Resurgence of people using third-party programs to find hunt marks?

[KageTokage]

It would be nice if the information from XIV's servers such as S rank/FATE/gathering node coordinates was more...secure, because both hunt detectors and bots are dependent on getting that information in order to function.

I'm mostly annoyed by the sudden prevalence of this hunt radar because my main linkshell is comprised strictly of players who actively try to spawn S ranks, and we call hunts there before anywhere else to try to ensure that the people who are actually putting in work get kill credit. We've missed out on kills because of radar users instantly calling hunts (Some of them will just sit AFK and tabbed out in a zone with an open spawn window while they wait for someone else to spawn it) while some of the folks in my linkshell were busy trying to spawn something somewhere else.

Sadly, it's entirely on SE to do something about this, which given their track record with handling hackers and bots, isn't likely to happen. They did actually break the original hunt detecting program at some point (Though whether it was intentional or accidental is another matter entirely), but I noticed people starting to popularize a new one not long after SB released, which incidentally, is when I first started running into these strange instances of people calling hunts seconds after they spawn (I saw someone call a spawned Okina in shout and linkshell the moment they loaded into the zone next to me, and there weren't any other players next to the thing when we arrived at it).

[Tridus]

It would be nice if the information from XIV's servers such as S rank/FATE/gathering node coordinates was more...secure, because both hunt detectors and bots are dependent on getting that information in order to function.

I'd expect the server end is plenty secure. Trouble comes when the client needs to know about it. As Mwynn mentioned, large draw distances on some of these targets mean the client has to know about it from a very large distance away, and SE may just be doing it at a zone level to avoid the calculations of which clients to tell for large targets like that (in that case it just notifies every client in the zone).

Once the client is notified, it's in RAM somewhere, and securing userspace program RAM against someone who will run programs elevated to let them read memory of other programs is effectively impossible in Windows. They'd need to obfuscate the game's memory to make it harder to find, and it's probably not worth it to them.

Sadly, it's entirely on SE to do something about this, which given their track record with handling hackers and bots, isn't likely to happen. They did actually break the original hunt detecting program at some point (Though whether it was intentional or accidental is another matter entirely), but I noticed people starting to popularize a new one not long after SB released, which incidentally, is when I first started running into these strange instances of people calling hunts seconds after they spawn (I saw someone call a spawned Okina in shout and linkshell the moment they loaded into the zone next to me, and there weren't any other players next to the thing when we arrived at it).

Without changing the visible distance of S ranks and also changing the communication model to limit which clients get that information, there isn't much they *can* do. They could play whack a mole by changing the memory layout to make it harder for the program to find it, but that's whack a mole. If the people behind the radar programs are dedicated, they'll always get it working again.