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

[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.

[Packetdancer]

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.

This quite possibly leads to an escalating cold war between devs and tool authors, though. Folks start hooking DX11 to inject new "cheaty markers" into the game's rendering canvas, so SquareEnix introduces an integrity check and the game quits if anything is mucking about in the graphics pipeline; that shuts down the tool—and things like ReShade—at the cost of other overlays like Discord's, StreamLabs OBS, etc. So now you can't use Discord with FFXIV, and meanwhile the tools devs write their own video driver that acts as a proxy to the real drivers and hook the rendering there, so SquareEnix makes it so that FFXIV only runs on a machine where it can validate the digital signature of the active video driver, so...

It's not a fun path for anyone involved. (Except maybe the tool authors if they genuinely enjoy the challenge of finding the next loophole, which—to be fair—many software engineers do.)

[DumdogsWorld]

snip

I never said it would be a good thing. I just meant that cold wars between devs and tool authors can and do happen. We should hope for the best and prepare for the worst.