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

[0xReki]

Anti-cheat just ruins games.

[LolitaBansheeMeru]

You know I've played games with those things if you have a firewall or have a exel document opened it prevents you from running the game those systems are always way over sensitive lol

[0xReki]

They said it in the Live Letter. You can use Excel to parse the battle log!

[QT_Melon]

They said it in the Live Letter. You can use Excel to parse the battle log!

No, the anti cheat system isn't made by SE - the person above you is saying that one of the issues is that even EXCEL has been known to conflict with the anti-cheat software.

[0xReki]

That was sarcasm. I forgot to bring the sign.

[QT_Melon]

That was sarcasm. I forgot to bring the sign.

Nah it's cool, my bad for not looking to see you had another reply before the one I responded to

[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.

[Melichoir]

Am I misunderstanding something here or is there a large influx of "See see, I told you Parsers were bad!" threads and commentary when that wasnt what YoshiP actually said. Unless I misread the entire thing, his greatest criticism and "Dont do this or youll fined yourself in a six foot deep hole" was regarding third party mods that altered the view of the game (nude mods particularly) and third party programs that directly affected the difficulty of a fight. In regards to ACT and parsing itself, it wasnt a huge offense because at it's core it just takes numbers and information out of the available combat log and displays them for you and that the issue there isnt the parser itself, its the harassment that ensues (though I think that his opinion, while well intentioned, is a bit misguided but I digress). If anything, didnt he say something along the lines of "Stop being so overt about using parsers in streams and such"?

[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.