/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:


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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
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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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Johners

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

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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.

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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.

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To your first claim most of those are lies or blatantly outdated.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

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

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Or you know....the devs should have those accessibility and disability needs implemented into the base game? I dont understand how both FFXIV and World of Warcraft have this weird stepping on glass attitude about addons when they can just do more of taking those requested features and putting them into the game, completely negating the need to have to download 3rd party software for it.

Look, I get it. The dev team's resources are spread thin, especially with many of these individuals adhering to strict schedules but you figure the amount of time it takes to make a simple addon feature and plug it into the game shouldnt realistically take like...more than a week? Heck I imagine this shit can be done in a few days at best.

This whole addon thing is so stupid. Just have this stuff in the game and then you wont have to worry about pissing off people about QoL, instead of just pissing off the big booty mods and cheaters who dont care about integrity and really we shouldnt try to cater to these people anyway.

For games that do have anti-cheat or anti-tamper software on them by SE they have used Denuvo which is a particularly invasive and resource consuming piece of software. Denuvo has been reported to have excessive write operations to storage components which can significantly shorten the lifespan of solid-state drives.

I mean as Yoshida says you can always unsub from his game and move on

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

Or you know....the devs should have those accessibility and disability needs implemented into the base game? I dont understand how both FFXIV and World of Warcraft have this weird stepping on glass attitude about addons when they can just do more of taking those requested features and putting them into the game, completely negating the need to have to download 3rd party software for it.

Look, I get it. The dev team's resources are spread thin, especially with many of these individuals adhering to strict schedules but you figure the amount of time it takes to make a simple addon feature and plug it into the game shouldnt realistically take like...more than a week? Heck I imagine this shit can be done in a few days at best.

This whole addon thing is so stupid. Just have this stuff in the game and then you wont have to worry about pissing off people about QoL, instead of just pissing off the big booty mods and cheaters who dont care about integrity and really we shouldnt try to cater to these people anyway.

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They should, yes. I don't think anyone is saying otherwise.

The point is that the game at this particular point is just not disability-friendly, and beyond a certain point there are always people that will accomplish it better.

Obviously, the preference would be that these features are made native, as this would not leave a big disparity between what those on consoles can do, and cannot do in relation to PC players.

Continually supporting disabled players would require a pretty significant amount of work, both in the development time, and in research itself.

Hey Howdy, I was the person who supplied the stats on how many people use Auto-Markers in that thread, but I'll post my 2 cents here.

I am someone who does not use plugins, and I raid with a group of people who are like-minded in that regard. Generally, it does not bother me if people use plugins if everyone they are playing with are O.K. with it. After all, if everyone you're playing with are fine with it, who am I an unrelated person, to yell at you. Obviously when plugins present a problem in a game like FFXIV, it is often when people do it in scenarios where there isn't that collective consent (e.g. cheating in fall guys competitively, or secretly using things in PF without the other players knowing).

That being said, as someone who doesn't use plugins, if they added an anti-cheat tomorrow that worked perfectly with no issues (heck even if that anti cheat somehow magically only targeted the "worst" plugins) it's not like it would magically improve my experience in the game whatsoever.

To that end, I would much rather that they spend the resources identifying *why* people use these plugins and addressing the underlying frustrations and issues that drive people to use them.

Auto-Markers, for example, aren't used for every mechanic in the game or fights they are in, they aren't even used in every Ultimate. They are used because in 3 of the Ultimates there are particularly Janky/Frustrating mechanics that both have incredibly high variance due to things like snapshots and ping and are designed in a way to be frustrating for Party Finder. Often these mechanics, such as Titan Gaols, aren't even the hardest or most interesting mechanics in the fight, they are simply the most janky and frustrating. I would much rather they go in and *change* Titan Gaols to make it better for *everyone* rather than just implement an Anti-Cheat.

We see this phenomenon with a lot of other plugins as well. Some other recent examples I can think of: NoClippy/XIVAlexander rose in popularity after they released an update that made ninja a lot more frustrating to play for a week or two for players who had high enough pings. GShade VFX Filters/EasyEyes had an explosion in popularity (to the point of being mentioned in PF) after fights like Pandemonium 3 were released that were incredibly frustrating to do if you were red color blind.

To that end, rather than spending whatever limited resources they have implementing an Anti Cheat that would just anger a lot of the people using plugins to make their cat faces more yass-ified or w/e, I would rather see them actually adjust content after its released in response to how players play it.

I don't. Anticheats aren't the answer for this game in my opinion.

The answer is just better server-side detection (for example, if someone teleports from one side of the world to the other) or implementing the features from them.

Where I think implementing the features from them will not work is if it's not fast enough or good enough to catch up with the most popular ones. In some cases it may not be realistic for SE to do the same thing but instead to do something similar that wouldn't ruin the game, but these efforts do help because then people will think what's the point downloading these things? They will especially think "what's the point downloading it" when they get a new PC and have to reinstall everything.

No as most tend to catch more innocent bystanders than actual cheaters. The devs would also need to constantly try to updated it at the same pace as cheat software is being updated to get around the anti-vheat software. That would have a bigger chance at taking away time and resources from other parts of the game.

I used to be against Anti-cheats due primarily to performance concerns, but over the years I've become increasingly in-favor of seeing Square Enix take measures to crack down on cheaters in FF14. The growing acceptance and reliance of cheating tools in the raiding community has definitely had a negative impact on my enthusiasm for the game. The whole 'Mind your own business' schtick doesn't really work out, because in a cooperative game the effect of your teammates cheating ends up having a very real impact on your experience. If raiding in this game devolves into the addon-soup that WoW has become over the years, I could easily see myself leaving altogether.

I also think people underestimate how much of an opportunity barrier anti-cheats present to the average player.

The amount of people willing to run plugins on a totally unprotected game is naturally much larger than the amount of players willing to rely on shady bypass methods to cheat in a protected game, particularly one where they have sunk a lot of time/money into their account. Back in my days of hosting GMod dedicated servers, the instances of cheaters on VAC secured servers were exponentially lower, despite VAC being totally trivial to bypass. For the vast majority of players, the risk simply isn't worth it. In an ideal world, it would be nice to see SE implement detection methods that don't rely on a third-party anticheat. In any case, Square needs to do SOMETHING, as the situation is totally out of hand.

One of the issues is, even if reported, often nothing happens. Because most GM's can't check it, or are not allowed to.

We still have level bots under the map teleporting around since 2.0. We still have crafting bots crafting all day and auto-adjusting prices. We still have gatherers walking the optimal path from one node to the next etc. We have people that collected 20000 hoards in deep dungeons in a few days according to achievement logs (some tools can display them even if hidden).

If there are no consequences, there is no deterrence against continuing.

They already banned waymarks during a fight. I wouldn't be surprised if they ban markings in all savage and ultimate content. But there will be always workarounds as long as combat data is easily parsable and not encrypted somehow.

Disclaimer: Nothing in my post should be construed as supporting plugins.

But FFXIV is known across the internet as being a "modder's game". Social media is flooded with modded screenshots and discussions about plugins. The most popular plugins have been downloaded millions of times. The #1 rule, don't talk about modding, is constantly broken in-game and outside of it. Countless people have "Mare Lamentorum" in their search info. This is the heart and soul of FFXIV in 2023. Do I like it? No, because I came from 2016 and not 2023. Many people are different. They came to FFXIV because it was the only MMO that allowed unlimited plugins. This is what Yoshida's life work is about. He created a follow-up to the most successful social sim of all time: No, not WoW, but Second Life.

About "anti-cheat": No one will read this, but there are two distinct vulnerabilities that exist only in FFXIV: the lack of server-side sanity checks and allowing third-party launchers with a third-party API. The first never should've been the case since 1.0. And the latter is baffling as to how it's possible. Other games like Second Life allow third-party launchers that use the existing API. FFXIV is the only online game that I have found that allows you to completely subvert the existing code with an entire API that exists totally outside of bounds. It's a legitimate cheat tool not because of how it's used, but because of what it can do. It can manipulate everything going to and from your client. This is not normal in online games. There are rules to keep things fair, because it's online, not offline. This isn't Skyrim.

The lack of sanity checks and the existence of an entire client-side API to hack this game should be seen as critical vulnerabilities because they are. That's a fact. You can say the game is so broken that fixing it is pointless, but you wouldn't dare criticize the game, would you?

Fortunately, fixing this doesn't require an "anti-cheat". It doesn't need Easy Anti-Cheat or a rootkit. It just needs Square Enix to stop being lazy and fix the vulnerabilities that already exist.

Easy Anti Cheat with reshade+mare+whatever else doesn't make the game dogshit whitelisted. You're delusional if you think it'll slow your $10,000 computer down or ban you for driver software. The game needs some kinda moderation or it'll just be you and your mod friends playing alone but hey seeing as how elitist and toxic you all are you'd probably enjoy that level of video game fascism. We need balance.

Big agree with the previous page comments that the effort would be better spent looking at why players feel the need to use particular addons/cheats etc and addressing/easing/tackling those issues as required.

I would love to see them shut down all modding so I can watch the chaos that unfolds. It would be truly glorious.

I think the only thing that ticks me off about this more than anything is that cheating has been a plague in this game for a long time, but it took a silly Fall Guys event for the greater side of the community to care and give a darn about it. Like the fact Fall Guys is the final straw for people is just kind of wild. Yeah, something should be done about cheating, I just can't get over the fact that it took a silly seasonal event to spark this revolution.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

Or you know....the devs should have those accessibility and disability needs implemented into the base game? I dont understand how both FFXIV and World of Warcraft have this weird stepping on glass attitude about addons when they can just do more of taking those requested features and putting them into the game, completely negating the need to have to download 3rd party software for it.

Look, I get it. The dev team's resources are spread thin, especially with many of these individuals adhering to strict schedules but you figure the amount of time it takes to make a simple addon feature and plug it into the game shouldnt realistically take like...more than a week? Heck I imagine this shit can be done in a few days at best.

This whole addon thing is so stupid. Just have this stuff in the game and then you wont have to worry about pissing off people about QoL, instead of just pissing off the big booty mods and cheaters who dont care about integrity and really we shouldnt try to cater to these people anyway.

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The problem with this argument is that it's like saying "Why don't people just stop doing bad things?" as if it's a real solution to war. SE isn't going to implement the features that people want/need for accessibility. They're not going to give us the QOL improvements that some mods provide. They're not going to give the glamour options that mods provide.

They could however someday go hard against mods, so being nervous about that is a real fear.

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Originally Posted by Reap00

I would love to see them shut down all modding so I can watch the chaos that unfolds. It would be truly glorious.

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https://media.tenor.com/iN7Ny-VwX8IA...raimi-meme.gif

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Originally Posted by AnnRam

I mean as Yoshida says you can always unsub from his game and move on

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Agreed. People who "need" cheats to play FFXIV should do as Yoshida says and unsubscribe:

Per https://support.na.square-enix.com/r...1&tag=users_en

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If you reject this User Agreement, then you will not be authorized to play the Game.
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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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2.6 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.

2.7 Modifying or Creating Derivative Software. You may not modify or cause to be modified any files that are a part of the Game or Service in any way not expressly authorized by Square Enix, and may not make any derivative works of the Game.

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Originally Posted by LilFlowers

... how elitist and toxic you all are you'd probably enjoy that level of video game fascism. We need balance.

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I... what? Video game fascism? This feels a little unhinged, given what the conversation is largely about.

while reddit polls make me laugh and the ffxiv subreddit is a joke at best. the best solution is to end the wrist slaps that SE does and just flat out perma ban people that cheat simple as that.

Nope.

Also this topic is like a dead horse at this point, stop beating it lol

I have to say people may not understand Yoshi-P or this dev team as well as they think they might if people believe it's 'Fall Guys' that would be the final nail. They would have done something a very VERY long time ago if they thought a anti-cheat measure was absolutely essential, and it would have been over something related to World First races or PvP/Feast Seasons.

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Originally Posted by Neoyoshi

I have to say people may not understand Yoshi-P or this dev team as well as they think they might if people believe it's 'Fall Guys' that would be the final nail. They would have done something a very VERY long time ago if they thought a anti-cheat measure was absolutely essential, and it would have been over something related to World First races or PvP/Feast Seasons.

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Every single drama that happens will be the end of mods according to this forum, yet it never happens

I wonder why

Hmmmm

I see zero point in anti cheats if strict penalties are not going to be enforced. Strict penalties IS the anti cheat. If you give players a feeling of FAFO by implementing no tolerance for cheating, and show that you will not only ban accounts for violating the ToS in general, but actually outright delete characters for cheating you will get completely different behavior from these players.

Cheating, put simply, destroys the integrity of the game. In no world is this worth the handful of subs that follow the accounts that are eliminated. And in all honesty, that's just the trash taking itself out.

Find it funny that people will point at some mods having 1 million downloads and claim, "see! everyone uses it!" then are magically able to deduce that FFXIV having 27 million accounts, doesn't mean that 27 million people are playing.

If I had to guess, I'd say around 5% of the active playerbase uses mods of any kind. This is mostly based on studies that have shown your average online gamer is very inactive in regard to seeking out additional information about the game, outside of the game itself. That your average online gamer, plays 1-8 hours a week, isn't on any online discussion platforms for the game, and isn't looking up videos for the game, and isn't looking up guides or strategies for the game.

There are many reports that repeat this similar result, such as this Forbes article. With the funny part being, that most of these articles are shocked by how much this is an increase in average gaming time compared to a decade ago.

So yea, while I'm on the side of letting players mod if they want, though maybe lockdown the API a bit to not make them trivialize content, or worse, become required for doing content. I also believe that if SE or XIV did find a way to lockdown mods, it wouldn't be the end of the game, not even close.

No, I just want a competent moderation team.

It's not difficult to identify most forms of cheating via direct investigation vs. faulty automated detection measures.

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Originally Posted by Swordsman

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

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it's the "perfectly" the problem here. It will slow down how data is received and sent (I need to control "anomalies"), thus if you have a system barely sufficient to handle the game, the anticheat will make the game -worse-

Of course no is going to win. A majority of the player base are cheaters.

It's a false premise to begin with and the OP (the original one, not this thread's OP, you get me) already admits it with their definition of what "perfectly" entails. Client side anti-cheat simply isn't sufficient to do what people want it to do, no matter how many screeds get posted about 'securing the launcher'.

I have said something to this effect many times and I will say it again: this is ultimately just a facet of one of the core security problems with PC gaming - whether you exercise it, understand it, or live in blissful ignorance of it, the truth is that you have the ability to exercise complete and ultimate authority over everything that happens on your PC. Companies and programs can utilize increasingly elaborate efforts to protect and obfuscate themselves from that authority, but if sufficiently motivated and capable, the physical controller always wins. And at this point the community is very large, very talented, and very motivated.

But that's okay, because client-side sucks anyway as previously established. It's server-side enforcement and moderation that needs to improve, and the only thing preventing SE from doing it is being cheap. The rest of this argument is smoke and mirrors and finger pointing.

well no saving this dead horse beating topic please let it die and bury it.

If the devs fixed their game, there would be no need for an anti cheat because people would use fewer addons.