Yoshi P statement regarding third party tools

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5122b8b8d6ec3b

RIP noclippy for us with slower internet i guess. I'm sure the small indie company doesn't have the budget like these modders do to fix packet loss so we can actually weave.

It's a lot of fluff basically and just clarified what's already been clarified before. At least they acknowledge the default UI isn't as good as it could be and they'd review popular UI plugins to potentially change things in the future. Apart from that, the same old don't use plugins or else comment that Yoshi-P has made before. Disappointing that it's only focused on PvE though, no mention of cheaters in PvP and the plugins they're using. How far can it actually be pushed before Square Enix have no choice but to implement client-side anti-cheat mechanisms because it some point this cycle of empty statements has to end?

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We believe that people use the aforementioned tools to expand the HUD and display more information because they feel that existing functions are insufficient for tackling high-end duties. In recognition of this, we intend to review the most prominent tools, and in order to discourage their use, endeavor to enhance the functionality of the HUD. Though it will take some time, we're determined to make it happen ─ not least for the benefit of those who play on consoles.

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This is a really good direction.

i always feel like if you're going to dismiss any modifications to a game, you better be ready to bring your A-game when it comes to supporting QOL/Community requested features within the base ui, sadly, BD3 has not really done so, latency tied animation locks, extremely finnicky ui elements, a housing system that relies on either installing a plugin or learning a multitude of glitches to even make good looking houses, outdated market board interface many users use Universalis to replace, among countless other issues really mar this game's experience, especially for console users without any ways to actively participate in many of these modifications that should just be part of the baseline game in some way shape or form

If they want to stamp out modifications, they need to provide a good enough service themselves that using them is unwarranted, sadly i doubt this will happen, and players will continue utilizing these tools until they do.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

This is a really good direction.

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feel like they said this before, years ago, and never did it. I'll believe it when i see it, tbh

Unfortunately, it's unlikely this actually represents a tightening of their stance and more likely is just a reminder.

They really need to be more active about dealing stuff with that falls into the "blatantly cheating" category regardless of where it's happening.

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Originally Posted by DezereDawn

feel like they said this before, years ago, and never did it. I'll believe it when i see it, tbh

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This is the only announcement or comment I've known wrt third-party tools. -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_i6mjiGerU

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Originally Posted by DezereDawn

feel like they said this before, years ago, and never did it. I'll believe it when i see it, tbh

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We've gotten a few things. Shields on the UI, rez targets being visible, people graying out if they're very far away, and perhaps most famously, job gauges. Not as customizable as party frames from games that allow mods, but better than nothing...

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Unfortunately, it's unlikely this actually represents a tightening of their stance and more likely is just a reminder.

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It is exactly a reminder. Clientside-only stuff, like parsers, essentially remain invisible to them. Tools that send or modify data could potentially be detected - users are gambling on those tools "faking it" perfectly. But anyone hoping SE is finally banning all those ebil parsers and gpose modders are going to be disappointed...

However, SE did issue a take down on the red mage world first clear video - it showed things like enlarged timers, a slidecast overlay, and so forth. So it seems part of the message is "Don't show off you stuff on youtube" (and perhaps they will start enforcing on twitch more now too? Even though previously they said "Well we can't confirm that you're showing DPS and not say fan RPMs or CPU temps and so on").

So while previously the DADT policy was "don't talk about it in game", it seems more and more it's "don't talk about it or show it off anywhere SE might be able to identify you, even on third party websites."

UPDATE:
And another streamer bites the dust.

So... while the policy hasn't changed, and SE isn't scanning your computer, you really can't show off anything third party you might be using on twitch or youtube (or so on). Enforcement's stepped up.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

We've gotten a few things. Shields on the UI, rez targets being visible, people graying out if they're very far away, and perhaps most famously, job gauges. Not as customizable as party frames from games that allow mods, but better than nothing...

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there's honestly 2 extremely basic things i'd personally like them to add, one, self shields also appearing on the ui with your green self health bar, and buff/debuff timers with actual numbers on them,

i've never touched DBM or Recount on WoW since i have 0 intentions of ever optimizing myself to a significant level, and 14's baseline ui is absolutely stronger than wow's is in many aspects, but hoo boy would i like to have even a smidgen of the qol possible with addons in that game possible here

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Originally Posted by DezereDawn

there's honestly 2 extremely basic things i'd personally like them to add, one, self shields also appearing on the ui with your green self health bar, and buff/debuff timers with actual numbers on them,

i've never touched DBM or Recount on WoW since i have 0 intentions of ever optimizing myself to a significant level, and 14's baseline ui is absolutely stronger than wow's is in many aspects, but hoo boy would i like to have even a smidgen of the qol possible with addons in that game possible here

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Believe me, this is a point I sympathize with. Back around ARR's original launch, SE promised eventual mod support, and I came from a non-WoW MMO that had moddable party frames so I was really pining for all the features I lost. Sadly, after delaying any time they were asked about it by the press, SE eventually decided they wouldn't have any official mod support after all...

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Originally Posted by Mat13295

RIP noclippy for us with slower internet i guess. I'm sure the small indie company doesn't have the budget like these modders do to fix packet loss so we can actually weave.

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It's disgusting that I give less DPS for being born in Brazil. 200 ping without programs like NoPing, 150 using them. Yeah, I don't have the money to pay another monthly fee to still play with lag

If there's one ui that needs an improvement, its Z axis for housing.

The Burn down the house plugin replicates teh storeroom glitch and it is so useful for getting items actually to the walls/corners instead of about 80% there then the ui gets grumpy and stops you

Thats a glitch the devs once said they decided to leave in instad of patching as it was harmless

Hopefully they start banning people who publicly use such HUD addons, if you cant clear a raid without a ton of extra information to help you then you shouldnt be clearing it anyway.

Otherwise it might end up like WoW where many people cant play the game without a billion addons holding their hand

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Unfortunately, it's unlikely this actually represents a tightening of their stance and more likely is just a reminder.

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They will never be able to tighten their stance and purge all the third party tools. Like never even if they could. Cause it would make shareholders and investors really unhappy to see SE basically killing a gigantic part of their playerbase and throwing all the goodwill the community has left out the window. Same reason why they can't just implement a anti cheat software, the collateral damage would be so big that SE stock would follow Blizzard into the abyss.

Best way to deal with all the problems is to create a better taskforce to detect all the definitely visible cheaters and give players a better report system so it doesn't take years to report each single bot that is running for weeks in a circle without any break.

What people also don't understand is how the complete absence of third party tools would affect them even if they aren't using them themselves. Rotation guides are made with data gathered through these tools. gposers and roleplayers (which use also a large amount of third party tools cause lets be honest the chatsystem is just awful) leave most money in the cashshop, without that money SE would have to cut back on development which would affect every player no matter if they use third party tools or not. Same with players who enjoy housing. With completely purging every third party tool SE would literally burn every community to the ground from NA raiders to people that do hunttrains and all the roleplay/housing/gpose folks.

I'm looking forward to some UI improvements and implementing functionality that currently only mods can provide in the future!

Definitely need barrier on your own HP bar, you can't see it at all for solo content (unless I'm blind?)!
Turn-ins need to allow you to submit faster, especially GC expert ones, needs to be 1 click like the new collectibles UI.
Ping clipping issues for those on slower connections is a big disadvantage, this should have been solved long ago.
Longer macro's! End-game crafting can be well in excess of 20 steps now, it's annoying to have to dedicate two macro slots to a recipe.
Control other characters emotes in /gpose. I hate that I get a really nice shot but then notice someone has the wrong expression or you suddenly have a cool idea but you need to abandon the entire thing, have them emote and then start all over.
Let us adjust the height of furniture in housing without having to use glitches, please!!
I also often find buffs/debuffs expiring without noticing, that might just be a me issue, but perhaps improve these to be more obvious? Like maybe if you're playing Bard and the DoT's are on the last 5 seconds or something, the icons next to the enemy could flash maybe.

However, for the most part, it's all very robust I must say! I think people already put the same suggestions forward so it's not like there's a laundry list of things that need fixing and adding, just some QoL ideas and nice-to-haves!


Edit:

Discord rich presence!!!

Start updating the UI then lmao.

This was already their stance on 3rd Party tools. Feels like this announcement was made solely due to the amount of cheating that happened for the Ultimate race.

And honestly, given how lax Square Enix is with actually banning people for things they claim are banable, I'd assume this is just more empty words. Special shout outs to the FCs that run bot farms, or the entire Empyrum Housing district basically being handed to Shell FCs/RMT trading on a silver platter.

As a Ps4 Player, ill just enjoy this Dumpster Fire from the best Seats possible.

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Originally Posted by Ranaku

They will never be able to tighten their stance and purge all the third party tools. Like never even if they could. Cause it would make shareholders and investors really unhappy to see SE basically killing a gigantic part of their playerbase and throwing all the goodwill the community has left out the window. Same reason why they can't just implement a anti cheat software, the collateral damage would be so big that SE stock would follow Blizzard into the abyss.

Best way to deal with all the problems is to create a better taskforce to detect all the definitely visible cheaters and give players a better report system so it doesn't take years to report each single bot that is running for weeks in a circle without any break.

What people also don't understand is how the complete absence of third party tools would affect them even if they aren't using them themselves. Rotation guides are made with data gathered through these tools. gposers and roleplayers (which use also a large amount of third party tools cause lets be honest the chatsystem is just awful) leave most money in the cashshop, without that money SE would have to cut back on development which would affect every player no matter if they use third party tools or not. Same with players who enjoy housing. With completely purging every third party tool SE would literally burn every community to the ground from NA raiders to people that do hunttrains and all the roleplay/housing/gpose folks.

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I'm mostly just really sick of seeing the same people from back when I first started playing still constantly running bots overnight as a routine part of their schedule.

I couldn't care less about people making changes that aren't actually giving them an unfair advantage.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

This is a really good direction.

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It is a really good sentiment, but the direction is already wrong. Before any UI and HUD improvements, what they should be focusing on is removing latency-induced animation lock, aka. finally fixing the netcode.

Now, of course I suspect this means that the UI team currently has capacity to look into such things while the server team has none, but still, they if they are at all aware of the issue, they should at least have mentioned they might look into it at the next possible point in the future.

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Originally Posted by KuroMaboroshi

It is a really good sentiment, but the direction is already wrong. Before any UI and HUD improvements, what they should be focusing on is removing latency-induced animation lock, aka. finally fixing the netcode.

Now, of course I suspect this means that the UI team currently has capacity to look into such things while the server team has none, but still, they if they are at all aware of the issue, they should at least have mentioned they might look into it at the next possible point in the future.

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Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with this, I just simply think that it is a good direction they're willing to look into and review some of the more prominent tools. From experience, most wouldn't even give these matters the time of day to consider making them integral to the game itself. Which given the multi-platform nature of the game it's crucial.

While I think "So... basically nothing's changed?" as I read the notice, I think it is at least good to serve as a reminder.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

While I think "So... basically nothing's changed?" as I read the notice, I think it is at least good to serve as a reminder.

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They're just mad about all the cheating during the DSR world first race.

Nothing is going to change.

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Originally Posted by Ralphe2449

Hopefully they start banning people who publicly use such HUD addons, if you cant clear a raid without a ton of extra information to help you then you shouldnt be clearing it anyway.

Otherwise it might end up like WoW where many people cant play the game without a billion addons holding their hand

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ITT:

People who won't clear any Ultimate even if you gave them 1000 hours to do so insinuating that world first/streamers can't clear Ultimate without addons.

Tbh allowing "certain" plugins only was always gonna be a slippery slope. Like yoshida said it is physically impossible to evaluate them on an individual basis to ascertain which are malicious and which ones aren't and as soon as you're done, 100 more pop-up every single day.

All I have to say is PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, use a brighter red font on the announcement or don't use it at all. The subtle red color in half of the post made me feel like I was having a stroke or something. I spent a good 30 seconds trying to see if the text was red or if I need to call someone, lol.

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Originally Posted by DezereDawn

i always feel like if you're going to dismiss any modifications to a game, you better be ready to bring your A-game when it comes to supporting QOL/Community requested features within the base ui, sadly, BD3 has not really done so, latency tied animation locks, extremely finnicky ui elements, a housing system that relies on either installing a plugin or learning a multitude of glitches to even make good looking houses, outdated market board interface many users use Universalis to replace, among countless other issues really mar this game's experience, especially for console users without any ways to actively participate in many of these modifications that should just be part of the baseline game in some way shape or form

If they want to stamp out modifications, they need to provide a good enough service themselves that using them is unwarranted, sadly i doubt this will happen, and players will continue utilizing these tools until they do.

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They should actually make a market board API once and for all.

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Originally Posted by Skiros

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People who won't clear any Ultimate even if you gave them 1000 hours to do so insinuating that world first/streamers can't clear Ultimate without addons.

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Although almost all streamers clearing ultimates ARE using addons / ACT callouts and such. And the WF groups also have 9th mans creating scripts / strats for their teams too. It's not everyone but I can pinpoint several streamers who say do UCOB and the entire Nael mechanics is announced for them Stack -> Spread -> In. Same with something like UWU almost all parties use automarkers for Titan Gaols including openly in PF. Sooo yeah you can definitely clear without those things, but lets not act like the average player clearing ultimates is not using one or several of these tools.

So they acknowledge packet-spoofing mods, and they mention expanding the HUD in accordance with UI mods. They don't give a peep about how awful it is to weave with low ping and fixing that? Ugh!

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Originally Posted by Skiros

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People who won't clear any Ultimate even if you gave them 1000 hours to do so insinuating that world first/streamers can't clear Ultimate without addons.

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Okay, hats off to you on that one.

In world ultimate race third party tools gave us RIBIDE and DAN DAN memes.

I'd say the ACT callouts do give some level of advantage in raiding, as the encounters in this game are designed to require robotic reactions, because FFXIV raiding is just a rhythm game in disguise. The more optimized a player plays the more bot-like his gameplay would be, as for fixed order of mechanics for particular spell/skill speed each job has just one correct sequence of button presses from beginning to the end. And since ultimates are endurance test automated callouts do take off some cognitive load from the players.

Idk about UI modifications giving any advantage, seem fluff to me. DPs meters etc are fluff for world first race as well.

I believe all the whining from JP players is due them having highest proportion of console players and console experience is inferior to PC one in FFXIV.

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Originally Posted by Skiros

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People who won't clear any Ultimate even if you gave them 1000 hours to do so insinuating that world first/streamers can't clear Ultimate without addons.

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Depending on your definition of 3rd party tool, they kinda cant and I don't think anyone really could, especially if you count how these fights are usually logged to a fan-site using a 3rd party program as against the TOS

I would go so far as to argue a majority of endgame progression is currently locked behind these sort of tools due to how lacking this game is with features like that.
Stone, Sky, Sea doesn't cut it.

Maybe if high ping on some job weren't a smoldering trash fire. Maybe if if the hud gave the player better and more information. Maybe if you could pull your camera back further. Then you might see a decrease in 3rd party apps making up for what SE doesn't provide.

Same as always then, this is nothing new

Good to see where the priorities of the dev team lie. Not with those with packetloss or using other benign enhancements, but certainly somewhere important to the dev team. I'm also very intrigued by the virus statement. Are people with internet access collectively still so inept after the limewire days?

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Originally Posted by gotaname1

Good to see where the priorities of the dev team lie. Not with those with packetloss or using other benign enhancements, but certainly somewhere important to the dev team. I'm also very intrigued by the virus statement. Are people with internet access collectively still so inept after the limewire days?

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Well there are people falling for phishing attempts like Steam giving free Discord nitro, so yeah I'd say a lot of people are.

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Originally Posted by HollowedDoll

Well there are people falling for phishing attempts like Steam giving free Discord nitro, so yeah I'd say a lot of people are.

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Dang, that is sad. :(

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Originally Posted by Oizen

Depending on your definition of 3rd party tool, they kinda cant and I don't think anyone really could, especially if you count how these fights are usually logged to a fan-site using a 3rd party program as against the TOS

I would go so far as to argue a majority of endgame progression is currently locked behind these sort of tools due to how lacking this game is with features like that.
Stone, Sky, Sea doesn't cut it.

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How do people clear all Ultimates on PS4 then lol? Literally one guy in my static who did that.

Please ban everyone using mods.


Yoshida has said they (mods, hacks, etc.) are illegal and there's no way players can justify their use.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

This is a really good direction.

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I'm really glad they've not only acknowledged it but they're also going to make an effort to upgrade their own UI system. Magical/Physical dmg display, skill cooldown display, resolution tweaking and so many other small but otherwise very useful qols are missing from the actual client. Let's just hope 7.0 can bring all or at least most of those into the fold.