Quote Originally Posted by LisSquid View Post
Reading through 14 pages of this thread makes me realize that there is an amazing lack of experience with addons. I developed addons for WoW and ESO way back, and nothing about them would give any clear advantage to FFXIV's base besides a QoL. Cactbot makes me laugh, just because SE does a phenomenal job telegraphing all the things DBM does for WoW. Been in one of those "Cactbot mandatory" statics. Never had it myself, and never advertised that I didn't. Was never called out on it just because you really get no advantage over someone just paying attention.

Funny story I have about Cactbot: I had someone in a group who really wanted to use it, and we begrudgingly let him put his bot in the Discord VC. It was so disruptive and distracting (literally talking over player calls), that we had a unanimous vote to ban it.

But, yeah, the only way to stop these are with invasive software, which other posters have said. It opens a lot of other security risks, and not sure SE wants to bother with it. When these mods actually break the game in a way that ruins the experience of another player, SE takes action. Parsers and the like don't even begin to encroach on that level of abuse, however.
All addons regardless of how you decide to classify them are used in violation of the ToS. You can spin it however you like. That is the absolute fact.