Why graphical mods are bad for PvP.

[KisaiTenshi]

Someone said Mass Effect 3 was having issues, because people were used to modding single player games and then there was a multiplayer component. I was mentioning Elder Scrolls as in the actual MMO part of the franchise. If people playing the MMO are conflicted because they're used to modding in Skyrim.

That's because Unreal Engine is used by many cheaply developed MMO's, and that is primarily a single-player FPS game engine. So the better way to look at a Unreal Engine game is "single player with multiplayer glued on." FFXIV/FFXV's doesn't use a third-party game engine, and is designed around being a MMO game engine with a single player campaign glued on for FFXV.

Anything that people do to mod FFXV (which SE has invited modding for) could be done against FFXIV.

The other thing about Unreal Engine, Source and CryEngine, is that it's difficult to actually secure any game designed primarily to be a single player game. Ever since Quake, FPS game engines have had people cheat, and use all kinds of ways of doing so. Most solutions to preventing cheating are short-lived, because you can not secure the game client as long as it runs on the user's system. There are features in macro's for Mice, Keyboards, even computer monitors for "creating advantages" over other players. Macro tools that use their own processors in the mice/keyboard/monitor, can't be detected as being macros, however those hardware devices can be blacklisted by asking the OS what hardware is plugged in.

Ultimately the only way to create a game that is uncheatable is to stream the video from a secured machine. That is so exorbitantly expensive and unworkable that if FPS tournaments were being played for money/prizes, the first thing they'd do is hold the tournaments on their own secured hardware in locations that are secured. That will weed out the cheaters because they can not perform without their illicit tools.

But more to the point, people who "need" third party tools to play the game, are simply bad players to begin with. People defending the use of mods or ACT or any other tool, are the ones most likely to be implicated as cheaters themselves. I've seen how this ends before, it only takes one careless person posting that they use such tools to the official forums for it to get cracked down on, and there are many careless people on the forum.

[JackHatchet]

Do you really think Square-Enix would crack down on these things?

[KageTokage]

Considering how inept they've been at curbing the flood of gil-farming bots and RMT spammers, I seriously doubt they'll ever attempt to find a more lasting solution (IE, finding some way to make the client reject foreign processes or simply close if it detects them) to any of the game's issues with cheating.

[KisaiTenshi]

Do you really think Square-Enix would crack down on these things?

They will if it affects their bottom line. A lot of mods start out as QoL stuff, but then they start being used to pass illicit information via back channels in order to win prizes that have limited availability, or find the locations of secrets that would require effort. FPS games are notoriously cheated because they are intensively F2P games, and anything that gives a player an advantage is quickly proliferated. One "PvP" site known for creating most of the mods/bots for MMO games out there destroyed at least one MMORPG by going too far.

There is a term for this "Script Kiddie", when tools that can do a lot of damage, proliferate and fall into the hands of people who don't actually know what they're doing. So for one game that meant the game was shutdown due to rampant destruction. For another game, it resulted in many players having their characters destroyed, and malicious players used the tool to target their enemies.

So yes, Square-Enix would have to crack down on things if the games reputation being destroyed by players who go too far. They show a willingness to go after the RMT side of things, but not much willingness to go after bots because they can't be sure a player is a bot without spending a lot of time monitoring them. That's why players using parsers are told to use fight club rules. If you say anything about parses through the game, you've implicated yourself.

[KageTokage]

They show a willingness to go after the RMT side of things, but not much willingness to go after bots because they can't be sure a player is a bot without spending a lot of time monitoring them.

It really doesn't take much effort at all to distinguish bots from real players, whether they're doing FATEs, PvPing, or gathering/crafting.

They stay online for abnormally long periods of time without ever ceasing their activity/going AFK, which should be an immediate red flag for an investigation, afterwhich just observing their stiff, repetitive "Point A to point B" style movement for a minute or two would be the nail in coffin for them if the STF was actually competent. Not to mention that as far as I can tell, bots are functionally incapable of taking flight while in motion, so you can pick them out from real players nine times out of 10 by just watching for the ones who jump in place before flying after completing a FATE or gathering from a node.

Even the gil farming bots that spend most of their time under the ground or in walls have sometimes managed to avoid being banned for so long that their initial 30 days of playtime expired (Despite me reporting them about two weeks prior). Aside from that, the gibberish names are such a unifying trait among them that just doing a player search for level 1-50 CNJ/WHM and THM/BLM will basically reveal every gil farmer on the server who isn't in an instance.

I suppose it's possible that they're required to conduct needlessly in-depth investigations even if all of the signs point towards them being bots, though...

[YojimboM]

So, this topic was clearly created by someone who doesn't PVP and is fishing for some excuse to try to rile people up about modding.

You already have "big green markers" on the healers' heads because the actual game UI puts them there with green job icons by their names. In other cases, people use Target-to-Attack markers and a variety of the included UI markers and tools to pick targets, and even put on countdowns for burst using macros that place 5-1 marks over people's heads.

There is no instance in PVP where being physically unable to see someone has any impact on anything whatsoever. If someone is standing behind a wall in Feast, 90% of the time you can still see them or their name, and the other 10% of the time it's because they might be behind you and in a really, really bad position if that's the case (AKA, out of position or overextended). There are no "critical items" hidden anywhere in PVP. There are giant crates that appear at fixed positions on the map and very specific times, which are highly visible and easy to target.

[Rinuko]

When people make posts about stuff they don't know anything about *thinking*

[Stormfur]

Yeah, PVP has more problems than just graphical mods. There's software or a plugin that tells you when an enemy is about to burst so you can get your shields and such ready, and there were exploits in the past where people could get on top of walls in the Feast arena and rain fireballs down on you and there was nothing you could do. I don't know if those issues have been fixed but between that and the bots in Frontline, there are far more pressing things about PVP that need to be fixed.

[KisaiTenshi]

It really doesn't take much effort at all to distinguish bots from real players, whether they're doing FATEs, PvPing, or gathering/crafting.

...

I suppose it's possible that they're required to conduct needlessly in-depth investigations even if all of the signs point towards them being bots, though...

That's probably the crux of the problem. They're spending more time investigating and are unwilling to carpetbomb (as that creates negative PR.) What is an obvious bot to you or me, would have to be observed, by a GM to actually warrant banning them, and then all they do is move on to the next account. Like if you watch any of these bots for any sufficient amount of time, you realize the problem is that the bots are going through the quests at nearly the same speed that a player does, they're just not moving between point A and point B. SE could solve that by actually moving things around, or having quest NPC's move around. That way their teleports are useless as the NPC won't be in the place they expect them to be, and can be honey-potted to listen for players who try to activate a NPC that isn't there.

Need I remind everyone about the gil deletion incident of 2.00.
http://www.novacrystallis.com/2013/0...per-interview/

Nova Crystallis: Do you have any plans to combat RMT (Real Money Trading)? It was a large problem in 1.X as well as FFXI.
Yoshida: We believe that with the type of game we have now, it is discouraged, RMT is all about getting gil and selling it, but we have a game here where a lot of gil is not necessary to progress. Something in our game that FFXI didn’t have is gear binding, and so because of this, you cannot sell worn equipment. The only thing that requires gil is the housing system, so there are RMT that might try and get gil through housing, but most RMTs work by using their free account to create many characters, and then make lots of gil in that time, and then transfer that gil all to one spot before the trial ends. We have systems in place so that the amount of gil you get at lower levels is really insignificant, so during that free period, will they even get a decent amount of gil? We also have systems in place that prevent trading at lower levels, so we do have lots of small systems that discourage RMT, and hopefully RMTs will see that there aren’t good ways of making money. On top of that we’ve strengthened our special task force that has been active since FFXI, and we’ve made ways of scanning bots to make sure that even those RMT that try and make gil will be combated.

5 years later, RMT is still a problem, but the most obnoxious part of has been mostly resolved (the spamming)

With PvP, there are incentives (eg limited time mounts) and thus people who can't sink the amount of time needed to get to the top to win it, will likely use a bot to secure their position. Thus SE should consider all PvP winners as potential bots, and audit their battles before rewarding anything. If activity looks like botting, then the reward is jail and a visit from the GM.

Sure SE could do something similar to NCsoft with BNS, that game does a file check and re-download any tempered file. Totally useless, BnS modding community created a tool to bypass it (and they did something to also improve performance/stability so kudos).

Hackshield and Gamegaurd are not a very good products. Basically they hook into the game and operating system and look for "unauthorized" processes. But both are defeated the same way, drop a dll file that the game actually initiallizes (eg winsock, direct3d, libpng, libjpeg, libvorbis etc) before HS/GG into it's directory, patch the CRT so that HS/GG load to make the game happy, but are otherwise just stub-loaded, eg whatever bits they're supposed to be doing to "prevent" hacking are neutered. Hackers laugh when they see these programs because they've been defeated forever. Those tools also screw up stability with the game. You can find thousands of pages of people complaining about these tools failing. It just creates more support nightmares. If you're not willing to develop your own in-house solution, then no solution ends up being better than a bad solution that you end up throwing more support staff at, and still doesn't stop the script kiddies.

And a lot of that comes back to changing how the game client communicates with the server. Why are bots able to teleport between two locations at all? Because the game developers want people to have a smooth experience when they walk between A and B, and not experience rubber-banding like in other MMO's. When you disconnect in the game, you are "still" in the game for up to two minutes, auto-attacking if you were mid-battle. Hence, the game is maintaining state between the game client and the game server, and when they're out of sync, the server pushes it back to the client (eg after a disconnect) but otherwise let's the game client move between two points unhindered.

If the game had more invisible walls, like it did in 1.0 there would be more opportunities for honeypots. But since you can pretty much get anywhere, expecially in the 3.x and 4.x areas due to flying mounts, the walls don't solve anything.

[Zeonx]

HA just no sorry it don't work that way.

I don't use mods but I have heard about them since FFXI where they use Dat files to change their appearance it gave no special benefits only to look different to them and nobody else could see it just them or a person they shared the dat file with.
I am figuring all this is about the talk about ffxiv clothing mods going around lately, no benefits its not the same as cheating with teleport botting in pvp and super speed cheating.

Its not graphical its botting should of said directed this at botting cause I don't think you know what you are talking about since SE uses programs to make clothing but server side for everyone so is everyone cheating?

id say its a good if the change clothing.

if you don't want to see someone dressed in underwear or in a dress or guys wearing girly clothing they could change it for them so they don't have to see it.

just my opinion