Can SQ-EN draw a line in the sand w/ 3rd Parties?

You are not wrong, it just seems people are salty because of possible future problems with raid content? Not that it matters, raids and classes have been getting progressively easier since Midas anyways.

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Originally Posted by EnigmaticDodo

As much as I like Yoshi P for saving this game and his continued work, his argument that discord, calculators, what have you, constitute as a 3rd party was a totally asinine. Tools that we're discussing here are essentially cheating, they inject code or sniff out data that isn't available to you. I think he needs to rethink his argument.

Is it impossible to have nuance with this? Or does it absolutely have to be 'ban everything'? If its the latter, then that, to me, is a cop out so they can be lazy. Forget the idea in that case.

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Call it a cop out if you want, I'd simply call it pragmatic. It's wasted effort to think about where to draw the exact line as long as content is designed to never require third party tool usage. Would we have a massive problem if hello world for example was not cleareable without cactbot? Absolutely, but we dont live in that world. Content being designed without tool usage and preventing people from bullying over perceived bad performance is what's important and how things like ACT could be abused if somehow integrated into the game. A smooth experience for people regularly playing the game is what's important to yoship. What he definitely does not want is throwing blame and reports around with reckless abandon.

A word on XIVAlexander perhaps, this one will likely become more and more risky to use. Personally I think it does more good than harm but that's only because the devs havent really made jobs like machinists playable on higher latency. If that would be solved ingame, then all that would be left of XIVA is just a cheating tool allowing you to do stupid things like 0 animation lock LB3 or triple weaved dragoon jumps with absolutely no risk.

With cactbot there are pretty much two ways of combatting it:

Making information packets increasingly obscure but I honestly doubt that would be more than a futile arms race at the expense of everyone else. We all know that FF14 runs on a lot of hope and duct tape.

Sending information packets very close to displaying the information on screen which is, from what someone told me in this thread on how intermediate relativity works, already something they are doing maybe.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

Correct me if I'm wrong but i'm pretty sure Cactbot doesn't inject anything to the game, it just reads off the memory or log data ACT gatherers?
CE manipulates the data and will get you banned if it's being detected as would most stuff that being injected to the game, this is why certain type of bots is being banned quicker than others I think.

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Cactbot itself does not edit memory, that is correct. It just reads from game memory, and intercepts network packets. It's built on top of ACT, with the FFXIV parsing plugin itself being based on yet another memory/network parsing library.

However, in order for Cactbot to be taught how to understand the memory signatures it's looking at, someone has to go in and identify those memory signatures, with Cheat Engine being a convenient way to go about it. If anyone is interested in the more technical details, Cactbot has an entire section on subject in its docs on github. I won't link directly to it here for obvious reasons.

I just thought it was a funny answer to the idea that humans being involved in the creation of triggers somehow made them more legitimate, particularly when cheat-engine is associated with the process.

I think the argument wasn't that they're more legitimate because people have to work to decipher all the stuff necessary to timeline a fight, but target more that the fact that people have to take the time to decipher all the stuff makes it way less likely that any world-first raiding team is going to be using something like Cactbot during that race.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

The way I look at it, they still gotta do the mechanics. The callouts is no different from a real person saying them.
It saves time to understand and learn abilities and the fights. They don't harm anyone from my pov.

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I strongly disagree with you also. The true ability of a raider is to identify the mechanics themselves and figure things out on their own.

These programs need to go right now not tomorrow because one thing leads to another then the situation only gets worst. This includes the parsing and ACT as a whole. All encounters can be learned as you go and completed without any help from third-party tools.

Just play the game and enjoy it the way it is meant to be played.

There are no excuses for that.

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Originally Posted by BristolRuss

Lol, they'd ending up banning all of their big content creators. Brilliant idea that...

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they stopped being content creators when they violated the tos and made it appear that breaking the ToS was ok they are infact bad pr

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Originally Posted by Nibelung_Valesti

I strongly disagree with you also. The true ability of a raider is to identify the mechanics themselves and figure things out on their own.

These programs need to go right now not tomorrow because one thing leads to another then the situation only gets worst. This includes the parsing and ACT as a whole. All encounters can be learned as you go and completed without any help from third-party tools.

Just play the game and enjoy it the way it is meant to be played.

There are no excuses for that.

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So what you're saying, even without using cactbot or similar applications to do automatic call-outs, you can't even have a party member do it over voice comm cause that would go against your own comment stating:

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The true ability of a raider is to identify the mechanics themselves and figure things out on their own

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Originally Posted by _Koneko_

they stopped being content creators when they violated the tos and made it appear that breaking the ToS was ok they are infact bad pr

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That's pretty unreasonable. ACT been used since the begining of the game, heck I'd go as far saying that the devs that plays the game probably use it privately.

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Originally Posted by Nibelung_Valesti

The true ability of a raider is to identify the mechanics themselves and figure things out on their own.

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So it’s a group effort or solo effort? Is it a solo duty or a ‘raid’? Guess I’m not a raider cause I help or getting helped by my co-raider’s PoV then? Wow, shame me :(

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Originally Posted by Nibelung_Valesti

I strongly disagree with you also. The true ability of a raider is to identify the mechanics themselves and figure things out on their own.

These programs need to go right now not tomorrow because one thing leads to another then the situation only gets worst. This includes the parsing and ACT as a whole. All encounters can be learned as you go and completed without any help from third-party tools.

Just play the game and enjoy it the way it is meant to be played.

There are no excuses for that.

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That would mean sharing and watching YouTube videos will for learning mechs will be prohibited essentially turning every fight in blind prog.

As for act, i will strongly disagree as well. It helps a lot at being better. You may think you are doing fine while proging ex or savage but in reality you will be doing last expansion dps.
And I'm truly sorry for all the console players that do not have such luxury as the game does a poor job (none in fact) at providing personal performance and contribution

I dont care about others using it cheating in this game especially PVE content has always been there, even more with fflogs % ( good old padding in old xpac, the top 10 of 100's being 300-400 dps above anyone else because solo card / dragon eye etc, was truly fun to watch leaderboard at the time ).

But i would never ever use those nor play with anyone using it, those player that needs this kind of thing to get a clear disgust me and it's pretty obvious who does that and does not.

( Talking about cacbot and such, ACT is "mandatory" if you truly want to become good at this game dummies isn't enough at all )

I'm sorry but saying players are disgusting for using cactbot, is very amusing to read. If you really don't want to play with people who may do that, don't ever pug then.

I have yet to see any PF "require" anyone any third party application, so it feels more like many in this thread is just fearmonger people into this is new wow with DBM requirement, when it is not.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

I'm sorry but saying players are disgusting for using cactbot, is very amusing to read. If you really don't want to play with people who may do that, don't ever pug then.

I have yet to see any PF "require" anyone any third party application, so it feels more like many in this thread is just fearmonger people into this is new wow with DBM requirement, when it is not.

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Glad we can all laugh about cacbot usage then :D
I did in fact even got stuff like "Dude it's really shit that you're on playstation" in several groups, we do all know what it means and i was very quick about quitting those ppl asap when things like that came up.
It's as amusing to read that it's no big deal, but you dont see me talk about it or try a sneak attack on those, sneaking isn't good, going frontal is the way.

So, just so we're up to speed - the updates to TOS added a clause that allows them to use streaming videos, and other broadcasting to allow them to crack down on violations. So while they can't scan your computer for third party tools and crack down that way (though they could adapt programs that do report that stuff if it gets truly bad.) I would issue a caution to those streaming using third party tools and mods. They is no grey area with this. It is a violation, and if you're broadcasting, they *can* crack down on it.

Will they? Donno, its their discretion and if people like the OP get salty enough, they could report it.

I don't have an opinion on it. Competing in video games has never been my style or strong suit. And I've already stated that 3rd party tools for MMOs are for me are like tool assisted Speedrunning is for other games. If that's what it takes for people to enjoy themselves, it's not my life to worry over. So long as they let me do my thing, I let them do their thing.

- up to the point where it becomes harassment of other players, it really isn't an issue for me. But the clause is there for the Game Masters to crack down on if they so choose. It's your account to risk.

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Originally Posted by Hyrist

So, just so we're up to speed - the updates to TOS added a clause that allows them to use streaming videos, and other broadcasting to allow them to crack down on violations. So while they can't scan your computer for third party tools and crack down that way (though they could adapt programs that do report that stuff if it gets truly bad.) I would issue a caution to those streaming using third party tools and mods. They is no grey area with this. It is a violation, and if you're broadcasting, they *can* crack down on it.

Will they? Donno, its their discretion and if people like the OP get salty enough, they could report it.

I don't have an opinion on it. Competing in video games has never been my style or strong suit. And I've already stated that 3rd party tools for MMOs are for me are like tool assisted Speedrunning is for other games. If that's what it takes for people to enjoy themselves, it's not my life to worry over. So long as they let me do my thing, I let them do their thing.

- up to the point where it becomes harassment of other players, it really isn't an issue for me. But the clause is there for the Game Masters to crack down on if they so choose. It's your account to risk.

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I guess they will do something if someone is actually reporting it, otherwise they wont.
It's not like they will hire ppl to watch every streamer, but someone motivated enough to bring a lot of evidence with stream timestamp and such can lead to sanctions that's how i do read it.

Yeah that's about my take on it.

A person can have opinions on who uses what third party tools. That's fine. But it's usually not streamers that become problems. It's those who follow in the wake but forget to behave like decent human beings in the process. Like all things - bad people will spoil anything.

I've seen this song and dance for too long to be fussed about it.

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Originally Posted by Hyrist

So, just so we're up to speed - the updates to TOS added a clause that allows them to use streaming videos, and other broadcasting to allow them to crack down on violations. So while they can't scan your computer for third party tools and crack down that way (though they could adapt programs that do report that stuff if it gets truly bad.) I would issue a caution to those streaming using third party tools and mods. They is no grey area with this. It is a violation, and if you're broadcasting, they *can* crack down on it.

Will they? Donno, its their discretion and if people like the OP get salty enough, they could report it.

I don't have an opinion on it. Competing in video games has never been my style or strong suit. And I've already stated that 3rd party tools for MMOs are for me are like tool assisted Speedrunning is for other games. If that's what it takes for people to enjoy themselves, it's not my life to worry over. So long as they let me do my thing, I let them do their thing.

- up to the point where it becomes harassment of other players, it really isn't an issue for me. But the clause is there for the Game Masters to crack down on if they so choose. It's your account to risk.

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If it going to start get enforced streamers will just hide the ACT from their OBS scene, it very easy to work around.

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Originally Posted by Izscha

I did in fact even got stuff like "Dude it's really shit that you're on playstation" in several groups, we do all know what it means and i was very quick about quitting those ppl asap when things like that came up.

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Lack of ACT or parser period for console is pretty sad though, I know I want to know how much dps I do and how I can optimize my rotation to do more. If you get harrased over it, then that's really unfortnate and should report it.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

Lack of ACT or parser period for console is pretty sad though, I know I want to know how much dps I do and how I can optimize my rotation to do more. If you get harrased over it, then that's really unfortnate and should report it.

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You can still play around it, but yeah that's a shame. It did not stop me to beat up that dummy for countless hours with the rotation printed on a random sheet right beside me at the time haha.

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Originally Posted by Izscha

You can still play around it, but yeah that's a shame. It did not stop me to beat up that dummy for countless hours with the rotation printed on a random sheet right beside me at the time haha.

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memorized a rotation isn't the issue, it more of do you do good dps or just bare minimum. Without a tool to parse that data, you can't tell.
That's why I wish SE would change their stance and implement something to the game.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

memorized a rotation isn't the issue, it more of do you do good dps or just bare minimum. Without a tool to parse that data, you can't tell.
That's why I wish SE would change their stance and implement something to the game.

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Sure it's far from perfect, my point being was more about you can still play and start to learn without ACT, optimizing without it and seek perfection is impossible indeed.
But still even as a console player doing any fight someone will be uploading 99 % of the time, so you can learn from there.

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Originally Posted by _Koneko_

they stopped being content creators when they violated the tos and made it appear that breaking the ToS was ok they are infact bad pr

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SE has been pretty open on this, with flat out saying if you are in trouble for addons you are more than likely in trouble for something else. The EULA is to cover their butt. They just don't want people requiring them, nor using them to harass other people.

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Originally Posted by Hyrist

So, just so we're up to speed - the updates to TOS added a clause that allows them to use streaming videos, and other broadcasting to allow them to crack down on violations. So while they can't scan your computer for third party tools and crack down that way (though they could adapt programs that do report that stuff if it gets truly bad.) I would issue a caution to those streaming using third party tools and mods. They is no grey area with this. It is a violation, and if you're broadcasting, they *can* crack down on it.

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Everywhere they mention using streams and videos is under all the harassment stuff. The area on addon literally reads like the current EULA, and we have quotes from the lead of the game about it. They are far and away more concerned about combating harassment than addons.

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Originally Posted by _Koneko_

they stopped being content creators when they violated the tos and made it appear that breaking the ToS was ok they are infact bad pr

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You mean the guy who was botting for multiple days to automate a character, and broadcast that fact on stream? Who further componded it with character sharing, by letting the stream control the character?