Mods and cheat engine

[ForteNightshade]

The tools aren't evil in and of themselves, its completely dependent on the personal conduct of the user. Not to mention some of these "tools" are "free" - you have to ask yourself what information you're giving to some third party to run them. I'd say Square Enix has your best interest in mind in regards to that. Also - its not a grey area - its a full blown TOS violation regardless of platform, and yes it does make it unfair for those who play by the rules.

Yoshida has literally said parsers are a grey area because he knows how much the high-end raid community values them. He may not like them but in a game entirely centered around DPS, they're not going anywhere. The raid scene as a whole would die overnight if all these third party programs were banned and the dev team is well aware of that. Hence why they do nothing about them unless it's made blatantly obvious.

[Saranade]

Yoshida has literally said parsers are a grey area because he knows how much the high-end raid community values them. He may not like them but in a game entirely centered around DPS, they're not going anywhere. The raid scene as a whole would die overnight if all these third party programs were banned and the dev team is well aware of that. Hence why they do nothing about them unless it's made blatantly obvious.

"Indeed, we’ve only released duties that we have proven can be beaten with the game’s standard features." - Yoshi P." - do you need any other clarification?

[ForteNightshade]

"Indeed, we’ve only released duties that we have proven can be beaten with the game’s standard features." - Yoshi P." - do you need any other clarification?

Evidently, you do. This queue doesn't address what I said. Their official stance is not to use third party programs yet they openly acknowledge it's a grey area due to their value and unwillingness to police what we install. The whole point of a grey area is even if something is technically against the rules, said rules will not necessarily enforced unless it becomes a problem.

Yoshida spells this out here.

On the subject on clearing content. I never said people required third party programs to clear content. What I said is the raid scene as a whole would die off because people want to use them. FFlogs literally keeps Savage relevant since there's no reason to even bother with the content unless an Ultimate exists. There are so many basic quality of life plugins a good chunk of players would quit the game on the whole if those were banned. Nevermind the mod community, which is massive nowadays. To give you a perspective on just how prevalent these programs are, the estimated amount of active players using them is over 300k.

Yoshida and the dev team are well aware of just how ubiquitous these programs have become and the impact it would have if they were ever banned. It wouldn't be profitable. Hence why they don't enforce the ToS unless players are harassing others.