The 7th Circle illegitimate waymarks post is a bit laughable

[Panthurrr]

Honestly I'm not even supporting the reasoning behind some of the rules. I do think it would be ideal if SE would at least work with what some of the community who have experience in coding to implement wanted QoL features.

They do work with the community to add QoL features. People with experience in actual development teams know that new features take a more time to implement than they do to code. And as expected, what players may believe is a QoL feature isn't always going to align with what the developers believe is necessary for quality of life.

I would fully expect they have an easier time working with the players of the community that request features through their intended system who play the game following TOS.

I for one love our recent QoL additions of using dynamic resolution and the Aethernet map. I wanted these the moment I started playing the game and it's great to see them implemented.

[Canadane]

I've never seen a more BS reason to ban (even if non permanent) someone

It's just a suspension if it's not permanent.
But modders and cheaters should be dealt with regardless.

[Packetdancer]

Oh this is rich, do go on and explain how not being able to place waymarks in places we should be able to is in our favor

I think Atelier meant that it's hypocritical of the community to pick-and-choose and say some rules should be ignored while we also laud others that work in our favor. I'm not sure I agree, but I didn't read the post as saying specifically that the waymark situation is in our favor.

That said, there's not a good method in the game's own UI to place waymarks when there's no floor to place them on; as a result, I think the core issue here (from SQEX's viewpoint) is not "placing those waymarks is, in and of itself, a bad thing" but rather more likely to be "there's no feasible way to place those waymarks in the game without using third-party modifications, therefore using those waymarks means someone somewhere back at the origin of those waymarks was using mods (which is a thing we do not allow)".

Now, this is not strictly speaking 100% true: as I said, you can edit your waymark file on-disk, since it's saved in your Documents directory. But doing so is an immense pain, can only be done when the game isn't running, and so actually making sure the marks were placed correctly would be a huge pain-in-the-ass of exiting the game, editing the file, logging back in, queuing into P7S, checking that you had positioned the marks correctly -- and if not, exiting the game, editing the file, and repeating.

So, suffice to say, while the existence of the waymarks is not absolute proof someone was running third-party modifications on its own, the process to create out-of-bounds markers without them is so much of a headache -- especially when there are third-party mods which demonstrably make creating those waymarks extremely easy, in comparison -- that it's safe to assume they were, in fact, created through the use of third-party modifications to the game. Which is, in fact, a thing SQEX has said is against the rules.

Or in other words, the issue isn't the waymarks. The waymarks are the smoke, and SQEX almost certainly takes issue with the fire that caused that smoke (e.g. third-party mods), not the smoke itself.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Oh this is rich, do go on and explain how not being able to place waymarks in places we should be able to is in our favor

Cut back with the passive aggressiveness there a bit friend.

I'm just saying we can't be cherry picking rules to follow just to suit our needs.

I mean...you can, I'm not stupid enough to believe that everyone is a saint who follows ToS, but don't complain or whine if you get caught with your pants down by SE for breaking them

[RyuDragnier]

From the way it sounds, the devs seemed to agree that it was a bit unfair to have field transformations with parts showing up that you couldn't set waymarks at. I suspect that will never happen again, as the entire field may change, but every part of it will be available to put markers on at start.

[Jojoya]

Cut back with the passive aggressiveness there a bit friend.

I'm just saying we can't be cherry picking rules to follow just to suit our needs.

I mean...you can, I'm not stupid enough to believe that everyone is a saint who follows ToS, but don't complain or whine if you get caught with your pants down by SE for breaking them

But players can question why the rules exist and what could have been done differently.

We had been able to place waymarkers mid battle until they were exploited using a mod (one of the Ultimates, I think?) to place and move them around much faster than humanly possible. Then SE took that ability away.

Could something else been done instead of taking away a useful function from players who had been playing by the rules?

If SE could investigate to figure out who was responsible for the illicit placement in the current situation, seems like they've got a way to track placements now. Maybe use it and go after the players who are using the waymark mods to do things outside of what's intended.

Use of mods is going to be a problem from here on out with the number of WoW players that now enjoy FFXIV. This is not to say that WoW players, current or former, are cheaters.
But they are coming from a game where use of mods was considered mandatory in any hard content/progression to the point the development team designed encounters around their use. For those players, it is automatic habit to turn to mods as a standard game tool. You're not going to get all of them to refrain from their use when they're seen as a normal part of gaming now.

SE needs to either crack down on mod usage even if that means introducing an anti-cheat program into the game for detection, or they need to start incorporating the functions of the commonly used mods into the game (especially those used for accessibility). To do the latter, they're going to need to open up a dialogue with the player base about where the game's UI functionality can be improved.

[Atelier-Bagur]

But players can question why the rules exist and what could have been done differently.

We had been able to place waymarkers mid battle until they were exploited using a mod (one of the Ultimates, I think?) to place and move them around much faster than humanly possible. Then SE took that ability away.

Could something else been done instead of taking away a useful function from players who had been playing by the rules?

If SE could investigate to figure out who was responsible for the illicit placement in the current situation, seems like they've got a way to track placements now. Maybe use it and go after the players who are using the waymark mods to do things outside of what's intended.

Use of mods is going to be a problem from here on out with the number of WoW players that now enjoy FFXIV. This is not to say that WoW players, current or former, are cheaters.
But they are coming from a game where use of mods was considered mandatory in any hard content/progression to the point the development team designed encounters around their use. For those players, it is automatic habit to turn to mods as a standard game tool. You're not going to get all of them to refrain from their use when they're seen as a normal part of gaming now.

SE needs to either crack down on mod usage even if that means introducing an anti-cheat program into the game for detection, or they need to start incorporating the functions of the commonly used mods into the game (especially those used for accessibility). To do the latter, they're going to need to open up a dialogue with the player base about where the game's UI functionality can be improved.

Its not as if they're not even trying. For years we've been slowly getting updates to the game's UI and thats not ever going to stop them from continuing to add in QoL. Its just the simple case of some of the playerbase getting impatient and going behind their back to mess with the game even though its breaking their ToS.

Again, I'm not advocating for the playerbase to not provide feedback to the dev team to add features to improve the game, but if we end up relying on ourselves to do their job then not only is that not 100% solving the issue since its doing it illegally on their terms but it just lessens the actual attention it deserves if everyone has to be "hush hush" about it. The only thing people getting caught with mods is doing is them screwing themselves to advocate immediate change and I think thats in of itself is stupid.

At least for me, I dont like nor do I enjoy wanting to rely on addons when the current game is perfectly playable on its own. I want those features to be implementing naturally without needing to be discreet about it.

[Packetdancer]

But players can question why the rules exist and what could have been done differently.

We had been able to place waymarkers mid battle until they were exploited using a mod (one of the Ultimates, I think?) to place and move them around much faster than humanly possible. Then SE took that ability away.

Yeah, my understanding is that there was an automated tool which would move the waymarks around mid-fight to indicate what the solution to a mechanic was. Which I tend to think is going way beyond what I'd be comfortable with. There's a lot of mods that are QoL which I personally can't find it in me to have any ethical objection to, but having something solve the mechanic for you and then indicate with markers on the field what that solution is so everyone can just play follow-the-leader with their marker? That's crossing a line. (Or possibly several lines.)

Could something else been done instead of taking away a useful function from players who had been playing by the rules?

From a technical standpoint, no.

If the server allows a player to do a thing, a mod running on a player's computer can do that thing on behalf of the player. So long as waymarks could be shifted mid-combat, there'd be no way to prevent a third-party tool from doing so on a player's behalf. Making it so the server itself refuses to change waymark positions once combat has begun is literally, on a technical level, the only way to prevent that.

When I've said before that if they tried to add an official modding API at this point, it would either be disappointingly limited or else powerful but prone to abuse, this is what I mean; an official API for modding would either need to restrict what you can do to a disappointingly small set of functionality ("no setting waymarks", e.g. no having an add-on that let you manage a library of waymark presets), would run the risk of the official API being used for cheating (i.e., automating mechanic solutions by setting waymarks), or they'd need to rewrite chunks of the game to prevent abuse (i.e., changing the server to no longer accept waymarks being moved once combat starts).

Keep in mind, also, that a lot of times coming up with a tool that does this sort of stuff is not done with malicious intent; many players who get enthusiastic about things and have a technical background will tear the thing apart to see how it works, and the tools they make that do things with what they find are often born of a place of love and enthusiasm for the thing they're modding.

Because if your game is even semi-successful it will almost always have a non-zero number of people who have technical expertise and enough curiosity to pry things open and see what makes them tick, and enough love of your game specifically that they'll regard said game as the 'things' they want to pry open and poke at. And a non-zero percentage of those people will then write tools utilizing what they find because... honestly, writing tools can be fun for those people.

I know this because I am one of those people; I may not write mods for FFXIV (other than shaders included with GShade, which are applicable to many other games as well), but believe me I have done a lot of modding of other games. And despite my statement above that I think a tool automating the solution to a mechanic via follow-the-leader waymarks crossed a line, I will admit I can also absolutely see myself approaching a thing like a puzzle and enthusiastically thinking "oooh, I wonder if I could have a tool that communicates visually in real-time with the party using waymark movements, rather than communicating in text in the chatbox!"

To reference the old Jurassic Park quote: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

SE needs to either crack down on mod usage even if that means introducing an anti-cheat program into the game for detection, or they need to start incorporating the functions of the commonly used mods into the game (especially those used for accessibility). To do the latter, they're going to need to open up a dialogue with the player base about where the game's UI functionality can be improved.

I mean, the real issue is that the only way to make an anti-cheat program truly undefeatable is to load it as privileged code -- e.g. running at a low level of the operating system. Aside from the fact that a lot of anti-cheat software is not well-written enough that I feel comfortable running it at that level of privilege, more than a few anti-cheat programs that run that way cause performance issues.

They do seem more willing to (sort of) open a dialogue with the playerbase about QoL improvements, though; we've already started to see a few changes, like the timers. I hope they'll do more, because I have a lot of opinions about this game's UX choices... and many are not favorable ones. I love this game, but some of their usability choices mystify me.

[Rolder50]

From a technical standpoint, no.

If the server allows a player to do a thing, a mod running on a player's computer can do that thing on behalf of the player. So long as waymarks could be shifted mid-combat, there'd be no way to prevent a third-party tool from doing so on a player's behalf. Making it so the server itself refuses to change waymark positions once combat has begun is literally, on a technical level, the only way to prevent that.

I believe the point being made here was more that, if SE has the ability to track down who placed certain markers, then they should be able to find who is placing them in unusual ways or too fast to be a human. Either with a report or with some kind of automated system depending. No reason to just go with a blanket "No markers in combat ever" if you can track down people with reports.

[Packetdancer]

I believe the point being made here was more that, if SE has the ability to track down who placed certain markers, then they should be able to find who is placing them in unusual ways or too fast to be a human. Either with a report or with some kind of automated system depending. No reason to just go with a blanket "No markers in combat ever" if you can track down people with reports.

Automated systems like that have a tendency to be incomplete at best, and in some cases can even backfire to create a new and worse situation. You'd be surprised how often false positives can crop up.

For instance, if someone is laying out markers manually and happens to hit a spike of lag, now as the server catches up it looks like they placed three waymarks almost instantly... and so they get automatically flagged. "Sure," you say, "but the client can include timestamps of when the waymarks were actually placed, so the server knows it wasn't actually instant." Ah, but then the third-party tool can just alter the timestamps of the waymark movement packets it generates, and we're right back where we started.

Conversely, if you say 'well, you're only allowed to move one marker every GCD once combat starts', that automated tool can still shift waymarks around. It might need to do it more slowly, but if you only need to indicate one of two or three different possibilities, you don't need all the waymarks to do it. 'One marker move per GCD' would be more than enough to use markers to set up a follow-the-markers paint-by-numbers scenario for, say, P5S Devour.

Worse, with any automated tool that flags abuse which isn't 100% spot on (and almost none of them ever are), you run the risk of someone finding a way to abuse that tool. Witness how in New World, people discovered that you could trigger the automatic suspension system on someone's account by reporting infractions in a specific way... and then factions would use that to get the opposing faction suspended en masse right before a PvP war, allowing them to swoop in and claim the other faction's territory unhindered because the other players had been given an automated 24 hour time-out.

Any solution that leaves the ability to move the waymarks mid-combat intact is at best imperfect, and still leaves the door open to a tool finding a loophole (and forcing you to revise your methodology, potentially repeatedly). Conversely, just flat-out removing the ability to shift waymarks around mid-combat at all, full stop, leaves no loopholes and is not exploitable in some new way. And is way, way less work. SQEX is far from the only game developer who would make the choice they did there.