Third party tools are a game design failing in a multi-platform game

[Droxybrobotnik]

Selfish pleb? You looking into mirror or something? God and people wonder why us PC players are viewed as self-centered assholes.

This really isn't hard to understand. There is the game as it is, and while you don't need anything else to play it just fine, being on PC means you can install user made content for a personalized experience.
And the vast majority of these mods are harmless fluff or assists with incredibly unimportant things, like cactpot. The amount of people who actually uses addons to cheat mechanics is very small.
The "pleb" remark is not for being on console. It's for examplifying the uninformed gamer who is mad he can't have the stuff people on PC does, despite knowing he bought a cheaper and more limited system.
You get called what you are. I'd love if this just died down because nothing has changed at all, just that since some random jp dude got banned for using ACT this is suddenly on the radar, and the collective ignorance of the community comes out.
And it mostly seem to be from the console side.

[Johners]

Snip

This recent situation just highlights several friction points in the global community of this game that reflect cultural norms around modding, the platform choices players have made and even just people's desire to use mods/addons in MMOs full stop. Given that World of Warcraft was a titan in the Western MMO market for so long, there's a big cultural around using third party tools even if we'd prefer not to but this doesn't exist in Japan were a large portion of FFXIV player base was and still is from. Not to mention the platform divide as a cross-platform game which is why many other online games have a strict no third party tools rule for PC players.

The problem is downstream from Square Enix's inability to actually enforce their own terms of service. The vast majority of these tools run client-side and without protection mechanisms in place to detect and moderate what interacts with the game client, they're unable to have an actual moderation stance beyond picking off users that broadcast third party tool usage via Twitch and other social media platforms. The lack of any anti-cheat is astounding when you consider it's norm for online-only games on PC, even those without console versions.

That said, an anti-cheat alone doesn't truly solve the problem as a small portion of tools will always get through any cracks and SE would still need a moderation stance. Riot Games, for example, are very strict and their anti-cheat will either refuse to start the game or kick you from it if anything unusual is detected. As a comparison point, Blizzard typically opt for ban waves in games such as World of Warcraft based on what their anti-cheat detects and the investigations they run internally. Neither approach is right nor wrong and ultimately reflect the genres they're in. Nobody wants an FPS game filled with hackers so just kicking people that seem "sus" is better than having obvious cheaters ruin lobbies. Likewise you wouldn't an anti-cheat throwing a wobbly, potentially, during a raid or Mythic+ dungeon in World of Warcraft so banning after internal investigations works better there.

If you read the statement Square Enix released the other day, it's pretty telling that they're unaware to the extend of third-party tools available to this game. That's also a failing in my opinion because at the very least, if they're not going to correctly enforce a terms of service, they should at least be documenting all the ways it's being broken via the range of plugins available publicly on the internet to better inform their game design choices rather than waiting for outrages like this to occur.