Can SQ-EN draw a line in the sand w/ 3rd Parties?

[Kira_Yaeger]

You are not wrong, it just seems people are salty because of possible future problems with raid content? Not that it matters, raids and classes have been getting progressively easier since Midas anyways.

[Saraide]

As much as I like Yoshi P for saving this game and his continued work, his argument that discord, calculators, what have you, constitute as a 3rd party was a totally asinine. Tools that we're discussing here are essentially cheating, they inject code or sniff out data that isn't available to you. I think he needs to rethink his argument.

Is it impossible to have nuance with this? Or does it absolutely have to be 'ban everything'? If its the latter, then that, to me, is a cop out so they can be lazy. Forget the idea in that case.

Call it a cop out if you want, I'd simply call it pragmatic. It's wasted effort to think about where to draw the exact line as long as content is designed to never require third party tool usage. Would we have a massive problem if hello world for example was not cleareable without cactbot? Absolutely, but we dont live in that world. Content being designed without tool usage and preventing people from bullying over perceived bad performance is what's important and how things like ACT could be abused if somehow integrated into the game. A smooth experience for people regularly playing the game is what's important to yoship. What he definitely does not want is throwing blame and reports around with reckless abandon.

A word on XIVAlexander perhaps, this one will likely become more and more risky to use. Personally I think it does more good than harm but that's only because the devs havent really made jobs like machinists playable on higher latency. If that would be solved ingame, then all that would be left of XIVA is just a cheating tool allowing you to do stupid things like 0 animation lock LB3 or triple weaved dragoon jumps with absolutely no risk.

With cactbot there are pretty much two ways of combatting it:

Making information packets increasingly obscure but I honestly doubt that would be more than a futile arms race at the expense of everyone else. We all know that FF14 runs on a lot of hope and duct tape.

Sending information packets very close to displaying the information on screen which is, from what someone told me in this thread on how intermediate relativity works, already something they are doing maybe.

[LittleImp]

Correct me if I'm wrong but i'm pretty sure Cactbot doesn't inject anything to the game, it just reads off the memory or log data ACT gatherers?
CE manipulates the data and will get you banned if it's being detected as would most stuff that being injected to the game, this is why certain type of bots is being banned quicker than others I think.

Cactbot itself does not edit memory, that is correct. It just reads from game memory, and intercepts network packets. It's built on top of ACT, with the FFXIV parsing plugin itself being based on yet another memory/network parsing library.

However, in order for Cactbot to be taught how to understand the memory signatures it's looking at, someone has to go in and identify those memory signatures, with Cheat Engine being a convenient way to go about it. If anyone is interested in the more technical details, Cactbot has an entire section on subject in its docs on github. I won't link directly to it here for obvious reasons.

I just thought it was a funny answer to the idea that humans being involved in the creation of triggers somehow made them more legitimate, particularly when cheat-engine is associated with the process.

[Packetdancer]

I think the argument wasn't that they're more legitimate because people have to work to decipher all the stuff necessary to timeline a fight, but target more that the fact that people have to take the time to decipher all the stuff makes it way less likely that any world-first raiding team is going to be using something like Cactbot during that race.

[Nibelung_Valesti]

The way I look at it, they still gotta do the mechanics. The callouts is no different from a real person saying them.
It saves time to understand and learn abilities and the fights. They don't harm anyone from my pov.

I strongly disagree with you also. The true ability of a raider is to identify the mechanics themselves and figure things out on their own.

These programs need to go right now not tomorrow because one thing leads to another then the situation only gets worst. This includes the parsing and ACT as a whole. All encounters can be learned as you go and completed without any help from third-party tools.

Just play the game and enjoy it the way it is meant to be played.

There are no excuses for that.

[_Koneko_]

Lol, they'd ending up banning all of their big content creators. Brilliant idea that...

they stopped being content creators when they violated the tos and made it appear that breaking the ToS was ok they are infact bad pr

[Sotaris]

I strongly disagree with you also. The true ability of a raider is to identify the mechanics themselves and figure things out on their own.

These programs need to go right now not tomorrow because one thing leads to another then the situation only gets worst. This includes the parsing and ACT as a whole. All encounters can be learned as you go and completed without any help from third-party tools.

Just play the game and enjoy it the way it is meant to be played.

There are no excuses for that.

So what you're saying, even without using cactbot or similar applications to do automatic call-outs, you can't even have a party member do it over voice comm cause that would go against your own comment stating:

The true ability of a raider is to identify the mechanics themselves and figure things out on their own

they stopped being content creators when they violated the tos and made it appear that breaking the ToS was ok they are infact bad pr

That's pretty unreasonable. ACT been used since the begining of the game, heck I'd go as far saying that the devs that plays the game probably use it privately.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

The true ability of a raider is to identify the mechanics themselves and figure things out on their own.

So it’s a group effort or solo effort? Is it a solo duty or a ‘raid’? Guess I’m not a raider cause I help or getting helped by my co-raider’s PoV then? Wow, shame me

[Endariel]

I strongly disagree with you also. The true ability of a raider is to identify the mechanics themselves and figure things out on their own.

These programs need to go right now not tomorrow because one thing leads to another then the situation only gets worst. This includes the parsing and ACT as a whole. All encounters can be learned as you go and completed without any help from third-party tools.

Just play the game and enjoy it the way it is meant to be played.

There are no excuses for that.

That would mean sharing and watching YouTube videos will for learning mechs will be prohibited essentially turning every fight in blind prog.

As for act, i will strongly disagree as well. It helps a lot at being better. You may think you are doing fine while proging ex or savage but in reality you will be doing last expansion dps.
And I'm truly sorry for all the console players that do not have such luxury as the game does a poor job (none in fact) at providing personal performance and contribution

[Izscha]

I dont care about others using it cheating in this game especially PVE content has always been there, even more with fflogs % ( good old padding in old xpac, the top 10 of 100's being 300-400 dps above anyone else because solo card / dragon eye etc, was truly fun to watch leaderboard at the time ).

But i would never ever use those nor play with anyone using it, those player that needs this kind of thing to get a clear disgust me and it's pretty obvious who does that and does not.

( Talking about cacbot and such, ACT is "mandatory" if you truly want to become good at this game dummies isn't enough at all )