Let's talk about placing markers during fights.

[Fawkes]

When they first started talking about it I assumed the presets would be placeable in combat, and that this new system was their attempt to raise everyone's capability to the level of the cheaters, basically evening the playing field so we can all put down complex waymark setups instantly in the middle of a fight.

Instead they'll be limiting legit players ability to set up waymarks, but I'm sure if the people who were using 3rd party programs want their combat-placeable waymarks they won't have any scruples about making some new overlay thing that functions in place of it. If those gifs of the telegraph overlay are real then there's nothing stopping them.

[Schan]

Regarding 24-man, if people can't wait 5 seconds for someone to drop the markers you deserve the wipe. Then I would probably kick the little rascal that got us to wipe.

Hopefully with the saved markers it will take 2 seconds now. That's a >50% time reduction

Regarding Ultimates well... you wanted a challenge soooo they're getting rid of one of the crutches. Git Gud.

[SaitoHikari]

The thing that gets me is that this is in response to a third party program. It's not just that, they basically designed their own system with the presets that can more or less replace it. Or well, it would have completely invalidated any reason to even consider using that program in the first place, if they didn't gut the ability to move markers mid-fight.

Taking options away from players to combat third party programs is a bad move in most cases. The best move is to incorporate what it does in official ways or make other, less restrictive adjustments so that they're no longer necessary. SE just stumbled at the last critical step for reasons that I can't find any logic in. If they simply let people move markers mid-fight with the presets, this wouldn't have blown up at all.

SE actually successfully killed off a third party app with this type of concept about 3-4 years ago, although they did have to restrict something since there was no reasonable alternative solution when dealing with bots. There was one called Guildwork that many PC players used, that had the ability to block chat messages sent to the user in-game if they contained certain key words or phrases. Many used it to combat the literal deluge of gold selling RMT tells during that era. Any *legitimate* reason to continue using the program died when SE stopped trial accounts from being able to send tells. The creator of that program stopped updating it at the beginning of Stormblood, and it's no longer in use.

(I say 'legitimate' because it had another feature that's unrelated to the RMT situation. It also called out positions of hunt mobs. *That* nobody should condone, and does indeed cross the line into actual cheating.)

[Phantom_Wings]

The thing that gets me is that this is in response to a third party program. It's not just that, they basically designed their own system with the presets that can more or less replace it. Or well, it would have completely invalidated any reason to even consider using that program in the first place, if they didn't gut the ability to move markers mid-fight.

Taking options away from players to combat third party programs is a bad move in most cases. The best move is to incorporate what it does in official ways so that they're no longer necessary. SE just stumbled at the last critical step for reasons that I can't find any logic in. If they simply let people move markers mid-fight with the presets, this wouldn't have blown up at all.

SE actually successfully killed off a third party app with this type of concept about 3-4 years ago, although they did have to restrict something since there was no reasonable alternative solution when dealing with bots. There was one called Guildwork that many PC players used, that had the ability to block chat messages sent to the user in-game if they contained certain key words or phrases. Many used it to combat the literal deluge of gold selling RMT tells during that era. Any reason to continue using the program died when SE stopped trial accounts from being able to send tells. The creator of that program stopped updating it at the beginning of Stormblood, and it's no longer in use.

EXACTLY. It's the part that infuriates me the most. They were so close to making something that eliminated the need for that specific 3rd party tool. But the way it is now, that program will evolve around the change and widen the gap even more. Now, legit players cannot change markers in combat, while cheaters can have client-side markers through the entire fight that change with every mechanic.

If they give us 5 presets that we can swap between mid-fight, I wholeheartedly believe that 3rd party tool would die.

[Docette]

Copied from another thread:

I fully understand why they made the changes for ultimate, but I'm upset that they couldn't think to make any kind of distinction between ultimate and alliance players. If we really can't place markers mid combat, early pulls and waymarker wipe trolls are going to make things significantly more annoying for casual players who just want to go about their lives or new ones who might not know the ins and outs of each instance. Fights that come to mind are Phlegethon, Agrias, and to a lesser extent 9S. In an ideal world, of course, everyone would be able to figure out their alliance positions on the go, but I can't force anyone to figure it out, so having an easy reference is the second best thing.

I think a better solution would be to limit combat marker placement within ultimate (and savage, if they really want) while retaining it for other instances, if at all possible.

[JunseiKei]

[snip]However, with the new presets system....Why not allow it so that marks cannot be MANUALLY placed mid-fight[snip]

Going to go out on a limb here and assume they came up with this solution because they have no way of telling the difference between a command prompt and program moving markers and a player manually moving markers. I'd like to think it'd be easy to have a system that detects multiple markers being set instantly as not-player-possible. However, that doesn't mean a system would detect a program setting markers automatically x amount of seconds after as automation.

[Gemina]

I feel like I have some skill set that I bring to raid to help prog go quicker and help reclears go smoother, and it has been stripped of me because SE couldn't find a better solution to stopping cheaters.

Ever consider shaking your finger at the cheaters?

[Phantom_Wings]

Ever consider shaking your finger at the cheaters?

I can shake my finger at the cheaters all I want, but that doesn't get us any results and it's not my job. It's SE's job to do something about the cheaters without punishing the non-cheaters.

[Billythepancake]

They were halfway to fixing the cheating problem without any backlash, or at least, with a lot less upset people. If you could use the presets while in combat then that would have made the 3rd party software unnecessary AND attacked the underlying problem of why it was used in the first place. The problem with this kind of behavior SE is doing is that it doesn't address WHY someone would use a program to set markers in the middle of fight, the answer? Because it was hard an inconvenient, so people found a way to make it convenient. Had they just let you use the presets in the middle of pull, BOOM, no problem, would've done the same thing as the third party software and there'd be less/0 controversy around this. You'll never get rid of cheaters, they will always exist, but giving people the least amount of reason to cheat, outside of just bringing down the ban hammer or removing features from the game, is to make it where there is genuinely no point in doing it, because you don't get anything extra out of it. In the end that helps much more people.

[Packetdancer]

Going to go out on a limb here and assume they came up with this solution because they have no way of telling the difference between a command prompt and program moving markers and a player manually moving markers. I'd like to think it'd be easy to have a system that detects multiple markers being set instantly as not-player-possible. However, that doesn't mean a system would detect a program setting markers automatically x amount of seconds after as automation.

This is probably the exact reason.

On a wild guess, the new presets are stored client-side (like gearsets and hotbars and UI layout and whatnot) rather than server-side; they wouldn't need to add a whole new system on the servers, just a thing that sent the exact same commands as a player placing them manually would. This would mean they could implement presets like that extremely quickly.

However, this would also mean that the commands coming from the client are unchanged, and the external program probably just uses those exact commands already. So it could just keep on doing what it's doing—there wouldn't really be a way to prevent it doing the "swap the waymarks out automatically on phase changes" which seems to be the problem folks have here, because the commands would be identical; blocking one would require blocking the other.

If that's the case, the only way to prevent that I can see think of and still let players swap between waymark templates during combat would be to:

1. Prevent the client from placing waymarks during combat (to prevent the external program from acting as if it were the player)—this
2. Implement the waymark system on the server. Instead of sending a series of 'place waymarks' commands to represent your waymark, it would need to send a 'place preset <#>' command.

But from what I can see as a player, the game has very few architectural provisions for saving character-specific data to the server (short of backing up/retrieving client-side settings in bulk); I imagine that would take a lot more engineering work—in the actual server architecture—and so would take a lot longer before they could patch the hole.

I might be wrong, mind you. But that's my take.