Quote Originally Posted by Packetdancer View Post
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.