Sonomaa (BG): In the 2.0 PDFs, addons were highlighted as something you want to see happen. Tanaka said the same about addons early in XIV's development but we never saw anything come out from it. Will you be releasing a developer kit to help create new addons for the game and show you're fully supported in evaluating and balancing addons? I know one of the most asked ones is a parser for people who like to min/max their damage, and just customizing the screen to look more like what players want.

Square-Enix: Rather than XML or LUA, like World of Warcraft is using, we're thinking of provide this in Flash simply to make it more visual. We'll be preparing a dev kit and providing that with help for the players. Once we get closer to the release of the dev kit (before it's even released), we will talk to the community and show what we have planned to put in it - UI engine, what we're providing - and then we can get feedback. So you could say, "This is not going to be enough, we need this," so we can get that feedback and get as close to what the community wants as possible.

Ragns (BG): When should we be expecting to see this?

SE: We could start now, but we're using SQWT and the situation is that it's such a mess that it's something that players would not be able to work well with. We want to streamline things to make it easy for players so we can get the best addons from the players. We feel that this is going to come with the release of 2.0. So we hope to have stuff ready about the same time.

Sonomaa (BG): I know he wants to work on his custom Final Fantasy I UI.

SE: [laughs] You'll have lots of time to use that screenshot we released and how you want to rearrange that to make it more like Final Fantasy I. With a lot of games, they'll have their addon community. Within BlueGartr, how many would you say are in that addon community.

Sonomaa (BG): A lot.

SE: A lot?

Sonomaa (BG): I'm not even joking. I'm not joking. You're talking the core hardcore player. The parsers for Final Fantasy XI were almost exclusively fixed by the BG community. The unofficial Windower for Final Fantasy XI... most of the addons - the fixing, the creation of that came from the Final Fantasy community, our community. Addons were created by many of our members, including BG members - not forum members.

SE: [laughs] Don't incriminate yourself now!

Sonomaa (BG): Well, Yarnball is the only plugin that has not broken, so I know he (Ragns) knows what he's doing.

SE: [more laughs] We'll make sure the mods you guys make will be able to be used for a long time. We don't want to make it where you make a mod, we change something, and you can't use it anymore. So we want to work with you.

Sonomaa (BG): World of Warcraft does that a lot - every major patch breaks half the addons. That, to me, is a... "Why are you screwing the community so much?" I can understand if something is broken and needs to be changed because it's breaking the fundamental game. But if every patch you have to disable all your addons, it doesn't seem professional. Even though the community may look like amateurs, they are pretty good at what they do.

SE: As you probably know, Japanese game development has been console based for a very long time. This whole concept of addons is very popular in the West, but not something a lot of developers are used to in Japan. They don't know how big of a community that is in America. So getting our developers to realize the importance of this, and not just tacking on something in the middle of a game after it is finished and having problems created that way, we're getting the game ready to accept addons.
I did not like this part at all! For one I am playing on PC, but I'll be ditching that for PS3 ver once it is out. I don't want PC players to have a greater advantage over me, but I would also just view these type of ADD-ONs such as in WoW as SE sanctioned cheating. If you cant learn to get a "feel" for things, then you probably should just not play rather than have the game play itself for you. I also dont want content to start to be designed around having to have these stupid things.

If SE is bound and determined to implement this, then I want Non-Addon or PS3 only servers to be implemented so I can purge myself of this filth.