I think Square Enix should look into possibly using Easy Anti Cheat for XIV

[Risvertasashi]

If SE goes scorched earth, they will lose a lot of customers. Of course there would be a bunch of people on the forums going "serves you all right, cheaters!" even though maybe someone just imported a hairstyle or wanted to improve their own play, but you know.

That said, I do worry a bit that some addon dev will eventually push things too far. Like the TEA stuff that Yoshi talked so much about in the most recent PLL. Even if they don't bend to installing anticheat software, there are things they could do to break addons, but it would break all of them, not just the "black" ones.

[linay]

there are things they could do to break addons, but it would break all of them, not just the "black" ones.

If their official stance is they don't want the use of addons, then might as well break them all or it might come off as being hypocritical. At the very least, they could try to break all addons that try to manipulate game data. It would be better than an anti-cheat software.

[Packetdancer]

If their official stance is they don't want the use of addons, then might as well break them all or it might come off as being hypocritical. At the very least, they could try to break all addons that try to manipulate game data. It would be better than an anti-cheat software.

The problem is that any type of add-on prevention will have a tradeoff that everyone else will pay for. I'm not directly familiar with how some of the mods out there work, but based on the way those sort of things usually work—former game developer, so I've seen this from the other side—my take is:

• Preventing the hair/clothing mods could likely be done by forcing an integrity check on all game data on-disk on startup each time, but that would likely make for exceedingly slow startups. (There's caveats here, but the forums limit me to 3000 characters, so I'll just skip them.)
• You could prevent GShade/ReShade type mods which adjust the rendering (tweak colors, change depth-of-field, turn the game into an oil painting or a pencil sketch for screenshots, etc.) by coming up with ways to detect if anything's mucking with the output... though this would potentially also break in-game overlays for other tools like Discord, StreamLabs OBS, etc.
• You can't easily prevent ACT, Teamcraft, etc., by modifying the game itself because those aren't actually touching the game itself; they're literally just entirely-separate applications which watch and process data the game generates, whether as logfiles on disk or as network traffic between the client and server. If I understand right, even the waymark program that's caused all this fuss doesn't even touch the game; it just hijacks the network stream at the Windows level and sends the commands to place waymarks as though it were the client. So the only way to stop that is with the false-positive-prone anticheat software mentioned earlier.

You never want the folks breaking the rules to have the better user experience than the ones following them do, and unfortunately, going down the road of aggressively blocking external mods is a good way to ensure you do precisely that.

[linay]

The problem is that any type of add-on prevention will have a tradeoff that everyone else will pay for. I'm not directly familiar with how some of the mods out there work, but based on the way those sort of things usually work—former game developer, so I've seen this from the other side—my take is:

• Preventing the hair/clothing mods could likely be done by forcing an integrity check on all game data on-disk on startup each time, but that would likely make for exceedingly slow startups. (There's caveats here, but the forums limit me to 3000 characters, so I'll just skip them.)
• You could prevent GShade/ReShade type mods which adjust the rendering (tweak colors, change depth-of-field, turn the game into an oil painting or a pencil sketch for screenshots, etc.) by coming up with ways to detect if anything's mucking with the output... though this would potentially also break in-game overlays for other tools like Discord, StreamLabs OBS, etc.
• You can't easily prevent ACT, Teamcraft, etc., by modifying the game itself because those aren't actually touching the game itself; they're literally just entirely-separate applications which watch and process data the game generates, whether as logfiles on disk or as network traffic between the client and server. If I understand right, the waymark program that's caused all this fuss doesn't even touch the game; it just hijacks the network stream at the Windows level and sends the commands as though it were the client. So the only way to stop that is with the false-positive-prone anticheat software mentioned earlier.

You never want the folks breaking the rules to have the better user experience than the ones following them do, and unfortunately, going down the road of aggressively blocking external mods is a good way to ensure you do precisely that.

I don't think they need to bother with tools that don't modify game data, except perhaps encrypting certain data to prevent data mining.

For those tools that do affect game data, they would of course have to be careful in how they will secure their data, but I don't think it's something they should give up on researching.

[Risvertasashi]

I don't think they need to bother with tools that don't modify game data, except perhaps encrypting certain data to prevent data mining.

For those tools that do affect game data, they would of course have to be careful in how they will secure their data, but I don't think it's something they should give up on researching.

If they really wanted to do this, I think it would be a lot simpler than most people realize.

It's possible to have parts of the running game encrypted in memory, and to have greater protections around especially sensitive parts. I've seen some other games do this when the devs, like the FF14 devs, really don't like the idea of scanning the players' computers. It can be pretty effective. And even if the community "breaks" the encryption within a few weeks, that would be plenty enough to kill its use in say, raid prog, and to make many addon devs give up simply from the effort required. And the FF14 devs could change the scheme every new major patch.

That's just one approach I know from having seen other games' devs do it. I'm not a game dev, so actual game devs may know of other alternatives too.

The downside is, well, this sort of thing doesn't discriminate. It really is scorched earth. And the more certain addons push the limits more and more, SE might feel more tempted to do something like this despite the community backlash they would receive.

Anyways I don't mean this post to say what SE should or shouldn't do (I have other posts for that), but I just want to highlight that SE's passivity shouldn't be taken for granted. With enough of a push, it could change.

[linay]

SE's passivity shouldn't be taken for granted. With enough of a push, it could change.

That's what I think too. And they probably have already started thinking about what they will have to do when people ignore them and tool developers attempt to bypass any restriction they put, or they should anyway after making their stance known.

[Arillyn]

That's what I think too. And they probably have already started thinking about what they will have to do when people ignore them and tool developers attempt to bypass any restriction they put, or they should anyway after making their stance known.

I think you're right. I think this was their "last warning" because the FFXIV community can't seem to not do stupid things. I think this was them putting it out there so when they start tightening things and/or laying down the ban hammer that they can then say "we did warn you it's against TOS".

[Packetdancer]

It's possible to have parts of the running game encrypted in memory, and to have greater protections around especially sensitive parts.

I've never used the problematic waymark tool so I don't actually know how it works for certain, mind you. But were I writing a tool to do that, rather than trying to read things out of memory (which will change from build to build), I'd read what's sent back and forth across the network. A waymark tool might watch and see a series of messages back and forth that are basically "Load Hades EX, connect to instance <whatever>" and then "Waymark A placed at this location", "Waymark B placed at this location", etc. The tool could keep track of this: 'in Hades EX, waymark A at pos1, waymark B at pos 2' and so on. And when you wanted to save the waymarks, it would save that data. Then to put them back, it would just generate the network packets to the FFXIV server as if it were the client: "place waymark A at pos1". So the server accepts the command—it's coming from the right computer, after all—and dutifully sends back to everyone 'Waymark A placed at this location' and everyone sees the waymark appear.

Now, you could probably break the ability to send the commands by putting a sequence number in the packets; if something else uses the next sequence number that the client was expecting to use, you spot that something else has been using your network stream and promptly error out, disconnecting the user. (There's other caveats there, of course. There's always caveats.) But the only way to stop folks reading the network traffic (for things like Teamcraft's automatic inventory updates) would be to encrypt the network traffic, which would have a decent amount of overhead and wouldn't even still be guaranteed to stop it; MITM (man-in-the-middle) security attacks are a thing.

Mind you, that's just a guess; I haven't dug deeply into the FFXIV network protocol. They may already do a sequence number thing and the waymark tool might be handling setting things differently. I'm speaking from the standpoint of "I used to be a video game developer for my day job, saw various shenanigans, and hear from former co-workers and various friends still in the industry about the shenanigans they see", and assuming these shenanigans are not appreciably different than many others.

At any rate, I think if SquareEnix is forced to crack down on mods from an engineering standpoint, writing things to prevent them entirely, it'll introduce new annoyances and inconveniences for everyone else, because that sort of security is never free. Not in that sense. So, y'know, I'd personally prefer they not.

But if the mods truly become enough of a problem to merit it... well, maybe that'll be the price we pay.

[DumdogsWorld]

....

I mean, to be fair, FFXIV is software and software is infinitely malleable if you have the understanding to do so. If people really wanted their combat markers back for statics, it would be child's play for a 3rd party marker overlay to be made. Hook D3D11, extract the various orientation and position matrices of the camera, implement some kind of editor, and use something like the Steamworks API for separate, peer-to-peer networking without passing around IP addresses.

Square Enix encrypting their executable and process memory would be just another gunshot in the war. It wouldn't end - people would just improvise.