Using 3rd party tools to call out Box Spawns / Enemy Buffs / DR considered cheating?

Yesterday I had the displeasure to watch someone streaming Feast Solo queue openly use a 3rd party program to call out when boxes spawned as well as when players used certain buffs (e.g. bot calls out 'Player A just used Blood for Blood'). When I confronted him about this he replied that he doesn't consider it cheating and that "lots of people do it", "no one ever cared when I did it on stream before", and "it's fine to use in raid, why wouldn't it be fine to use in PvP" to paraphrase.

It's upsetting to know that someone who is currently ranked in the top 4 on my datacenter has probably been using this program the whole time to gain an advantage over everyone else they've been playing but I'd like to open up the discussion to everyone else; do you consider using 3rd party tools like this cheating? If so, how can we fix it/is there anything SE can do to stop them?

Isnt box spawn time?

The thought that someone could be using a 3rd party program to gain advantage doesnt surprised me, we use it in raid as well, is it cheating I dont think so imo, its clever use of assistance programming. Is it against SE rules? If it is then its cheating.

What people consider "cheating" will be opened to personal interpretation. What is not in the Final Fantasy XIV User License aggreement.

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2.1 Cheating and Botting. You may not create or use any unauthorized cheats, bots, automation software, hacks, mods or any other unauthorized software or hardware designed to modify the Game and gameplay. In addition, you may not take advantage of game system bugs and exploits during gameplay.
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2.5 Data Mining. You may not intercept, mine or otherwise collect information from the Game using unauthorized third party software.

2.6 Hacking and Circumvention. You may not hack, disassemble, decompile, or otherwise modify the Game or server computer code, whether the Game code is located on a DVD, Blu-rayTM disc, your computer/console or on Square Enix's servers, except as expressly permitted by Square Enix or applicable law.
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BUt practically as far as I know, SE has no way to know if someone is breaking these rules for the tools you describe, unless the person directly admits it directly inside FF XIV chat.

Using 3rd party programs is one the highest degrees of cheating in PvP, especially one like ACT that calls out skill usage and objective spawns. Users of it no longer have to maintain awareness (big part of PvP) because the program does it for them and is better than visually staying aware. ACT calls out when cds are used and who does them and in some cases calls out stuff that is extremely hard to see/hear with your own senses as in who uses purify. Also, PS4 users can't even use ACT so it's a very obvious advantage. Just because it is used in PvE for legitimate reasons does not make it okay in PvP instances.

As a community, we should recognize these cheaters as low tier skilled players that are using a crutch to get ahead rather than simply uping their own awareness without having to use a spineless cheat. SE needs to ban the use and the users of 3rd party programs and act on it like they said they would.

Using 3rd party programs in PvP is cheating, and EVERYONE who uses it are simply bad.

I can understand speed hacking as cheat but using a call out program? Wouldn't the user has to literally perform twice the duty in order to put it to use. You would literally have to pay attention visual and audio at the same time and make decisions and actions while paying attention to two things at the same time. I mean it requires a bit of skills to handle both. I wouldn't consider them low tier just because of that, plus how much of an advantages are we talking about.

Using Callouts in PvP is worse than bolter, in my opinion. At least when someone is using bolter, if they arent aware they are still super bad. Using a tool to make you aware of everything going on, is about the highest level of cheating on PvP.

It's funny because it calls some buffs before the animation or buff gets applied, I don't know how someone would call that fair. This is like putting LeBron in a college basketball game.

I thought SE was implementing encrypted data packets in pvp to prevent this, did that never happen?

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Originally Posted by Kai_Lee

Wouldn't the user has to literally perform twice the duty in order to put it to use. You would literally have to pay attention visual and audio at the same time and make decisions and actions while paying attention to two things at the same time. I mean it requires a bit of skills to handle both.

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Uhhh, what? Compare having to actually watch all 4 enemy player's characters (which may not even be possible if they're behind a wall/out of range, something which doesn't matter to such a program) to just being able to ignore all of that and have a bot read out to you when they use certain moves. Not even the best of the best players can pay attention to what all 4 enemy players are doing, what buffs they're using, and when their DRs are coming off. Using 3rd party programs allows anyone to do it with no awareness at all.

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Originally Posted by Chocolys

What people consider "cheating" will be opened to personal interpretation. What is not in the Final Fantasy XIV User License aggreement.


BUt practically as far as I know, SE has no way to know if someone is breaking these rules for the tools you describe, unless the person directly admits it directly inside FF XIV chat.

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I don't understand how it is open to interpretation. I mean the program literally does exactly what 2.5 says is cheating.