The Nael mechanic is a funny example because literally nobody, not even the people who can do it without callout triggers, likes that mechanic. Having to look at chat boxes for a mechanic is just terrible design.
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Good players can absolutely clear raids without addons. In the hands of a great player, some addons simply become a tool that pushes their gameplay further. I found that with DBM in WoW, you could push your planning, mapping and optimization in ways that a bad player never would regardless of addons.
That said, I don't miss DBM. There is a line you can cross where an addon goes from QoL or self improvement to a straight up advantage over playing the intended way. Addons that call out mechanics before they even happen, show telegraphs when there normally aren't any or automatically assign markers are crossing that line imo. I don't think players are automatically "bad" for using them, but we don't need them in the game either.
Auto markers for Titan gaols is one of those things where SE dropped the ball too. They admitted that mechanic was badly designed and never fixed it.
As for telling us to stop using parsers, that can be yawned at. I dare them to ban all parsing. See what happens. They know they won't. I'm also not really happy they're acknowledging mods, addons and mostly harmless QoL programs when bots are still ignored and are a massive issue that completely destroy the ToS.
Because of the blog post’s intentionally broad language, this rudely antagonizes modders whose only updates are restoring mutilated Hrothgar ears and adding missing headgear support for Hrothgar and Viera races. Such mods wouldn’t exist in the first place if those players didn’t consistently feel like their races were considered less important and frankly incomplete compared to other races. Before any moderators get mad at me by the way, I don’t use mods and I’m not saying to use them; I dislike the extremely broad language used in the post though and would prefer that the company swallow some of its pride and reach out to hire some of these modders instead to work their updates into the baseline, further testing them as needed.
Based on the download statistics alone, it's now estimated well over 300,000 players use one or more of these programs. The mod discord alone has nearly 100,000 members. To put these numbers into perspective. If only 20%, 1/5th up and quit instantly over these programs suddenly being blocked, SE stands to lose roughly $800,000 monthly. Nearly a million dollars is just thrown away monthly for literally nothing. There's no actual benefit for Square Enix. And this is a rather low estimate.
Put simply, there is zero chance Square Enix would even allow Yoshida to do anything significant to these programs regardless of his stance due to the financial loss.
I suspect it's because mods and Plugins have become increasingly more widespread, especially on Twitch. It doesn't look particularly good on them when modders, for example, are implementing things like Hrothgar hair after the massive backlash towards their abominations. Meanwhile, those invisible bots go unnoticed by the masses. It really does reinforce how reactionary SE tends to be. Only if something slaps them in the face, repeatedly, do they actually do anything about it.
Terrible? meh. Different? Absolutely. Is it hard to keep track of? Nope.
Once you are used to reading the queues when they occur (over her head and in chatbox), all you look for is one word and it tells you what is happening (Iron, Fire, High, Moon). That's not exactly different from looking at a bosses cast bar to find out what they are about to do (ala P4S Pinax Teleport), or looking at a Enemy List to guage or read a cast time. Just a different location.
It's long since changed from that stupid paragraph when it first came out.
So when are they going to ban 90% of all the big streamers that use 3rd party tools in their content?
Sounds like nothing has changed. Especially since they explicitly state the game has no anti-cheat, which means most plugins people use are invisible to them. That means the only people getting banned for 3rd party tools are people who are blatant with it, use something that actually interferes with the server, or talk about it in-game.