Mods and cheat engine

[Koldan]

All those 3rd party tools just devalues archievements of people, you went out of your way to get certain item/archivement/title and others just cheated their way through? Are you proud of your archivement now? As one of the guys said "i dont care about others, MY gameplay is whats important" is mentality that gets us here. It has zero business to be in multiplayer game, pve or pvp.
Its same shitty people how play monster hunter rise with cheats, one shotting monsters in coop. "whats a big deal"? if you dont understand whats the deal you are either stupid or just dishonest with yourself.

[Saraide]

All those 3rd party tools just devalues archievements of people, you went out of your way to get certain item/archivement/title and others just cheated their way through? Are you proud of your archivement now? As one of the guys said "i dont care about others, MY gameplay is whats important" is mentality that gets us here. It has zero business to be in multiplayer game, pve or pvp.
Its same shitty people how play monster hunter rise with cheats, one shotting monsters in coop. "whats a big deal"? if you dont understand whats the deal you are either stupid or just dishonest with yourself.

Yes, yes I am still proud of what I achieved. No cheater can take that away from me because I did those savage fights for myself, to have fun overcoming them. I'm sorry all you look for is bragging rights. All you have ever fought for will eventually become watered down because more people do it, better strats get developed, new gear gets brought into the game. Are you really having fun doing savage or ultimate? Are you really having fun playing monster hunter? Or is all your enjoyment coming from bragging and feeling superior to someone else?

I get that I shouldn't let cheaters suck the joy out of my hard-earned achievements, but I can't help but feel it like it's a slap in the face whenever I run into someone using a bot to grind a difficult and/or time-consuming achievement like big fishing or the pteradactyl from Firmament points; moreso if they're clout chasers who strut around with their fancy title/mount like they're hot stuff when they didn't lift a finger to get it.

Is it really so terrible to expect/want people to put in a fair, honest effort in getting things done? Cause a lot of people certainly seem to think that's the case.

But is it worth it trying to crack down on all third party programs for that? Fighting against cheaters is often times a futile effort and even the most aggressive anti cheat softwares will still let a lot of cheaters through. Effort that could be spent on more meaningful projects. A lot of third party programs offer solutions to problems the devs cant/wont solve like machinist not being playable at high ping.
There's always going to be clowns who think they're the hot shit, I think the best way to go about it is to just judge people based on how they behave and play instead of what they brag about with. We put far too much notice on titles and medals instead of the path that got us there. If someone is worth interacting with, it will become clear soon enough.

Honestly someone doing nothing else but bragging about titles makes it really quick to find out if they are worth interacting with.

[Packetdancer]

All those 3rd party tools just devalues archievements of people, you went out of your way to get certain item/archivement/title and others just cheated their way through? Are you proud of your archivement now?

So, the Coils raids used to be considered very difficult. But you can now run the Coils raids unsynced, with gear and abilities 40 levels higher, and basically solo them. Does this mean that someone who earned the Domitrix title back in ARR can take less pride in it now that the title is "easily achieved"? The presence of the title might be less impressive now, but I'd argue that most raiders who cleared Coils back then will still take pride in the fact that they did so back then, when they were still really difficult.

Heck, my FC's "Retro Raiders" group did Coils properly, synched down and everything, just last fall. And I can take pleasure in the fact that we managed to get through it properly, even if you can solo them unsynched now.

Similarly, I managed to get through Delubrum Reginae's savage variant prior to Zadnor coming out. Now DR Savage is considerably easier, what with the rays of valour mechanic added with Zadnor; people can go in and skip entire mechanics easily. But the fact that DRS is considerably easier now than when it first came out does nothing to change the fact that I'm happy I was able to clear it back then.

Things becoming easier over time is sort of the nature of ongoing online games where you have some sort of power progression (i.e. leveling of some form). If you allow yourself to be unhappy because other people who achieved something did it more easily than you did as a result of that power creep over time, you'll just make yourself miserable. That's why I, personally, choose not to let myself get upset over someone else using tools to make a fight easier (or even just more accessible to them); if I value my own achievements only by their rarity or perceived difficulty, I'll just drive myself mad.

Now, if we're talking about cheating in PvP, yeah, that's a problem; that's someone's cheating directly and deliberately impeding my ability to work towards an achievement, and I think that's wholly justified in getting upset about.

But "I ran content <X> blind, now people can run it unsynched/use Cactbot for callouts/whatever, so my achievement is lessened"? Nah, I can't find it in me to go with that logic. As I said, that way lies madness and misery, regardless of whether or not stuff like Cactbot exists. (Even aside from the fact that, as I noted, I consider Cactbot little different than having a good human raid-caller in voice chat and thus not really "cheating".)

[Melorie]

Things becoming easier over time is sort of the nature of ongoing online games where you have some sort of power progression (i.e. leveling of some form). If you allow yourself to be unhappy because other people who achieved something did it more easily than you did as a result of that power creep over time, you'll just make yourself miserable. That's why I, personally, choose not to let myself get upset over someone else using tools to make a fight easier (or even just more accessible to them); if I value my own achievements only by their rarity or perceived difficulty, I'll just drive myself mad.

I would even say that, if you're the type of person that looks after hard achievements that brings you a sort of status and remain hard for a longer time, FFXIV is not even the best game for that. The relic you did will be easier, the mount you farmed 1493984 fights to get will appear at the moogle tomestone event, the gear you crafted by yourself before all your friends will be useless next patch, the minion or emote you paid bazigillions will be cheap eventually.
If the value of your achievements is solely dependent if others are able to do it or not, you'll always be disappointed, with or without plugin.


And even so, I'm struggling to find plugins that would really help me get certain achievements. You bet that, if I download cactpot, I still won't be able to land into a random ultimate party and clear it.

[Packetdancer]

You bet that, if I download cactpot, I still won't be able to land into a random ultimate party and clear it.

So, I know this was a typo, but I realized that I'm noticing a lot of things getting conflated in this thread, so it might be worth adding a little clarity.

"Cactpot" is the minigame at the Gold Saucer, both the Jumbo Cactpot (which is basically a lottery once a week) and Mini Cactpot (which is a daily scratch ticket with much smaller prizes). There is a mod that will give you suggestions on which square to scratch on a Mini Cactpot ticket. It doesn't guarantee good results—it's often wrong!—but it gives you the most likely line to have the biggest payout. The math behind that can be done with a pencil and paper or on any number of websites, though, so the mod doesn't give anything other than "convenience" by putting the solver into the game itself rather than on a webpage (or your notebook). This mod was discussed early on in the thread.

"Cactbot" is an addon for ACT (the external tool many raiders use to parse and analyze fights to improve their performance); it's named as a punny reference to the above-mentioned cactpot. Though folks keep referring to specifically the raid callouts it can do, Cactbot itself is basically a scripting engine which allows you to trigger off of and react to data as ACT processes it. So "Cactbot" is actually a collection of a variety of different modules with different purposes built on the same engine, though folks here are basically referring to one specific module.

Now, I don't use the "Raidboss" module in Cactbot that handles callouts (and which is being conflated with Cactbot as a whole); I honestly have no ethical problem with it, but I am the raid-caller in most of my groups and suspect I would find something giving me automated callouts distracting and actively detrimental rather than beneficial. (I mean, I certainly find it distracting when a second actual person decides to chime in with callouts of their own on the voice chat, so I figure I don't need to add a robot to that as well.)

That said, there are a number of other modules built on Cactbot, and the one that I do think is invaluable is "Oopsy Raidsy". When a wipe happens, Oopsy Raidsy will give you a breakdown of deaths and debuffs, showing (for instance) that the NIN died because they took 38k worth of damage when they only had 32k of health (meaning "if they'd been healed more they probably could've survived that"), or that the BRD took 98k worth of damage (meaning "something went wrong here, and healing wouldn't have been any help"). If you click on a death it'll show a log of damage and healing leading up to that death. It'll also show any instances of avoidable damage (i.e. any time someone took a vuln stack or damage down, meaning there was a way to avoid being hit by something there). When a pull goes bad and someone's like "I don't know why I died there" or "okay, did we just need more healing?" or whatever, Oopsy Raidsy can be amazingly valuable at helping a static break down just where everything took a hard left into disaster after a pull turns into a wipe.

There's also the Eureka module, which provides the functionality of the Eureka or Bozja tracker websites (i.e. tracking how long until it's possible to spawn a given Notorious Monster, Skirmish, or Critical Engagement) just in a map window right in game. Stuff like that.

"xivalexander" is a tool which subtracts a best estimate of network round-trip time from the game's inbuilt animation lock, allowing people with terrible ping to double-weave with the same degree of consistency that folks with non-terrible connections to the game can have. It could also hypothetically be used in a cheat-y manner to enable triple-weaving, though one imagines that would trip some alarms on the servers and send up a warning flag that might get someone banned; enabling double-weaving wouldn't, because it would functionally just look the same on the server side as someone who has less-terrible ping. (Because as it is, some jobs -- notably NIN -- are just straight unplayable with bad ping unless you negate the animation lock that gets added on top of that.)

There are other tools, some of which are definitely cheaty. Anything that violates the normal rules of how PvP operates, for instance. Or there used to be a tool that would shift the waymarkers around mid-fight, meaning you didn't even need a raid-caller because it'd be like "Okay, you are marker A, just follow that" and then you went wherever the tool put that marker. That one, Square-Enix quite obviously thought was cheaty, because they addressed it by making it impossible to move or place waymarks once combat begins.

And that's why I think it's hard to speak of "mods" as a single whole. There's stuff like the Mini Cactpot solver or the Eureka module built on Cactbot (which are just convenience, providing information you can get from an external website anyway, or even do by hand for the Cactpot solver). There's stuff like Cactbot's Oopsy Raidsy, which gives no actual performance aid but can be really useful for figuring out where stuff went wrong in prog. There's stuff like Cactbot's Raidboss, which I think is little different than a human raid-caller; yes, it can call some mechanics before a human raid-caller would, but it can call other ones poorly (if at all), so it's still no substitute for learning the mechanics—any more than a raid caller is. There's stuff like xivalexander, which can be cheaty but can also be used to level the playing field. There's stuff out there that's purely aesthetic, like mods to change the UI style or do artistic screenshots or whatnot. And there's stuff out there that's just straight-up cheaty and should absolutely be shut down.

[Melorie]

So, I know this was a typo, but I realized that I'm noticing a lot of things getting conflated in this thread, so it might be worth adding a little clarity.

Ooops! hah Thanks for the correction. And yes, people might branch this discussion as simply "waaah it's against the ToS ban it all" but it is way more nuanced than that. Look at the community built around g-shade, and creating their original characters exactly like they would want... There's a lot of room for creativity with these things, so acting like they're all bad isn't doing anyone favours. Seems over the top imo.

[Packetdancer]

Look at the community built around g-shade, and creating their original characters exactly like they would want... There's a lot of room for creativity with these things, so acting like they're all bad isn't doing anyone favours. Seems over the top imo.

GShade (and other ReShade variants) is kind of an odd duck with regards to third-party software, since the devs have explicitly said—on these forums, even—that they have no problem with it, though they have asked in the past that folks not include the copyright line that the game usually includes in images, just so folks don't mistake it for the stock game. Nvidia's ReShade variant—Freestyle—even lists FFXIV on the officially-supported-software page; if you've got an Nvidia card and are running an even remotely recent version of GeForce Experience, Freestyle's already enabled in-game and you can pull up that particular ReShade variant with Alt+F2 (unless you've changed the keybinding, obviously).

So those are less "unauthorized third-party software" and more "authorized third-party software". I mention this only because that renders them (mostly) irrelevant to the topic at hand.

(Though in the interests of full disclosure, I'm also a contributor to GShade; I write shaders that are included with it and have made bundled presets that are also included. So where my interest in most of the tools folks have brought up in this thread is academic, that one I'll confess to having some actual direct relevance to me.)

[Risvertasashi]

GShade (and other ReShade variants) is kind of an odd duck with regards to third-party software, since the devs have explicitly said—on these forums, even—that they have no problem with it, though they have asked in the past that folks not include the copyright line that the game usually includes in images, just so folks don't mistake it for the stock game. Nvidia's ReShade variant—Freestyle—even lists FFXIV on the officially-supported-software page; if you've got an Nvidia card and are running an even remotely recent version of GeForce Experience, Freestyle's already enabled in-game and you can pull up that particular ReShade variant with Alt+F2 (unless you've changed the keybinding, obviously).

So those are less "unauthorized third-party software" and more "authorized third-party software". I mention this only because that renders them (mostly) irrelevant to the topic at hand.

(Though in the interests of full disclosure, I'm also a contributor to GShade; I write shaders that are included with it and have made bundled presets that are also included. So where my interest in most of the tools folks have brought up in this thread is academic, that one I'll confess to having some actual direct relevance to me.)

The problem here is if you consider this "authorization", SE has also said in interviews they know people are using ACT and don't really have a problem with people using it for self improvement. You can call it "authorized" from that but it's a stretch and you can still get suspended if you say you use it in game. SE's official policy is no third party apps, full stop. They've also noted in a live letter that technically this could include discord or using microsoft excel to calculate DPS.

So, GShade, ReShade, etc aren't really in any better standing. SE's official policy is "just don't use it." For everything, including shaders.

Though, it's also worth noting - on games willing to implement anticheat, they often tell people not to use shaders because, apparently, it looks just like a cheat program in how it interacts with the game. If official anticheat ever comes to FF14, shader mods would probably be in the same boat. (But, probably one more reason SE feels it's not worth it...)

[Koldan]

So, the Coils raids used to be considered very difficult. But you can now run the Coils raids unsynced, with gear and abilities 40 levels higher, and basically solo them. Does this mean that someone who earned the Domitrix title back in ARR can take less pride in it now that the title is "easily achieved"? The presence of the title might be less impressive now, but I'd argue that most raiders who cleared Coils back then will still take pride in the fact that they did so back then, when they were still really difficult.

Heck, my FC's "Retro Raiders" group did Coils properly, synched down and everything, just last fall. And I can take pleasure in the fact that we managed to get through it properly, even if you can solo them unsynched now.

Similarly, I managed to get through Delubrum Reginae's savage variant prior to Zadnor coming out. Now DR Savage is considerably easier, what with the rays of valour mechanic added with Zadnor; people can go in and skip entire mechanics easily. But the fact that DRS is considerably easier now than when it first came out does nothing to change the fact that I'm happy I was able to clear it back then.

Things becoming easier over time is sort of the nature of ongoing online games where you have some sort of power progression (i.e. leveling of some form). If you allow yourself to be unhappy because other people who achieved something did it more easily than you did as a result of that power creep over time, you'll just make yourself miserable. That's why I, personally, choose not to let myself get upset over someone else using tools to make a fight easier (or even just more accessible to them); if I value my own achievements only by their rarity or perceived difficulty, I'll just drive myself mad.

Now, if we're talking about cheating in PvP, yeah, that's a problem; that's someone's cheating directly and deliberately impeding my ability to work towards an achievement, and I think that's wholly justified in getting upset about.

But "I ran content <X> blind, now people can run it unsynched/use Cactbot for callouts/whatever, so my achievement is lessened"? Nah, I can't find it in me to go with that logic. As I said, that way lies madness and misery, regardless of whether or not stuff like Cactbot exists. (Even aside from the fact that, as I noted, I consider Cactbot little different than having a good human raid-caller in voice chat and thus not really "cheating".)

Everything you mentioned is accessible inside the game, everyone can do it.
What we are talking about here are mods/hacks and such that allow you to do something base game doesnt give you, whats so hard to understand?
In mutlplayer environment there is no place to disparity like that.

[Melorie]

Everything you mentioned is accessible inside the game, everyone can do it.
What we are talking about here are mods/hacks and such that allow you to do something base game doesnt give you, whats so hard to understand?
In mutlplayer environment there is no place to disparity like that.

That's the whole point of modding though? They give you something the game doesn't have. Acting like it's giving you things that are destructive to the game though and affect people, is blowing it out of proportion, given it's not the case for the HUGE majority of the people that use them.

At this point, a lot of online games have/had it (E.V.E online, GW2, even RO had specific edits to the .grf to make your map more clear, TERA) and if it wasn't a plugin in-game, it could've been an external thing that gives you information that isn't easily accessible in game (BDO has very complex calculators for example). Even in Dead by Daylight, people customize their icons and other UI stuff with mods... That's the reality of online games nowadays, you can keep losing your mind like some people here because someone is using it, or you play the game like you want to. At this point, it doesn't really matter if you believe if there's "no place", they already have found their way.

It is not willfully ignorant or willfully instigating bringing up pvp when a common argument from people with the same or similar views as you argue “how does it effect you”. To point out there are ones that have a direct effect i think is valid. Just because maybe you or a few others don’t use the pvp ones specifically, doesnt mean others have a moral standing against using them for benefits that are directly against other players

It's true. I don't play PvP. And I think that people that are cheating inside PvP should be punished - I'm just saying that a huge part of the mod community, plugin creators, etc, are very against people creating things that affect others negatively, so when people pick everyone and place them in the same basket, it does seem extremely unfair to me.

I don't do much raiding, I have a terrible ping and I will never have a data center near where I live - you bet that if I tried to do savage or ultimate, I would download xivalexander. Many people I know are able to raid more comfortably because of it. And no one bats an eye because they're using something similar to it. So by all means, fight against bots and cheaters, but I ask that people in this discussion learn to separate things.