no lag issues running XIV on max settings 4K stable 60fps only dipping to 52fps in crowded Limsa etc

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This is simply wrong and shows you have no understanding of how latency works. I literally can't get better internet than I already have because it doesn't exist in Quebec. My ping fluctuates between 94-105 simply because I'm over 3,000 miles away from the nearest datacenter. For reference sake, when said datacenters were located in Montreal even weaker internet allowed me to play at just 10 ping.

A VPN can help but still won't reduce ping by much. Not to mention, they come with an extra fee nearly doubling my sub cost. Meanwhile, a simple plugin fixes everything for free and should be how the game functions to begin with. The dev team often doesn't even realize how bad ping reliance can get because it isn't an issue in Japan. Hence why Dark Knight and Machinist suffered for years—the latter being unplayable for a lot of people.

There's a reason most MMOs and online games in general have servers on both the West and East coast.