Concerns about useage of 3rd party applications

[Dragonblanco]

Sorry, I'd like to have put it all here but limited characters per response. I'm cherry picking from transcripts but trying to hit the key points.

Also, one more thing. Talking about tools. Well… recently… especially at the forefront of 5.0 and soon thereafter, we saw a huge boost in the number of players and with that, the definition of ‘’tools’’ became increasingly messy to say the least. It’s kind of getting to the point of collapse in regards to tools… so we would like to clearly address this. Well first of all, this goes without saying and it’s also often addressed, um… the use of external tools is ‘’prohibited’’ and this is what’s written in the ToS. And so if in the case that you ask us if it’s okay to use external tools, out reply will always be ‘’No’’, it’s ‘’NG’’, please don’t use them. In the worst case scenario, there is a possibility that your account will be suspended. Such penalties are definitely possible, so please do not use such tools; this will be our response. However, going further into this one word ‘’tool’’, well, in the perspective of us engineers, well… for example… (sigh) we have Discord right? It’s a voice chat ‘’tool’’ yeah? Well it’s fine to call it a voice chat ‘’application’’ anyways and if you ask what the difference is between a ‘’tool’’ and an ‘’application’’, there is no clear definition for that.

[Dragonblanco]

So yeah, you're kind of seeing where officially not allowed but it's all about how much it interferes with the game and other players.

So like, while playing FFXIV, using Discord, talking to friends who are far away, or like talking to your girlfriend, or your parents, if you ask us if THIS is okay, then it’s like I guess that’s fine. So like, at the end of the day, it stands on the point of the ‘’use’’ and the nuance becomes very difficult. So speaking in that perspective, there is a tool called ACT, and what ACT is, it’s called Advanced Combat Tracker. The most base function of this tool, the base function when simply just installed, when in a battle, in the chat log, there is the battle log right? Like, ‘’Morbol took XXX amount of damage’’ etc. It’s simply just adding all those numbers as they roll out. But… it’s not modifying anything, eh… it’s not remodeling anything, it’s also not… hacking the memory data… eh… even if you tell us it’s just a calculator… but you know… if we are talking about ‘’external tools’’, it’s an ‘’external tool’’. So, it’s bad, you can’t use it. ALRIGHT THEN! In that case, I’ll get a calculator and put it in front of me. Playing FFXIV with one hand and with extreme vigor on the other… (Morbol: You become superman)… Yeah. But you can’t, it’s impossible right. ‘’Then what!?’’ and if asked if a calculator is an external tool, then it’s like, I don’t friggin know, don’t ask(!) (laughs)

[Dragonblanco]

So as officially it's no, grey is still grey

So like, if you do use it, regardless if it’s detectable or not, we may suddenly decide to suspend all users, that’s a risk you take, so we want you to understand that. That’s what I think. And as such, ‘’DON’T. Please don’t do it’’. However, having said all that in a strict manner, grey is still grey, considerably. Okay? What is installed on your personal computer, we do not know. So for example, the thing that I hate the most, it’s fighting a battle with notification like callouts, I really don’t like that……. Um……. That person is using it…… so like….. why am I the only one getting the penalty and not that person….. I don’t think that’s what a ‘’game’’ is supposed to be… so like ‘’Yoshida say’s don’t, so let’s not do it’’, that’s what I want people to do. Like, I often get requests to ‘’draw the line’’… there is no ‘’end’’ to that. Like we just talked about… So… like, then their just like, prohibit ‘’everything’’. It was in the comments just now… but like then what is ‘’everything’’? So like we mentioned, we have no idea what is on the PC’s being used… (Morbol: Yes, we don’t know and there is point in trying to know.) Yeah, no point… Well we can’t anyways and at that point it becomes the topic of private information…

[Dragonblanco]

And just kind of rebuilding what he said and their limitations on enforcing the rules

Yes… though… I think you would know if you thought about it. And also, we sometimes get reports from people where someone is using these tools in a video… and frankly speaking, we honestly don’t know. It might appear as so, in appearance, but like they could just say that it’s the CPU temp and if they don’t make it look like that, they won’t know their CPU temps… So like what the hell do we do? Like we can’t exactly take their PC and investigate it. So like, just as we said earlier, if you take the data coming to the PC and you process that on a calculator, that’s not affecting the server, we can’t even trace it. And if we install a spyware in the FFXIV client to investigate what the user is doing, WE will be sued. Yeah.

[Dragonblanco]

I know, it was a long speech...I could just link to one of the Reddit with the entire things, but meh, putting here for people who hop on to read.

Continuing on, sorry, just a little bit more. Going back to ACT, it has a function where you can add plugins and with this, you can add ‘’expansions’’. And these expansions, are not part of ACT itself, but are creations form further third parties. And such expansions, destroy game balance and it goes in the game memory, and it does bad things, and from our perspective, there are much more malicious ones as well. And in regards to this, we are very serious and the moment we find evidence, the risks of penalties is extremely high and we want you to understand this. Please keep this in mind. Even on our side, we have preventions, actually we started since around 4.0 and we actually added security to the data packets of certain actions so that players can’t decipher it. This was to observe how the plugin creators reacted and responded. And we are changing the methods continuously…. And… we want you to stop. Basically, we set the rewards based on the game balance…. And so we want this to stop.

[Dragonblanco]

Ok, final bit from that interview and has your official answer, though you saw where he was pushing grey area before

Recently a tool was made to ‘’show’’ the attack range/cone of an attack that is not supposed to show any. And this depending on some people, was a very serious issue. Like ‘’you can see every action now!’’. But actually, that’s not quite like that. It’s specifically made, JUST for that one attack, so when the attack comes, they made a visual data that would show the range of the attack. Like, REALLY? You made this JUST for this one attack? … I was REALLY shocked. So like they traced the exact range of cone and made a tool JUST for this one move. Like what the HELL are you doing? So talking about the seriousness of this… it’s not a tool that will make the game an open book, but it’s made with an immense amount of dedication and patience. So when the next savage comes and if you think that this will allow you to see everything, it’s not like that at all. But it’s possible to make one for each and every move, but for that, in the worst case, its data modification in a sense, even though it’s just for that one move, so like it’s completely BLACK. So if we find usage of that, we will immediately throw out penalties. So even just simply calling it a tool, there are tools which give user convenience and like taking a peek inside and moving some things…. Like tools which allows you to macro buttons for faster actions and like we just talked about, tools which goes beyond breaking the game balance, it gives too much convenience and tools which breaks the games difficulty, there is just no way we can accept this. In regards to these, it’s not allowed and if we find you using it and distributing it, penalties will be done. We want to strongly warn you about this.

[MilkieTea]

Ok, final bit from that interview and has your official answer, though you saw where he was pushing grey area before

I’d like to say that while I appreciate this sheer amount of effort, you can circumvent the character limit by posting a few words and then editing that post with the full quote.

[Dragonblanco]

Unlikely for anything to happen. We had the same ~4 people ninja pulling S-ranks for the entirety of Stormblood, even the ones that someone else spent who knows how many hours on to spawn. Pretty safe to assume that they were using some kind of 3rd party software since they would sit in Limsa, or other zones that weren't connected to the spawn location, for hours until an S-rank was spawned. Then as soon as one spawned they'd show up within a minute, without it even being announced anywhere, immediately pull and start killing it.


Nothing ever happened to them, despite actively gloating in chat.

Actually, chances are they are using websites like https://ffxiv.ariyala.com/HuntTracker/ or https://ffxivhunt.com/

Like with ffxivhunt one, you can create or join a group. Once you know when something spawned and was defeated, it can tell you the window for when it will pop again. Obviously these sites don't dig into the server data and is a crowdsourced bit of info, relying on users to witness and report info, but yeah....

[Drakonic]

Sorry, I'd like to have put it all here but limited characters per response. I'm cherry picking from transcripts but trying to hit the key points.

So yeah, you're kind of seeing where officially not allowed but it's all about how much it interferes with the game and other players.

So as officially it's no, grey is still grey

And just kind of rebuilding what he said and their limitations on enforcing the rules

I know, it was a long speech...I could just link to one of the Reddit with the entire things, but meh, putting here for people who hop on to read.

Ok, final bit from that interview and has your official answer, though you saw where he was pushing grey area before

There's a very nifty forum feature called Edit, which you can use to edit your post. Just thought you should be aware!

[SannaR]

I’d like to say that while I appreciate this sheer amount of effort, you can circumvent the character limit by posting a few words and then editing that post with the full quote.

I knew I should have bumped my psa.