I can only acknowledge world first clears on PS4-5 and so on.

[solimiano]

I would need an external device... That's not playing on PS4/PS5...
It's cheating.
A normal PS4/PS5 player will only use the console and will have no access to add-ons, so access to cheats.

[Avoidy]

I almost want them to scan for 3rd party addons and completely eliminate them, just so the raiders will continue clearing raids just fine and the players who are salty about their low performance at endgame and resort to blaming outside factors will have no argument anymore.

I get where you're coming from but this post reminded me of what happened in the last game I played when they tried to eliminate third party tools and modding, and since I'm bored at work and this thread isn't serious anyway I'll blather on about it.

Basically, Tera did this to try and shut down third party tool use. It was pretty funny how that went down. Essentially it broke the game for people running it on operating systems that weren't windows, it created a ton of false positive reports when it saw device drivers it didn't recognize and assumed they were cheats, and actual cheaters bypassed it within a literal day and posted the bypass instructions on the official forums, where staff supervision was so low that it actually remained up for about a week. Later, the North American branch hosted by Enmasse posted a "zero tolerance" policy on modding of any kind at all, so players responded by uprooting completely and playing on the European version hosted by Gameforge. Generally speaking, Gameforge is a terrible publisher known for milking dead MMOs, but in this singular instance they were quite based; they heard about Enmasse's player flight issue, and created a "new player event" welcoming anybody who "just so happened" to be joining their game for the first time with loads of EXP boosts and catchup events. They basically extended an olive branch to spurned players and gained thousands of new people by profiting off of the North American publisher's stupidity. Enmasse never fully recovered from this loss; their game's community was barren as hell after that and Enmasse completely shut down and handed their game over to Gameforge about a year and a half later. Once Gameforge realized they had no real competition left in the western market, they went back to their scumbag ways and things were pretty bleak for a long time until finally the game closed its doors permanently.

I think if people are being mostly harmless, developers are better off just leaving them be. In tera's case, and in XIV's case, the lead developers of these tools generally give a shit about the long term health of the game and ban cheatier stuff from their platform or at least force users to take extra steps if they want to use the more controversial stuff. In tera's case as well, the devs reached out to the official developers and offered assistance with the game's latency/QoL issues and were quite literally permabanned from the game lmao. Like, I think if you fuck with people who are mostly passionate about your game and just want to help make it better, you're shooting yourself in the foot for no reason. "Spot-ban the idiots but leave everyone else alone" is probably the wisest course of action they can take short of just collaborating with these people so we can all get the "people with high ping can double weave" QoL among others.

All that being said, I do agree that it's funny to see people whine about (for example) third party tools a day after a patch just dropped, when all of that third party stuff is broken anyway. Many don't fully know what they're talking about in this regard and just assume if you memorized a fight's mechanic order to stand OUT preemptively that you're cheating. They just know that some people took a lot of extra steps to gain an advantage, and watching them assume it pertains to anyone who just ... knows a fight well, is amusing. There was a thread about this earlier actually, where some guy complained that cheaters were being too obvious because they were prepositioning lmao

[HeyMcFly]

I would need an external device... That's not playing on PS4/PS5...
It's cheating.
A normal PS4/PS5 player will only use the console and will have no access to add-ons, so access to cheats.

console players actually do have access to that stuff

[solimiano]

console players actually do have access to that stuff

Without jailbreak and use of different devices? As far as I know ( and I know nothing) you can't run you're own code on PS5, PS4 yes, although you by connecting to the PSN you can be put on the list for next banwave... But please do explain.

[Rilifane]

snip

What I find so amusing about the "ban all third-party tools! ban everyone who uses them! give us anti-cheat software that detects it and BANS EVERYONE!" is that many don't realize just how many people use third-party tools. I'm fairly sure that modding your appearance is far more common than parsing. Way more common. Every day I see tons of screenshots with modded hairstyles, clothes, fatcat fairy and whatnot. There's a gigantic community that is really into this sort of thing and I'm not just talking about the RP scene, also that one is filled to the brim with people that use addons for chat bubbles in addition to appearance as well.
Then there's also people with visual impairment that use them to adjust colors or change the shape of markers or the UI.
Thinking that "third-party tool users = parsers = bad, we can ban them all without loss" is so incredibly stupid and naive.

You ban all 3rd party tools and anyone using them and you'd lose far more casual players than raiders and people that parse. But of course, when speaking about banning third-party tool users they usually mean people that parse. Not all people

[Avoidy]

What I find so amusing about the "ban all third-party tools! ban everyone who uses them! give us anti-cheat software that detects it and BANS EVERYONE!" is that many don't realize just how many people use third-party tools. I'm fairly sure that modding your appearance is far more common than parsing. Way more common. Every day I see tons of screenshots with modded hairstyles, clothes, fatcat fairy and whatnot. There's a gigantic community that is really into this sort of thing and I'm not just talking about the RP scene, also that one is filled to the brim with people that use addons for chat bubbles in addition to appearance as well.
Then there's also people with visual impairment that use them to adjust colors or change the shape of markers or the UI.
Thinking that "third-party tool users = parsers = bad, we can ban them all without loss" is so incredibly stupid and naive.

You ban all 3rd party tools and anyone using them and you'd lose far more casual players than raiders and people that parse. But of course, when speaking about banning third-party tool users they usually mean people that parse. Not all people

Yeah people have this idea in their heads of like, the guys who preview the AoEs before they come out and probably just mean those people should be banned. But then they'll propose anticheats that affect everybody whether they cheat or not, or they'll post threads like these where they're assmad over an idiot automating his crafts or other threads will be made where purely cosmetic mods are put on blast just because, and it becomes apparent that some people really do take a no-tolerance stance and want to see folks banned just for using gshade or something. Luckily it's not up to them.

Christ, though. The irony is never lost on me how xigncode's implementation in tera is what pushed so many of my "legit" (i.e. didn't use cheats) friends to begin using third party tools. All of them bit the bullet just to use the xigncode bypass. Then when they learned about all the QoL stuff they were missing out on, they went "in for a penny in for a pound" and started using more advanced cheats. I bet you anything the same route would happen here. I throw a lot of shade at SE but I'll give them credit where it's due for not making a reactionary decision and forcing xigncode on us.

[Ivtrix]

What I find so amusing about the "ban all third-party tools! ban everyone who uses them! give us anti-cheat software that detects it and BANS EVERYONE!" is that many don't realize just how many people use third-party tools. I'm fairly sure that modding your appearance is far more common than parsing. Way more common. Every day I see tons of screenshots with modded hairstyles, clothes, fatcat fairy and whatnot. There's a gigantic community that is really into this sort of thing and I'm not just talking about the RP scene, also that one is filled to the brim with people that use addons for chat bubbles in addition to appearance as well.
Then there's also people with visual impairment that use them to adjust colors or change the shape of markers or the UI.
Thinking that "third-party tool users = parsers = bad, we can ban them all without loss" is so incredibly stupid and naive.

You ban all 3rd party tools and anyone using them and you'd lose far more casual players than raiders and people that parse. But of course, when speaking about banning third-party tool users they usually mean people that parse. Not all people

there are a lot of purists who subscribe to "you must play the game exactly how the developer ships it to you, never complain, and be grateful"

very naive mentality

[SassyAssassin]

Do people really care about these things truthfully?
What does it even matter if someone is first or second at clearing content in a video game?
Do they receive any special items or titles, anything extra?

[Raven2014]

okay we will keep that in mind

You will?

I won't. My brain has other trash to keep up with.

[Absimiliard]

Nobody tell the OP a lot of the console raiders are using third-party tools too.