Would you be opposed to SE implementing a program to scan for addons/parsers?

[SaitoHikari]

I'm pretty sure Yoshi-P has enough experience playing MMOs to realize that adding any kind of scanning will only achieve 2 things.

1) It'll be a major annoyance to the entire playerbase, possibly resulting in performance drops

2) It'll push the entire third party scene underground, and start an arms race with them.

SE isn't going to do it, when there isn't really any benefit to having it, beyond just simply saying that they have it. They would sooner axe future development of Ultimate raids than to waste resources on this stuff.

[ForteNightshade]

I'm pretty sure Yoshi-P has enough experience playing MMOs to realize that adding any kind of scanning will only achieve 2 things.

1) It'll be a major annoyance to the entire playerbase, possibly resulting in performance drops

2) It'll push the entire third party scene underground, and start an arms race with them.

SE isn't going to do it, when there isn't really any benefit to having it, beyond just simply saying that they have it. They would sooner axe future development of Ultimate raids than to waste resources on this stuff.

This is what most people don't understand. None of the anti-cheat or DRM software has accomplished much of anything except to vastly annoy regular customers. In fact, only Amazon/Twitch has been successful in beating out adblock. Why is that? Because they literally made a division dedicated to doing precisely that. Very few companies want to spend the resources and manpower constantly having update their DRM to compete with users who essentially have potentially all the free time in the world to render their work worthless. Facebook once boasted they had defeated adblock only for their investment to be broken without 48 hours.

None of this accounts for the sheer amount of money they will lose from people quitting the game. In a hypothetical scenario where everything from parsers to mods are blocked with no way of getting them to work underground, a good amount of people using them will unsub. So now you have Square Enix spending millions to maintain and update DRM nobody likes all while losing millions from those unsubbing. Just to say their game is pure. Not exactly a strong selling argument to investors.

[sharknado]

I'm pretty sure Yoshi-P has enough experience playing MMOs to realize that adding any kind of scanning will only achieve 2 things.

1) It'll be a major annoyance to the entire playerbase, possibly resulting in performance drops

2) It'll push the entire third party scene underground, and start an arms race with them.

SE isn't going to do it, when there isn't really any benefit to having it, beyond just simply saying that they have it. They would sooner axe future development of Ultimate raids than to waste resources on this stuff.

Many games scan for processes or for changes in their data files on launch. It doesn't really affect performance nor move apps "underground". Blizzard has a long-lasting experience with this - they banned assets change because aside from looks it could be used for cheating. They also look for running cheating/decompiling apps while the game is running. The downside is that some games go overboard and scan your system while having escalated permissions which allows them to do way more than described.

And hardcore competitive games often do not support non-default display aspect ratios.