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

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...heat_in_ffxiv/

Pretty interesting thread going on in /r/ffxivdiscussion right now and I thought I'd share it with the official forums. I'll copy and paste the main post below:


============================
I'm abusing my mod powers by making a Reddit poll with an attached conversation/discussion because I can and you cannot stop me.

The Fall Guys event has kind of brought the third party tools situation in XIV to a spotlight that's normally reserved for Ultimate world progression or PvP memes. From my perspective on XIV Twitter and other subreddits this is definitely the most people have been talking about XIV's integrity in a long time, to the point of asking for more invasive anti-cheat in the game.

For the purposes of this post and poll, I'm kind of assuming the following things (that are very big assumptions!):

SE could implement this in a way that doesn't detract from or delay the current content pipeline.
SE could implement this in a way that doesn't set the game on fire like they did in 6.3 when they changed how packets were handled.
It would work more or less "perfectly".

What do I mean by the last one? That more or less all of the following things would be impossible:

Using ACT or other damage meters (Some anti cheats can detect what's running on your PC other than the actual game. You could work around this by using a VM or routing your packets to another distinct computer to process, but that's a lot of work for a funny number).
XIVAlexander (Though again since consoles can work with it there's VM/distinct machine ways to work this one).
XIVLauncher and any and all associated plugins.
Texture/model modding via data integrity checks (So no personal TexTools modding).
Botting to some degree (Even games with aggressive anticheats haven't solved this one).

And some statistics for fun:

Mare has about 20-25k concurrent users on at most peak NA times. The Discord has 142k members.
The parsing plugin for XIV has millions of downloads, but I believe that tracks lifetime downloads through every version update and not unique downloads. Still a lot!
Likewise, many plugins like SimpleTweaks have lifetime downloads in the hundreds of thousands to millions.

So I suppose the main thrust of this poll is if the competitive integrity of XIV activities such as Savage/Ultimate world racing, Fall Guys, PvP, crafting/gathering (Plugins these days basically bot these systems if you tell them to) and having a sort of fairness parity with consoles are worth the tradeoff of no parsing, modding, or plugins.

Link to Poll: https://www.reddit.com/poll/17tw7na
============================


I'm in favor of it. I don't really use any mods, so having an anti-cheat program wouldn't affect me, and I'm all for a fair game, so it's got my vote.

Feel free to discuss your opinions and thoughts below. Cheers.

--------------------------------------------------------

Edit - Added a picture of the poll results below for those who do not have reddit accounts:

Results as of 11/13/2023
https://i.imgur.com/qkhU18f.png

Is there anyway of viewing the poll results without having a Reddit account?

As for the discussion at hand, I do find it rather amusing that the bean game crossover is the eye opener for both cheating but also the snapshotting. That is natural considering the game mode is an every man for himself race to the finish line placed over three rounds. There's no boss to fight, crystal to push, tethers to pass or whatever other mechanic exists to flesh out content. You just avoid some stuff and run to the finish line hoping to be first. The real kicker is that the "FOMO" nature of the event, as we don't know the cycle for when it'll return after December 31st, is the motivator for cheating. You better get those 100 wins for the King/Queen Bean title or the wait could be years.

Now for the cheating itself, there's the speed/wall hackers which are super obvious clowns that get the hammer dropped on them pretty quick. I know this exists in PvP as well so hopefully they can come up with better server side detection mechanisms (same for people going out of bounds in the overworld while we're at it). However, there's also that other clip of the mechanics being drawn on-screen before the spell animations kick in. We've seen a similar thing before during one of the ultimates this expansion but in that scenario, the 8 man team WINS because that group might clear the fight faster. In the bean game, someone using a cheat to see where everything will hit without learning or paying attention to patterns has a huge advantage which can lead to 23 other people LOSING. There's another element to the cheating discussion around crafting and gathering but those systems get botted in every game. Likewise with ACT functions beyond logging/parsing.

All of these situations, for a myriad of reasons, are ENTIRELY the fault of Square Enix. I will not fault the players due to this being an MMO like any other. If there's an advantage to be gained by any addon, plugin, cheat, exploit or simply just min-maxing... the players will jump on it. Island Sanctuary is a glorified spreadsheet because there was a reward and players found the most efficient way to obtain it.

Coming into XIV from World of Warcraft, I've seen all these mentalities before. There's a difference in that WoW has a LUA addon framework since day one which not only has grown with the game but also impacted it's development. Square Enix were wise enough to see this and establish a terms of service which prohibited any of this... but failed to give themselves the tools to enforce it.

Even if players genuinely think the game would be unplayable if SE finally dropped the hammer on all of this, it's probably what they should've done to begin with. I know streamers such as Zepla love to quote the Yoshi-P "keep it hidden" line but that was never a sustainable stance and merely delayed the inevitable. Combine that with the game having a huge burst in popularity and here we are.

It's a rock and a hard place. On one side cheating only gets worse and the legitimate gaming environment will only be destroyed for good. On the other you pull the rug from under many people's feet and destroy part of the community when "harmless" things like Mare get caught in the process (although SE likely wouldn't care because they sell cosmetics anyway).

This depends a lot on the implementation of the anti-cheat solution.
I don't need another rootkit-lite anti-cheat, I also don't need an anti-cheat that scans running programs and throws out hardware bans for things like RGB software.
I'm fine with solutions that check for modifed files and more server sanity checks. I'm fine with them checking the activity of people that somehow consistently follow the optimal pathing in the new Fall Guys collab or execute a perpetually perfect rotation with consistently the same input latency or show other signs of automated gameplay.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Johners

Is there anyway of viewing the poll results without having a Reddit account?

---

I'm not sure, but I added a picture of the poll results at the bottom of the main post so people can see the results.

i have long since made peace with the fact that one of my fav game is full of cheaters, if you wanna spin mod using like that

if the mods would disappear forever now, it would not make the game so much better. at best everythong would look and feel the same

with love
fellow wol with ps5 as platform

The poll likely isn't an accurate representation of opinions sadly. Someone showed some data from some old trackers back before the reddit api changes, and apparently the two big ffxiv subreddits are among some of the most brigaded subreddits per userbase. Not much different from the forums with all of the alts here I suppose, but it's something to keep in mind.

I play on console and don't use any mods, and I would be against having an onboard anti-cheat program.

1. Anti-cheat programs are generally invasive enough that many people consider them to be spyware. That sucks and I don't want anyone to have to deal with this.
2. Players who use add-ons to address accessibility and disability needs would be hurt by this.

In short, anti-cheat problems would cause far more problems than they would solve. No thank you.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

I play on console and don't use any mods, and I would be against having an onboard anti-cheat program.

1. Anti-cheat programs are generally invasive enough that many people consider them to be spyware. That sucks and I don't want anyone to have to deal with this.
2. Players who use add-ons to address accessibility and disability needs would be hurt by this.

In short, anti-cheat problems would cause far more problems than they would solve. No thank you.

---

To your first claim most of those are lies or blatantly outdated.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

2. Players who use add-ons to address accessibility and disability needs would be hurt by this.

---

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

Not often i speak on this. The gamer community has ppl who want stuff easier and will find ways to do it.

Whether it's exploiting a bug, cheat software of any kind or in case of a group of EU pvp players...win trade.

Saying this. I find it funny that people decided to use some cheat to get their 100 wins for that stupid title. It's not really that important. The important stuff was the items you could get.

I get the "I pay my sub I should play how I want" argument which is stupid. Considering it's a online community where ppl interact.

Pvp cheaters is just meh. Like you proving nothing really. Content cheaters is just...why..this game is easy as is and outside ultimates and certain savages...why you think this game is hard to cheat in. Even in hard content you can learn and clear it. No cheats needed.

If they wanted to honestly do better anti cheats then they would. It would stop gil botters for a time till the software is updated with a evasion workaround.

Gotta face it folks. Cheating is here. All you can do is either play the game and enjoy it or stop and play something else.

To the devs though. You all really gotta step up more to combat this stuff.