On Ultimate Off Ultimate

[Rockette]

Doing anything other than what Kisai says to do deserves to be banned. Use parsers? ban. Try to get better? ban. Raid difficult content? ban. disagree on the forums? ban. Use a DPS spell as a healer? BAN TWICE.

I fully expect to be banned for explaining this to you, so, nice to meet you!

Oh the no-dps healer type that doesn't raid but has correct opinions about raiders. Ok. Gotcha. They're like the anti-vaxxers of Eorzea.

I went and looked up Cactbot after reading this thread and talked to some friends about it. Apparently these sorts of plugins are pretty widely used on WoW (this is my first mmo so I don't know these things).

To be honest, its not the sort of thing I'd like to play with, I think it would take a lot of fun out of the game. It's a personal no from me but if it keeps people bombing PF primal farm parties because they can't mechanics then its whatever. It doesn't bother me what others choose to do.

[Theodric]

I just hope it means we get something else instead. Over time, it feels like a lot of things are being reduced and spread out. We used to get multiple hairstyles with each new patch, now we only get two - and in recent patches they've both been very feminine or androgynous in their design. That's despite increased character customisation being a major talking point.

[CreinCrein]

Words.

Maybe ACT and fflogs enhances the longevity of the game for the raiding player-base by providing a system where players are given the metrics and platforms necessary not only for self-improvement, but for competition among their peers. Maybe using these tools as a way of improving is enjoyable, and by having an enjoyble game you can increase customer retention and extend the subscriptions of those who use these tools. Maybe SE thinks about these things; maybe.

On topic though, I'm pretty bummed that they're removing ultimate. With the direction of the game heading toward making savage content more accessible, ultimate is the only piece of content that's offering me exhilarating highs and a sense of achievement. Seeing it go away is a shame; the subsequent patches are going to be quite dry.

[Rockette]

Maybe ACT and fflogs enhances the longevity of the game for the raiding player-base by providing a system where players are given the metrics and platforms necessary not only for self-improvement, but for competition among their peers. Maybe using these tools as a way of improving is enjoyable, and by having an enjoyble game you can increase customer retention and extend the subscriptions of those who use these tools. Maybe SE thinks about these things; maybe.

On topic though, I'm pretty bummed that they're removing ultimate. With the direction of the game heading toward making savage content more accessible, ultimate is the only piece of content that's offering me exhilarating highs and a sense of achievement. Seeing it go away is a shame; the subsequent patches are going to be quite dry.

I wish I could have written this post because it's everything I love about playing the game, the best bit about ACT and the same sentiment about no more Ultimate. Couldn't agree more.

[MoroMurasaki]

snipped

The mental gymnastics you perform are truly Olympic quality. I wanted to break this post down but the lack of commom sense or anything even resembling logic just made my head hurt.

Enjoy your bubble where all of what you said is true, the rest of us are busy with reality.

[Asiragan]

You'll note that I don't mention these things until someone brings up something they could only have known by using a parser. Bourne named the parser plugin first, and in this case it was Yoshi-P who brought it up at all. It is still my view that the parsers suck the fun out of the game, and this thread is a perfect example of why.

You want hard content? Then why are you using a cheat tool to win it? That should not count as a clear, and when these same people complain about there not being another "Ultimate" for the 4.x patch cycle, perhaps they should ask themselves why should the developers bother to spend months developing a fight only for a couple of people to spoil it for everyone two days after it's released. Wouldn't it suck for Yoshi-P to go "Well due to the amount of users who cheat using parsers, we're no longer going to invest any resources in high end fights. Enjoy your casual theme park." That would be the ultimate punishment for using parsers, is for everyone to be punished because of a few people who can't even be polite and pretend that parsers don't exist.

The developers will never be able to make the "hard content" you guys want if you keep using the cheat tools to solve it. Yoshi-P's only real solution to this is to make DPS numbers meaningless, randomizing and fake-out mechanics, or even recognizing players who are cheating and give them loaded dice so that they can not use their cheat tools to win it. In a sense, you're asking for Yoshi-P to make a fight that can not be cheated by any means, and that is probably something that will never exist.

*business hat on*

If I was SE's legal department, I'd ask why Yoshi-P has not banned people who blatantly using parsers, and the response would be "that costs money". Ok, so what about streamers who blatantly use parsers? I'm sure they are reported by the vengeful trolls all the time. "that costs money too". There is a specific level of abuse that has to be crossed where "that costs money to do" becomes a better option to "we're losing subs because nobody wants to play with cheaters"

Does FFXIV deserve a reputation of being full of cheaters? No. But people who keep mentioning parsers, ACT, fflogs, etc on the official forums without being being warned or having those posts ninja-edited gives the impression that SE does not care about the integrity of the game. I'm actually surprised Square-Enix hasn't put any pressure on the Reddit for the same.

Just to mention one thing regarding this topic to give an other perspective.

Since the beginning of WoW, players were able to use Addons. One of them was called Deadly Boss Mods and was used by them to call certains mechanics before they happened.

After a few years, the developers openly admitted that fights were designed with the idea of players using DBM. If they didn't use it, most fights would take way much longer to clear, or wouldn't be beatable at all.
I think WoW's devs even go to the length of giving sources code of the fights to DBM's dev before it's released, so that players can have it updated when the patch drop.

So, for a WoW's player a tool like that is absolutely not cheating.

Plus, with the way FFXIV is designed, parsers are necessary. If the devs wanted the parsers dead, they would need to release content that are not savage or ultimate in the first place. An quite honestly, using legal means to fight parsers would be useless. It will just make people flee the game, the parsers devs would probably works faster than S.E. anyway, and FFXIV would become a laughingstock since they would sue parse users while they can't deals with the BoTs.


Finally, while the official stance of S.E. regarding third party tools says that it's not allowed, unofficially they really don't care as long as you don't harass people. Proof is that Yoshida watch streams of people using parsers and doesn't even seems to pay attention to it.


So S.E. probably care about the integrity of the game. They just don't think that parsers and the likes are a threat to it.


Side note : I'm using WoW as an example because it's the only MMO aside of FFXIV where I have HL experience. I tried other but not long enough to know how players are working things out in HL activities.

Maybe ACT and fflogs enhances the longevity of the game for the raiding player-base by providing a system where players are given the metrics and platforms necessary not only for self-improvement, but for competition among their peers. Maybe using these tools as a way of improving is enjoyable, and by having an enjoyble game you can increase customer retention and extend the subscriptions of those who use these tools. Maybe SE thinks about these things; maybe. .

Also this right here. ACT and FFlogs allow players to see their "score" at dps. And counting points probably exists since the very birth of games.

[KisaiTenshi]

I'm sure I'll get a headdesk worthy response to this but I'm genuinely curious of the train of thought. How is knowing your own dps numbers cheating?

Do you look up a walkthrough to a game without even playing it?

Here's almost everything you can do with the parser right now:
1. See every player and NPC/Monster in the zone, their hp, mp, tp, x/y/z location name and FC, immediately.
2. See every buff, debuff, time remaining of that buff/debuff and who casted it
3. See every mining node, before it appears
4. See the hate values for every monster
5. See the equipped gear of every player in the zone

The overlay is what actually puts that on the players screen. Which information you want to know and which information you ignore is what makes the difference between cheating and just logging progress.

Having any information on the screen that is not already presented by the game client is cheating. Knowing that a monster has a million hitpoints vs knowing it has 65% remaining HP isn't terribly different, but because that is a real value sent by the game server to the client, calculating real time DPS is possible, but also highly inaccurate. The reason is that DoT's, HoT's and Pets values are simply not attributed to the player, and buffs and debuffs are clipped over a certain number so the server doesn't report all the buffs. Hence the parser guesses what damage is being done based on the length of time the DoT would last from initial cast. Consider the logic gymnastics that has to be written to take into account a pet, a DoT, an AST Buff that is then subsequently overwritten by another AST's buff, and the crit value. The parser doesn't know any of this because that's not what the game client tracks. The game client doesn't care that a boss has 96 debuffs on it, it only cares what the last 30 are because it only displays that many.

Those "DPS meters" only reflect the DPS you can do in raw damage. If you play a class that deals in DoT's, what you're seeing is guesswork. SMN/SCH/ACN's pets, MCH's turrets, and AST's Earthly Star all involve additional NPC's to track, and hence it's entirely possible for these things to "miss", while the calculation is based on delivering damage.

Relying on the DPS meter to tell you numbers is just deceving yourself, and hence people using parsers to harass other people because they don't do the kind of damage they expect is entirely missing the point that the parser doesn't tell you 100% exactly what damage you're doing at all. Clipping DoT's ensures the parser won't track it properly. You can read the release notes or poke the source code for how that plugin works and see that is all true.

And as I've stated before, the problem is not the people using these things privately. The problem is the script kiddies who get these tools because their FC, or linkshell or some bozo they friended told them about it, and haven't the first clue about how these things work and why it's a bad idea to take them at face value. Anyone tell you "git good" because of fflogs is someone who hasn't the first clue how these thing work. To them, if you don't have anything on fflogs, clearly you must be a bad player. I'd say the opposite is true. If you have anything on fflogs that is publicly visible, go hide it and don't hand out that information to anyone. If a condition of joining a static or a FC is using a parser, and having parses on fflogs, then that is not people you should be dealing with, because it doesn't stop with parsers for a DPS meter.

Hence 'cactbot' is basically radar and fight reduction to "press x to win", you don't need to think, you just need to react.

See the lack of action by SE on parser users usually leads to the lack of action on people are actively botting, because they don't see SE doing anything about it, so they keep testing SE to see what gets them banned. Which appears to be nothing.

I report somewhere between 30 and 90 bot players a day on my server alone. All I have to do is sit there in front of any of the GC areas and punch search to get a list of bot names. These things should not be making it to level 50, yet they do, and they persist for days.

Yet somehow in that time, the GM found time to send a mentor player to the jail for saying some bad words. Meanwhile, bots all still there.

SE's priorities are really backwards. Instead of trying to protect the integrity of the game, they instead appear to be cherry-picking things that have minimal consequence to the game over those that are actively eroding player confidence.

If only players using cheat tools play hard content, then what is the point of developing any hard content at all? Just make everything a choreographed fight like Bardams Mettle. These players can not demand more hard content when they haven't even earned the clear on the content they have yet.

Finally, while the official stance of S.E. regarding third party tools says that it's not allowed, unofficially they really don't care as long as you don't harass people. Proof is that Yoshida watch streams of people using parsers and doesn't even seems to pay attention to it.

That's not endorsement. Going "Yoshi-P didn't immediately ban the world first clears who were using (whatever tool)" as endorsement of parsing is the same as going "well cops don't go after every speeder".

You don't go fishing to catch all the fish in the pond.

[Rockette]

I don't use any of that stuff you just mentioned. I didn't even know it existed. Nor did I even ask about it. I just use act to practise openers and get my rotation correct.

So again, my original question that you ignored. How is knowing my personal raw damage cheating?

In response to your question that also has nothing to do with me asking about dps numbers: Yes, I absolutely will look up a guide/video/diagram/walkthrough about a fight I don't know. Especially if I'm planning to join a pug.

[lulunami]

World firsts also didn’t spend 20+ hours a day on it either. They did 16~18, with one group doing 21 on the day they cleared because they were that close to a clear.

16-18 hours a day is not a really healthy amount of time to play. That is more time spent than a hedge fund manager spends a day at work.

Just because you don’t care about the weapon or titles doesn’t mean that “nobody” does. Speak only for yourself, please.

At the end of the day, none of this gear means anything. None of my real life friends and families outside of FFXIV care about beating a virtual dragon.

[Remedi]

This argument is stale, games are played for enjoyment and to spend times, as such the argument of this are only pixels should die in gaming discussions, It's the enjoyment that drives ppl to do certain things, some it's getting the best gear possible and some to test their limits and have fun with friends.
At the end of the day ppl did ultimates for fun mostly not because there was gear out of it. Also if ultimates are to remain synched that will only mean that said content will have a long life span because it's real merit is the challenge of the fight And let's not forget that it means that certain parts of rthe game will remain relevant because of it.
There's more to ultimate than just the 1%, it's healthy to the game overall, which I'm afraid I find lacking in long term goals