Did SE threaten to not make ultimates anymore?

[Midareyukki]

And your playing a story based game... Because?

Why do you care this much? xD

[Amenara]

And your playing a story based game... Because?

I play an MMORPG because I have friends I like hanging out with and I am enjoying my new house? One day people will realize not everyone plays FFXIV for the story as shocking as it may seem to those who are enthralled by the game's story.

[Renathras]

Then you venture into parsers which impact the game is a massive way. Those rotation every one of us uses from the Balance? All mathed out via a parser.

I suspect this IS largely true, but it actually isn't necessary. The game lists all ability potencies, including modifiers. The only thing that require parsers is determining optimal melds (since the game doesn't tell us Crit % and stuff like that, so those things have to be parsed out via training dummy or whatnot). But in strict terms, rotations can be mathed out using the potencies. I've done it before to compare parts of rotations or make a priority system for myself when things like expansions happen and The Balance hasn't released their updated stuff yet. The tricky part is factoring in all the party buff interactions and making something that's general across all compositions to get everything lined up, but that's more overall knowledge of all the Jobs than it is parsers.

Honestly, there are a lot of add-ons that are innocuous, and many players don't use any at all, not even shaders. Never used any myself. But it's the more cheat-y ones that make the rest look bad and force Yoshi P away from a "don't ask, don't tell" policy into one of heavy-handed enforcement.

I think I remember reading the number was around 10-20% or so depending on the data center and server. I could be wrong though. It would make sense though based on what I've seen in game. These weapons aren't exactly a rare sight, but they are cool all the same.

Wasn't this Savage?

I think Savage is higher now (something like 30% have at least attempted or cleared, I forget which, P1S/P5S, something like 15-25% [median 20?] have completed the final fight of a current tier), but Ultimates are still pretty small, something like 5% or less clear and maybe 10-15% attempt? Though who knows what the real numbers are.

Which mount or title do you value more? Which experience will you fondly (or not so fondly) share with your friends? Likely not the one you cheesed (whether that be running it unsync or cheating).

I get where you're going, but I'd be careful with such a broad brush. Unsync isn't cheating, it's something the game allows for people later on to try something with a handicap, much like how Echo is implemented after a certain point to help more people clear content. I have a lot of fond memories of running old content. I unsynced Coils in ShB after clearing Turn 5 years ago in ARR (need a friend to help with Nail, so I caught her up and then we finished the rest together), and hell yeah I valued it. Running content with a friend and then being smacked with that in-game CGI cutscene after the second to last fight was an amazing feeling. It was like finishing ARR's story for the first time, and I've recommended it to others (and helped a couple people run it) since then because of how it's the "true conclusion" to both the 1.X and 2.0 stories.

Likewise, I've done many Extremes to farm or just get a clear on. I still remember soloing Sophia Ex (the last Ex I hadn't done) on PLD in the middle of Endwalker, and remember PF runs of Alex 9 Savage for Lux farming with other people at 80, level 60 at the end of HW farming Tank mounts running Garuda unsynced, running Susaku 99 times and buying her mount with the totems because it just WOULD. NOT. DROP! lol Chain running dungeons unsynced with a friend I met there in Swiftperch to finish my first Zodiac Relic as said new friend was finishing their last.

I fondly remember a lot of things done unsynced.

There's quite a bit of difference between "trying something years later when people aren't really doing it anymore, but within the game rules to see the content and maybe challenge yourself" vs "actively using against the rules tools to access things you aren't supposed to that gives you an advantage over the other people not doing it".

No one unsyncing a raid is cheating their way to a world first.

I do think your first line, however, is right; that this is Yoshi asking people "Why are you doing this? Do you not see how it invalidates your own efforts?"

And before we have a return to last night's dumpster fire of a discussion, no I'm not defending cheating nor am I downplaying cheat mods, I just keep seeing this idea of "cheat mods = no effort required" passed around and it doesn't help matters at all.

No one's saying it plays the game for the, but it does REDUCE the effort required. Say you want some hard content. You want a 9 or 10 out of 10 difficulty. The Developers give you a 9. you then use mods which make it a 7. Sure, it still requires EFFORT - you aren't just setting your controller down and getting a clear - but you've reduced the threshold of difficulty to below what it was; below what you even were asking for it to be.

I think that's what people are saying.

.

To the OP:

It sounds like a little of both. Like he's debating the point of making this content if people are going to cheat it, but it could be more him asking the question to himself (do we make more?), him asking the playerbase (why are you cheating?), or him speaking in a general sense (why do we fight?)

[CaptainLagbeard]

They could always just not care about the world first races... Just drop in the content like any other patch, put the servers up whenever they're ready instead of artificially lengthening the maintenance for the sake of a small minority of players.

And with less of a race, there's less incentive to cheat.

[Shurrikhan]

I don't think it's made as an attempt at threat. It does feel more like self-reflection, and probably more importantly, an attempt at trying to position the community participating to actually reflect on how they approach content.

This seems like it'd make the most sense, if only because that's a worthwhile or even necessary tack to take before content increasingly comes into an arms race with mods or has to try to limit all players' freedoms to outpace them. Ultimate is its own beast and doesn't provide nearly great enough rewards, one would think, to damn its own experience by replacing them with slapdash mod-UI warnings and the like... so long as the experience would thereby feel lessened for those players. As for those who care only for the extrinsic rewards even then, well, that probably shouldn't be the groups around which Ultimate (or anything else) is designed.

That said, it does leave some obvious cues out of the conversation. Generally, the more unintuitive or "unfair" a mechanic appears to be, even if other forms of difficulty are lauded, might not be considered a loss when dispensed with via a mod, and since mods have little reason to be so finely tunable as to differentiate, say, mechanics that offer no indicating beyond subtle floor markings from ones that have cleanly decipherable visual cues, the more a fight is laden with especially finnicky mechanics that aren't proportionately that much more fun to the average runner, the higher chance people are to just mod it. And that's to say nothing for the greatest-reasonable-requirements of PuG-life (memorize video guide, have mods, etc., etc.).

[RobynDaBank]

They could always just not care about the world first races... Just drop in the content like any other patch, put the servers up whenever they're ready instead of artificially lengthening the maintenance for the sake of a small minority of players.

And with less of a race, there's less incentive to cheat.

But they don't officially endorse the race in any way, do they?

[Midareyukki]

But they don't officially endorse the race in any way, do they?

Officially? Square doesn't care.

Yoshida does acknowledge it, however, and said

If the illicit use of third-party tools is made clear through our investigations, I, at the very least, will not recognize that team as the true World First.

So he views it more like a fun community-driven sport than necessarily anything SE pushes groups to do.

[Shurrikhan]

Those rotation every one of us uses from the Balance? All mathed out via a parser.

Technically, they're mathed out via the relative potencies themselves, not via any crunching of the battle log. Raw damage parsers are notoriously confounded by random damage variances (in our case, via Critical Hit, and Direct Hit chances and the ±5% deviation on all non-HP-based throughput actions).

Then you have gameplay testing to see that nothing was missed (no impossibilities in weave that normal models didn't catch, such as from an ability randomly having a longer-than-normal ICD/"animation lock period" or having effectively less duration than stated, as with old Blood Weapon). Finally, then, a shitton of controlled tests will eventually test the theory via parsers, but that's the final step, and typically the least necessary.

Parsers are how a random player may learn, given enough data points, what's preferable in a given situation --including ones not generally worth optimizer's interest (since, why should raiders care about unaligned dungeon pulls, etc.?)-- but it's not where anyone working on the level of The Balance is going to start from.

Agreed on the rest, though.

[CaptainLagbeard]

But they don't officially endorse the race in any way, do they?

They don't endorse it, but they go out of their way to facilitate and then keep a close eye on it...

They seem to want them to happen, but they won't hand out any rewards outside of maybe a mention for it.

And then they get upset when people in a competitive environment they created try to get an advantage.

[Arazehl]

I think a lot gets misconstrued in these forums not just this one comment from Yoshida. I didn't read Yoshida's words as a threat, but to drive a point home towards creating content that the player base asked for, only to have it cleared by advantageous means that is unfair to good number of the ffxiv population who try to do the content by the book and it's rules. Why there is a thread like this when what he said was pretty plain, is the bigger question to me. Learn the difference in a threat and making a point I say.