Yoshi P statement regarding third party tools

[Havenchild]

ITT:

People who won't clear any Ultimate even if you gave them 1000 hours to do so insinuating that world first/streamers can't clear Ultimate without addons.

Although almost all streamers clearing ultimates ARE using addons / ACT callouts and such. And the WF groups also have 9th mans creating scripts / strats for their teams too. It's not everyone but I can pinpoint several streamers who say do UCOB and the entire Nael mechanics is announced for them Stack -> Spread -> In. Same with something like UWU almost all parties use automarkers for Titan Gaols including openly in PF. Sooo yeah you can definitely clear without those things, but lets not act like the average player clearing ultimates is not using one or several of these tools.

[Absurdity]

It's not everyone but I can pinpoint several streamers who say do UCOB and the entire Nael mechanics is announced for them Stack -> Spread -> In.

The Nael mechanic is a funny example because literally nobody, not even the people who can do it without callout triggers, likes that mechanic. Having to look at chat boxes for a mechanic is just terrible design.

[Havenchild]

The Nael mechanic is a funny example because literally nobody, not even the people who can do it without callout triggers, likes that mechanic. Having to look at chat boxes for a mechanic is just terrible design.

Terrible? meh. Different? Absolutely. Is it hard to keep track of? Nope.
Once you are used to reading the queues when they occur (over her head and in chatbox), all you look for is one word and it tells you what is happening (Iron, Fire, High, Moon). That's not exactly different from looking at a bosses cast bar to find out what they are about to do (ala P4S Pinax Teleport), or looking at a Enemy List to guage or read a cast time. Just a different location.

It's long since changed from that stupid paragraph when it first came out.

[Liam_Harper]

Good players can absolutely clear raids without addons. In the hands of a great player, some addons simply become a tool that pushes their gameplay further. I found that with DBM in WoW, you could push your planning, mapping and optimization in ways that a bad player never would regardless of addons.

That said, I don't miss DBM. There is a line you can cross where an addon goes from QoL or self improvement to a straight up advantage over playing the intended way. Addons that call out mechanics before they even happen, show telegraphs when there normally aren't any or automatically assign markers are crossing that line imo. I don't think players are automatically "bad" for using them, but we don't need them in the game either.
Auto markers for Titan gaols is one of those things where SE dropped the ball too. They admitted that mechanic was badly designed and never fixed it.

As for telling us to stop using parsers, that can be yawned at. I dare them to ban all parsing. See what happens. They know they won't. I'm also not really happy they're acknowledging mods, addons and mostly harmless QoL programs when bots are still ignored and are a massive issue that completely destroy the ToS.

[ForteNightshade]

Please ban everyone using mods.


Yoshida has said they (mods, hacks, etc.) are illegal and there's no way players can justify their use.

Based on the download statistics alone, it's now estimated well over 300,000 players use one or more of these programs. The mod discord alone has nearly 100,000 members. To put these numbers into perspective. If only 20%, 1/5th up and quit instantly over these programs suddenly being blocked, SE stands to lose roughly $800,000 monthly. Nearly a million dollars is just thrown away monthly for literally nothing. There's no actual benefit for Square Enix. And this is a rather low estimate.

Put simply, there is zero chance Square Enix would even allow Yoshida to do anything significant to these programs regardless of his stance due to the financial loss.

As for telling us to stop using parsers, that can be yawned at. I dare them to ban all parsing. See what happens. They know they won't. I'm also not really happy they're acknowledging mods, addons and mostly harmless QoL programs when bots are still ignored and are a massive issue that completely destroy the ToS.

I suspect it's because mods and Plugins have become increasingly more widespread, especially on Twitch. It doesn't look particularly good on them when modders, for example, are implementing things like Hrothgar hair after the massive backlash towards their abominations. Meanwhile, those invisible bots go unnoticed by the masses. It really does reinforce how reactionary SE tends to be. Only if something slaps them in the face, repeatedly, do they actually do anything about it.

[Doc_Seraph]

Kupo, information is not illegal it is what you do with the information kupo <3

[Imora]

None of is strictly illegal because it's not breaking law. ToS violations are not illegal and I will die on this hill. In game rules are not legal issues, no one is getting criminal marks for using parser.

Argh this bothers the hell out of me.

[Arrius]

That said, I don't miss DBM. There is a line you can cross where an addon goes from QoL or self improvement to a straight up advantage over playing the intended way. Addons that call out mechanics before they even happen, show telegraphs when there normally aren't any or automatically assign markers are crossing that line imo. I don't think players are automatically "bad" for using them, but we don't need them in the game either.
Auto markers for Titan gaols is one of those things where SE dropped the ball too. They admitted that mechanic was badly designed and never fixed it.

Thing is, DBM and WeakAuras have become something of a necessity due to Blizzard not polishing their own UI properly to be workable even in a raid environment, and instead rolling it off to the community to fill the gaps. And we already saw the problems that come with those, forcing players to have certain add-ons or risk exclusion from raids. Not to mention the drama about weakaura macros that automatically did /spit on those who were using deluxe edition mounts on classic.

[Packetdancer]

Good players can absolutely clear raids without addons. In the hands of a great player, some addons simply become a tool that pushes their gameplay further. I found that with DBM in WoW, you could push your planning, mapping and optimization in ways that a bad player never would regardless of addons.

I'll be bluntly honest: the single most useful third-party tool I've seen in this game isn't one that helps you clear anything, but tells you why you didn't. There's an ACT addon called "Oopsie Raidsy" which literally just dumps out a list post-encounter showing who took what avoidable damage (e.g. something that gives you a vuln or damage down), and for any death it shows what the most recent thing that damaged the player was -- and how much damage they took, versus how much health they had.

I think that's an excellent example of the sort of QoL mod that helps a good raider become better. (Or at least, helps a static become better.)

You can do the fight just as well without it -- it provides no benefit during a pull -- but from everything I've seen it can be extremely useful for helping a static figure out where something's going wrong afterwards. Did that DPS die to being clipped by an avoidable mechanic that turned the unavoidable one into a one-shot, or did they just not have enough healing before the unavoidable one? If someone takes 200k+ of damage in one go, it's pretty likely they got clipped by something (or did a mechanic wrong), and the healer couldn't have done much to get them through it. If someone dies to 23k of damage when they had 18k health out of their total 53k max health? That's probably on the healer, not the player who hit the floor.

It's basically the same as taking a VOD of the pull and rewinding it to watch carefully for what went wrong, except already expressed in a convenient data format to save time.

So if there were anything inspired by a mod they were going to add into the game other than general QoL UI/UX tweaks, I would absolutely want it to be that: not something that makes the actual fight easier, but some sort of optional post-fight damage breakdown or timeline you could review. (Or at least, one in a format that's easier to read than trying to scroll through the "Combat" tab to find the right line.)

That said, I don't miss DBM. There is a line you can cross where an addon goes from QoL or self improvement to a straight up advantage over playing the intended way. Addons that call out mechanics before they even happen, show telegraphs when there normally aren't any or automatically assign markers are crossing that line imo. I don't think players are automatically "bad" for using them, but we don't need them in the game either.

As I've said before, I don't care too much if people use those. I think it's a problem if they rely on them, but I think it's a problem if a group relies on me as a shot-caller, too. Because it's unquestionably a potential problem if you can't raid without the mod doing callouts... but I'm not sure it's a worse (or even fundamentally different) problem than if you can't raid if your shot-caller misses a week or has laryngitis or whatever.

A shot-caller -- human or otherwise -- should only ever be a sanity check on your own read of mechanics, for if you happened to be looking away or turned the wrong direction to see the telegraph or whatever. They are not instructions to be blindly followed. If you use those mods only as a sanity check on your own read, I'm not going to judge.

If you use them to blindly tell you where to go rather than even trying to read them yourself... well, I'm going to admit I think that you're doing yourself no favors. Especially if it means you are completely unable to raid on patch days. Because if I encounter you in PF and you can't do a single mechanic because your automated callouts are broken... maybe I won't judge you for it, but I'll probably be at least mildly annoyed.