Would you be opposed to SE implementing a program to scan for addons/parsers?

In light of the recent TOP issue and concerns surrounding the legitimacy of their clear - would you be opposed to anticheat software scanning your system for addons/parsers/plugins?

This would help enforce the total and categorical ban on any third party programs used.

The second SE starts scanning my PC with weird invasive rootkit stuff is the second I get over any remaining FFXIV habit that I have left.

I would sooner see them implement the sorely needed QoL features that the game still lacks to this day.

I would rather shove a rusted nail through my hand than have to deal with some janky anti cheat system.

I'm pretty sure Yoshi-P has enough experience playing MMOs to realize that adding any kind of scanning will only achieve 2 things.

1) It'll be a major annoyance to the entire playerbase, possibly resulting in performance drops

2) It'll push the entire third party scene underground, and start an arms race with them.

SE isn't going to do it, when there isn't really any benefit to having it, beyond just simply saying that they have it. They would sooner axe future development of Ultimate raids than to waste resources on this stuff.

Yeah, no. EAC and similar software has always been a "fuck-the-customer" move that only ever punishes legitimate paying customers for engaging with a company, and the company always expects the payer to kiss the ring or kiss the foot.
The customer might not always be right, but corporate abuses have soured my outlook on this shit too much.

Yeah, let's also have SE implement a system to monitor our Discord calls, text messages and browser history to prevent possible bad behavior, defeat evil, and save Narnia.

Absolutely opposed to it yes, no thank you. That's the day I take my business elsewhere.

I do not want the game digging around my PC.

yes, I would be.

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Originally Posted by SaitoHikari

I'm pretty sure Yoshi-P has enough experience playing MMOs to realize that adding any kind of scanning will only achieve 2 things.

1) It'll be a major annoyance to the entire playerbase, possibly resulting in performance drops

2) It'll push the entire third party scene underground, and start an arms race with them.

SE isn't going to do it, when there isn't really any benefit to having it, beyond just simply saying that they have it. They would sooner axe future development of Ultimate raids than to waste resources on this stuff.

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This. Those sorts of tools are nothing but trouble and only lead to more drama and witchhunts anyways. Besides there privacy issues as well to consider that would lead to legal trouble and such. I've seen the trouble they've caused playing various MMO's over the years to know that any such "anti-cheat" is something that is hassle and I'd be opposed to anyways.

Yes, extremely opposed. Those sorts of software are unreliable as they are and tend to report false flags due to some fringe configuration they happen to not like. And the FF14 launcher is already a not-very-fun source for weird glitches and exceptions.

Besides, as much as we harp on third-party tools that give players an advantage and automate the game, there are some that grant quality of life options that SE has yet to implement. Such as better support for disabilities, increasing the font or support for other languages.

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Originally Posted by Midareyukki

Yes, extremely opposed. Those sorts of software are unreliable as they are and tend to report false flags due to some fringe configuration they happen to not like. And the FF14 launcher is already a not-very-fun source for weird glitches and exceptions.

Besides, as much as we harp on third-party tools that give players an advantage and automate the game, there are some that grant quality of life options that SE has yet to implement. Such as better support for disabilities, increasing the font or support for other languages.

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Those those third-party tools that "grant quality of life options" are categorically banned.

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Originally Posted by SaitoHikari

I'm pretty sure Yoshi-P has enough experience playing MMOs to realize that adding any kind of scanning will only achieve 2 things.

1) It'll be a major annoyance to the entire playerbase, possibly resulting in performance drops

2) It'll push the entire third party scene underground, and start an arms race with them.

SE isn't going to do it, when there isn't really any benefit to having it, beyond just simply saying that they have it. They would sooner axe future development of Ultimate raids than to waste resources on this stuff.

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This is what most people don't understand. None of the anti-cheat or DRM software has accomplished much of anything except to vastly annoy regular customers. In fact, only Amazon/Twitch has been successful in beating out adblock. Why is that? Because they literally made a division dedicated to doing precisely that. Very few companies want to spend the resources and manpower constantly having update their DRM to compete with users who essentially have potentially all the free time in the world to render their work worthless. Facebook once boasted they had defeated adblock only for their investment to be broken without 48 hours.

None of this accounts for the sheer amount of money they will lose from people quitting the game. In a hypothetical scenario where everything from parsers to mods are blocked with no way of getting them to work underground, a good amount of people using them will unsub. So now you have Square Enix spending millions to maintain and update DRM nobody likes all while losing millions from those unsubbing. Just to say their game is pure. Not exactly a strong selling argument to investors.

anti-cheat software tbh doesn't stop cheaters or bots. It just annoys legitimate players by making the game less stable and run worse while being a small annoyance to the people who make the cheat software because they have a few additional hoops to move around making said software.

Don't most Easy AC games have rampant cheating anyway??

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Originally Posted by Anger

Those those third-party tools that "grant quality of life options" are categorically banned.

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I know. But that's the thing. People are going to quit if those quality of life tools aren't allowed, unfortunately.

I never said that those are okay, they still break the TOS.

And people really need to stop taking any such points as immediately defending the use of third party tools.

I'm just being pragmatic here. We're focusing on tools that enable cheating and give people an upper hand. What upper hand would a colourblind person have over being able to see the AoEs everyone else has through the use of a shader or some other form of modification?

Because yes. Yoshida has said 3rd Party Tools overall are not okay in the latest post. No one disputes this.
He's also said, however, in previous moments that not only does he not want a witch hunt over these things, there are tools he considers to exist in a gray area.
And those are things he's gradually having implemented into the game, the latest of which is being able to tell which hit is magical or physical damage.

Even if they're categorically banned, you still need to consider their use and application. Why they're being used overall. And until SE implements those into the game to discourage their use, you'll basically be telling people that rely on those things to "get good" over something that isn't within their immediate control.

And with that, you'll just lose customers. A select handful, sure. But you'll still lose them anyway.

People need to stop being such hard-headed over these things. Okay, fine, they're all banned. But if even the lead producer of the game is capable of saying "Yeah, there are green areas, just keep them hushed and make sure they don't impact anything else", so can you, for crying out loud... The TOS doesn't need to be applied all black-and-white over every possible thing people do and say and get.

The fact the lead producer acknowledges gray areas means that saying "categorically banned" has nuance.

And keep in mind though, I'm only pointing toward quality of life stuff that helps people with disabilities and stuff like that. Not advocating for cheating of any kind.

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Originally Posted by DiaDeem

Don't most Easy AC games have rampant cheating anyway??

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Laughs in Elden Ring

There is no point. People will always find a way around anticheat softwares.

They said they can’t because of legal issues with other countries.

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Originally Posted by Anger

In light of the recent TOP issue and concerns surrounding the legitimacy of their clear - would you be opposed to anticheat software scanning your system for addons/parsers/plugins?

This would help enforce the total and categorical ban on any third party programs used.

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I believe there are a lot of useful addons, plugins, and mods that many players are using. The moment you take that from them is the same moment you encourage them to quit the game, and I'm not talking about the NSFW modding community because that's a completely different matter.
I think it's better to support the game with official features and QoL improvements that render these third-party tools obsolete, or at least render as much as possible before starting to use whatever third-party detection methods. This way, not only you increase customer satisfaction, but also decrease the number of potential players who might quit as a result.
That being said. There will always be people using third-party tools, and the first step in solving the problem is admitting it. Hence my recommendation is to add these third-party tools as official features when possible as stated above. The next step should be a gradual detection of third-party tools to allow players to use some (but not all) and get gradually used to a different gameplay style than the one they used to play with if some third-party tools can't be added as official features without completely stripping the players to mitigate the number of potential players who might quit. .

Sure i would, i run no software id need to hide lol

Also we do deserve it.

The vast majority of online games published in the past 23 years have had anti-cheats, whether you realize it or not. FFXI and FFXIV stand alone among major online games. For everyone in this thread complaining about anti-cheats, I want you to uninstall Steam and close your account. You say you’d leave this game, so why not leave the others as well? Why are we exceptional?

By the way, we don’t need an anti-cheat to turn off plugins, but that’s a bit beyond the scope of our (and Square’s) field of expertise.

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

Sure i would, i run no software id need to hide lol

Also we do deserve it.

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Speak for yourself, plenty of players don't use mods of any kind, and some of us use only cosmetic mods. I don't think any of those players deserve having invasive software installed on their PCs.

it would probably help if they just took reports of Plugin/cheat/addonusers more seriously.

Honestly i have nothing to hide so i wouldnt care if they did, let them scan away. As long as it doesnt interfere with my quality of gaming like causing lag or whatever. I personally dont get it you have players clamouring for hard content even some who complaing that the game is too easy. I would like to know how many of those people are the ones using those tools.

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Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

Speak for yourself, plenty of players don't use mods of any kind, and some of us use only cosmetic mods. I don't think any of those players deserve having invasive software installed on their PCs.

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An anti-cheat isn’t “invasive” in the way that you think. On a basic level, the game scans its own files to make sure they match the official ones. This is the same method used when you “verify game file integrity” in Steam or other launchers. It’s also how VAC operates. In fact, the entire system can run server-side. There’s no “scanning” that needs to be performed on your hardware. And AFAIK, a game has a legal and technical right to access its own files.

Also, have people not considered the sheer difference in magnitude between the above system and Mare? Which not only scans your files, but allows arbitrary downloads and code injection onto your client? In addition to uploading information from your client to others? In addition to sharing you and your alts’ statuses? On some dude’s private PC in his basement, no less (no one knows who or what runs Mare). Far, far more intrusive and yet 20,000 people are running Mare at any given time. A large portion of the FFXIV community welcomes intrusiveness. An anti-cheat would relieve them of that.

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Originally Posted by Eorzean_username

The second SE starts scanning my PC with weird invasive rootkit stuff is the second I get over any remaining FFXIV habit that I have left.

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What's really weird is that this mindset is a very common one - and yet plenty of people would be fine with requiring every group member during world prog to stream their run for legitimacy.

As in, apparently surveilling someone's room RL (not to mention excluding nearly everyone whose RL doesn't allow for a streaming-presentable gaming environment ...) is a lesser evil over surveilling their PC ...

Personally, the main issues I've seen with anti-cheats are:

a, most of them (especially the ones Asian developers usually rely on) do not work properly unless you're running an actual Windows operating system (especially important now with how much of a hit the Steam Deck is).

b, kernel level trust increases the attack surface for actually-malicious software.

c, performance hits. Would really rather not see 7.0 (especially with the graphics revamp on top of it) start requiring Forspoken level system specs (what? you don't have a 4090? have fun with the framerate in hunts and exploratory missions! LOL).

I play on Steam Deck, so I'm using Proton as a compatibility layer to run ffxiv on Linux instead of Windows. While some anticheats can be configured to allow Proton, more likely than not I would be collateral damage.

No amount or type of anti-cheats will prevent people from cheating. Once one understands this, anti-cheats become obsolete. They cause more harm than good.

They don't like to spend money and that would probably cost money. It's more likely they'd stop making Ultimates altogether, then there's less reason to cheat.

the absolute smooth brains of people using "wElL i DoN't HaVe AnYtHiNg To HiDe!" as an argument.

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Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

The vast majority of online games published in the past 23 years have had anti-cheats, whether you realize it or not. FFXI and FFXIV stand alone among major online games. For everyone in this thread complaining about anti-cheats, I want you to uninstall Steam and close your account. You say you’d leave this game, so why not leave the others as well? Why are we exceptional?

By the way, we don’t need an anti-cheat to turn off plugins, but that’s a bit beyond the scope of our (and Square’s) field of expertise.

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I’m pretty sure everyone already knows this, the actual argument is whether it’s actually worthwhile for the devs to pursue.

The only anti cheat I’ve ever seen that was actually any effective is the one Genshin Impact uses, and it’s also famously one of the most intrusive ones ever known. To the level where the game forces you to run it in administrator mode, there are entire conspiracy theories around the necessity of its existence considering it’s developed by a Chinese company, and hackers a while back actually reverse engineered its code for use in their malware.

The level of invasiveness they'd need to have anything worthwhile means I'd just stop playing immediately.

I've never played Valorant or a few other games for similar reasons. Besides, it'd be a bit of a slap in the face for SE to implement some kind of client-side detection instead of use that development time to actually make the game better. Especially for a dev team that consistently claims things are impossible until they're shamed into implementing it by third party stuff that proves it's actually possible.

those things don't actually do anything more than eat up cpu and ram
the people making mods just look at what it's looking for and go about it a different way, everyone else just suffers for no good reason

A parser is literally just reading the data the game log is already generating and putting it in an easier to understand format for instance
it's not really the kind of thing one of those nprotect type programs could even detect without being incredibly invasive

You used to be able to change client side zoom by simply changing a number in the .cfg file. No program needed at all, for all I know you still can. used to have to go into that file all the time to fix game loading issues but whatever caused that seems to be fixed by now

The things that do automated call outs is just a timer synced to the pull. Can have it not even interacting with the game at all if you wanted
Solution to that is making the fights actually be interactive instead of just an intricately tuned by the numbers dance routine

I don't use any mods myself but logically it gets to a point where it's like... "is discord bannable?" "is watching twitch while playing bannable?" "is listening to itunes bannable?" "is a stopwatch bannable?" "is a keyboard with macro keys bannable?"

The solution is making the game not need that stuff to begin with. I mean like no buff timers and damage types being hidden for how many years before they finally fixed it?

I don't use addons. I never will. In saying that the launcher is enough drm for me. They do that and I will quit and I have nothing to fear from the addon/plugin police. That's just too invasion to punish a handful of players.

Unless they make mechanics where they are required but that will spawn the same problem with WoW. New players WILL get confused with the addon culture and weak auras turning PvE more hostile. Why don't you have X addon installed? Wth is your problem ? etc etc

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Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

The vast majority of online games published in the past 23 years have had anti-cheats, whether you realize it or not. FFXI and FFXIV stand alone among major online games. For everyone in this thread complaining about anti-cheats, I want you to uninstall Steam and close your account. You say you’d leave this game, so why not leave the others as well? Why are we exceptional?

By the way, we don’t need an anti-cheat to turn off plugins, but that’s a bit beyond the scope of our (and Square’s) field of expertise.

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I mod my steam games like crazy what on earth are you talking about?

Console user here, sometimes PC user who still has never used a single add-on:

The discourse on Third-Party Tools that screw with the legitimacy of wins and stuff is really bad, but there are lots of add-ons out there that people use that I appreciate the existence of. Things like in-game chat bubbles for player text (TAKE NOTE, SE!), or player fixes for vastly needed things like Viera and Hrothgar hats. The game as a whole benefits from these and SE needs to take note and actually fix things, because players are only doing it themselves because SE is too slow on the draw.

I don't endorse any kind of add-on that unfairly skews gameplay for one's favor, but if you start invasive file checking on the game client and PC files, it's not going to end well for literally anyone involved. This would be a scorched earth approach and should be avoided at all costs.

I don't think this would be a good idea. Such a scan conflicts with laws in random countries as well, so they would lose a good bit of money. They would benefit more by making add-ons and mods less desired by adding requested features to the game.