Quote Originally Posted by SaitoHikari View Post
I'm going to regret biting, but...

What -did- happen with UwU, if you don't mind me asking? What are you referring to, with that statement?

The official staff was watching the progress of the groups in that content very, very closely, after all. Enough that the combat designer was delighted when there was such positive reaction to the 'twist' of the fight. They also did know that no group that used the Ungarmax exploit was able to clear Bahamut Ultimate with it, as an example. Are you implying that the groups that have cleared UwU should be banned just for associating with parsers? Do you believe yourselves to have better judgement than the actual developers?

There are... Feelings. And then there is practical reality. Knowledge of the latter is certainly lacking in a lot of people in this age.
Refer to this
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._bad_news_for/
A JP site summarized the dengeki interview at E3. Here's the translation:

[Regarding the problem involving 3rd party tools in Ultima weapon (ultimate)]

Certain 3rd party tools allowed players to capture and show the packets sent from the servers, earlier than they should be shown. (note: They are talking about 3rd party tools calling out Gaol targets in Ultimate before they even show up on the screen). However, they don't think it was that crucial of a problem, because that phase takes place early on in the battle.

To counter this in future content, they will need to add another layer of protection. They want to change the timing and how they send the packets, and also improve how the effects/animations allow you to detect the mechanics, in order to confuse those 3rd party tools.
As much as I'd love to see Yoshi-P deliberately break all the tools, It would take elliptic-curve cryptography to prevent the FFXIV ACT Plugin from being able to record that data in the first place (as opposed to the fixed key to access the lobby). Yet it's likely they'd just use an off-the-shelf crypto, which would just add more latency and increase the minimum CPU requirements. The only reason it works at all is because the existing plugin only needs to use zlib, and not for very much.

The irony is, Yoshi-P is clearly aware of the kinds of cheating going on, and hasn't cracked down on players doing it, which ends up giving the impression that nobody will ever be punished for ANY kind of automated play.

The very definition of cheating is "to violate rules or regulations"