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

[solimiano]

For someone who said they're rather calm, you really aren't acting like it. This is basically you having no chill just because one group decided to cheat.



People like you threw insults at other people for wanting to parse their own characters to improve, and denied that disabilities exist. Something SE itself acknowledged and is trying to implement the tools that enable us to get the same type of information slowly into the game so that they don't have to resort to third party tools.

But untill they implement those tools your nothing more than a cheater, you admitted on the official forums you are using third party tools, you broke the tos, your account should be terminated period.
Don't care if you only use it to improve yourself, to get better graphics, because you're colour blind or have disabilities,none of that matters, there's no grey area, there's no use and be quiet about it. All addons are forbidden unless stated otherwise by the developer of the game on the latest statement, not the statement made 5 years ago, the latest one. You and anyone using any kind of add-on are breaking the rules and can be banned at any point for breaking tos.
You want to try your luck and use mods, at least keep your mouth shut, and pray you don't get banned.
I honestly to think there's 2 ways to go forward, either make all mods official and part of the main game or start banning everyone that is using them, if they need to shut the game every day for maintenance to upgrade their mod detection so be it, I'll still pay for my subscription as long as there are no third party add-ons. Either it's official and part of the game or burn it all down.

[Saraide]

But untill they implement those tools your nothing more than a cheater, you admitted on the official forums you are using third party tools, you broke the tos, your account should be terminated period.
Don't care if you only use it to improve yourself, to get better graphics, because you're colour blind or have disabilities,none of that matters, there's no grey area, there's no use and be quiet about it. All addons are forbidden unless stated otherwise by the developer of the game on the latest statement, not the statement made 5 years ago, the latest one. You and anyone using any kind of add-on are breaking the rules and can be banned at any point for breaking tos.
You want to try your luck and use mods, at least keep your mouth shut, and pray you don't get banned.
I honestly to think there's 2 ways to go forward, either make all mods official and part of the main game or start banning everyone that is using them, if they need to shut the game every day for maintenance to upgrade their mod detection so be it, I'll still pay for my subscription as long as there are no third party add-ons. Either it's official and part of the game or burn it all down.

I'm glad you know so much more than the people running this game on this topic.

[Midareyukki]

But untill they implement those tools your nothing more than a cheater, you admitted on the official forums you are using third party tools, you broke the tos, your account should be terminated period.
Don't care if you only use it to improve yourself, to get better graphics, because you're colour blind or have disabilities,none of that matters, there's no grey area, there's no use and be quiet about it. All addons are forbidden unless stated otherwise by the developer of the game on the latest statement, not the statement made 5 years ago, the latest one. You and anyone using any kind of add-on are breaking the rules and can be banned at any point for breaking tos.
You want to try your luck and use mods, at least keep your mouth shut, and pray you don't get banned.
I honestly to think there's 2 ways to go forward, either make all mods official and part of the main game or start banning everyone that is using them, if they need to shut the game every day for maintenance to upgrade their mod detection so be it, I'll still pay for my subscription as long as there are no third party add-ons. Either it's official and part of the game or burn it all down.

...Hmm... then I need some clarification. Not just from you, but from other people who know better. Preferrably a moderator with knowledge on this.

First, I'd like to clarify something myself. I hope you're not expecting Reshade/Gshade. I don't use them because my PC kinda doesn't like it. Last time I used ReShade, it was on Skyrim. SKYRIM of all things, that game's older than gay marriage has been legal in the UK. And the fan started screaming at me. So I doubt my PC would agree with those things being on at all on an MMO. So I don't have it installed, be it on FF14, GW2, PSO2 or whichever other MMO.

The ones I use are in my NVidia card :x They're no different than me tweaking the settings of my monitor. Is Square disallowing me changing my graphic card's settings or my monitor's settings so I can tell hues apart? Because I don't think they can implement a program to scan for addons and block the graphics card. If they do, the graphics card won't work, and thus the game won't render. I doubt it'd even load. Nvidia shaders aren't a third party tool necessarily. They are third-party, but they are just as much as my CPU or monitor are. I kinda can't play without it???

I admitted I use shaders, yes... Nvidia shaders. Because, as I've explained before, changing the saturation down on things like FF14's colourblind mode does is insufficient. I need something to help me tell some stuff apart. And even then, it doesn't give me any upper edge in any case, because even with that on, P3S was a disaster. I can't tell orange apart from orange, some stuff is too faint for me to tell. It's not making stuff brighter or darker that's going to make a change on it, because it's all orange. I'd need a better indicator altogether, and I can't get that unless SE actually goes into the fight and changes how the indicators are displayed. All that I do with my shaders is just change how certain values are rendered so I can tell them apart, making dark stuff darker and bright stuff brighter.

See, this is one of the cases where I wish a mod could step in to clarify, if possible. Because I don't know whether I'm doing wrong or not. For me, this is no different than me changing the brightness setting on my monitor. But illegality isn't up to me, and I'm sorry but not you either, to decide. It's up to Square. And right now, I don't know where Nvidia stands, so I'm not even certain if what I'm using is illegal or not. If it happens to be, then I'd like to be properly informed of it so that, yes, I do stop using it.

[SaitoHikari]

...Hmm... then I need some clarification. Not just from you, but from other people who know better. Preferrably a moderator with knowledge on this.

First, I'd like to clarify something myself. I hope you're not expecting Reshade/Gshade. I don't use them because my PC kinda doesn't like it. Last time I used ReShade, it was on Skyrim. SKYRIM of all things, that game's older than gay marriage has been legal in the UK. And the fan started screaming at me. So I doubt my PC would agree with those things being on at all on an MMO. So I don't have it installed, be it on FF14, GW2, PSO2 or whichever other MMO.

The ones I use are in my NVidia card :x They're no different than me tweaking the settings of my monitor. Is Square disallowing me changing my graphic card's settings or my monitor's settings so I can tell hues apart? Because I don't think they can implement a program to scan for addons and block the graphics card. If they do, the graphics card won't work, and thus the game won't render. I doubt it'd even load. Nvidia shaders aren't a third party tool necessarily. They are third-party, but they are just as much as my CPU or monitor are. I kinda can't play without it???

I admitted I use shaders, yes... Nvidia shaders. Because, as I've explained before, changing the saturation down on things like FF14's colourblind mode does is insufficient. I need something to help me tell some stuff apart. And even then, it doesn't give me any upper edge in any case, because even with that on, P3S was a disaster. I can't tell orange apart from orange, some stuff is too faint for me to tell. It's not making stuff brighter or darker that's going to make a change on it, because it's all orange. I'd need a better indicator altogether, and I can't get that unless SE actually goes into the fight and changes how the indicators are displayed. All that I do with my shaders is just change how certain values are rendered so I can tell them apart, making dark stuff darker and bright stuff brighter.

See, this is one of the cases where I wish a mod could step in to clarify, if possible. Because I don't know whether I'm doing wrong or not. For me, this is no different than me changing the brightness setting on my monitor. But illegality isn't up to me, and I'm sorry but not you either, to decide. It's up to Square. And right now, I don't know where Nvidia stands, so I'm not even certain if what I'm using is illegal or not. If it happens to be, then I'd like to be properly informed of it so that, yes, I do stop using it.

I have no association with SE, but I have moderated for a different MMO in the past.

In the absolute strictest definition, using any third party tool would be a bannable offense, as it is written in the TOS (though it's been years since I last looked at it).

Is it enforceable though? Realistically, no. You need absolute proof that a person is using one, and some of the methods to obtain that absolute proof that SE likely won't ever entertain would run them afoul of privacy laws in some countries. So in order for a player to get banned, they'd either have to openly admit it, or they'd have to get reported along with the person reporting submitting enough proof of their guilt. And even then, SE may still not act for whatever reason, or if they do, they won't tell anyone. And they shouldn't tell anyone of exactly what enforcement actions they take against specific players, because that's how you get empowered Karens in the community thinking like they have a free moral ticket to start abusing the report system. In the MMO that I once moderated for, the moderation staff had a very public presence on the forums, and there were people trying to play politics with us. I myself made the very dumb decision to have played a part in that too, and I do not blame SE one bit for not having a public presence in the XIV forums. I will simply tell you that you don't want empowered Karens in the community.

This is why things like harassment gets moderated far more often at first glance, because the staff can pull up chat logs proving that said harassment took place. I distinctly recall that when I ran E4S with my static group about three years ago, there was a Dragoon who was forcibly yanked out of the instance and placed right into GM gaols. The GM mentioned that they were observing us and were waiting for us to end our raid session for the day, but couldn't wait any longer when we decided to go past our usual end time. What did the Dragoon do to attract the GM's ire? The story goes that during the day before, the Dragoon was in a random E4N party, and he cussed out the healer because the healer (purposefully, as the Dragoon alleges) rescued him into an AoE which got him killed, and said healer presumably reported him for that. The GM otherwise told the Dragoon that he or she was cheering us on in our efforts to clear E4S before letting them off with a warning. The experience told me that SE staff has the power to observe specific instances and maybe even pull up recordings of them too.

So why did they act against this Ultimate raid group for cheating, and not the thousands of people using parsers? The evidence was basically by their own admission, they used third party programs that granted an actual advantage that couldn't be reproduced through normal means, and knowledge of this was very, VERY public. I'd say the harshness of the punishment (which I fully agree with) was probably amplified by the idea that it was as close to an international incident as this game's community could get, considering the Japanese raid community LOVED accusing the NA/EU raid communities of doing the same before this happened. Not only that, knowledge of this incident hit mainstream news in Japan too.

SE's stance on third party programs has consistently remained as such, going off of their behavior:

1) They won't punish you for merely using them, UNLESS...
2) The programs are being used to harass someone else, or granting an actual gameplay advantage. IIRC they didn't go after specific streaming raiders for parsing until toxic Twitch chat started harassing specific players with evidence beyond reasonable doubt that the source could be traced back to the stream.

SE would probably love to ban all use of third party programs, but from a pragmatic standpoint, going after the majority of cases is a waste of time that they simply don't have the manpower for, and would have no real tangible benefit to the community at large. So they only really go after the people that cross into the second point. Of course, the complete irony of someone going on a crusade against people merely using parsers and visual mods, like that Twitter clown, is that they in turn are probably breaking the TOS in a way that SE would consider far more serious. As in, actual harassment.

[solimiano]

...snip.

Honestly I don't know, the initial stance was don't tell, don't get caught, and everything is fine, then the mods kept evolving and all these debacles started happening, it's now the second time Yoshi had to intervene and have a blanket ban on all mods because of some black sheep...
I also can't go into details about shaders since I only have what the ps5 can output, it's not the same as having options in a pc.

Because of a few, now everyone suffers, blanket statement saying all mods are forbidden, and to those that go on about witch hunts and stuff, that was related to the first debacle were the community started mass reporting all the streamers using mods... Streaming with mods visible after the director of the game makes an official post stating all mods are forbidden, what do you really expect.
Same thing now, blanket statement with supporting evidence so noone can say there are grey areas, all and any mods are forbidden.
The best resolution would be to engage with the creators of the mods that serve as qol, and integrate them as part of the official game.
That would without a doubt remove all the excuses to use mods besides cheating.
On the other hand they might go the route of FFXI absolute virtue, wich was impossible to clear when it launched, and if anyone clears it... Well you know they were cheating...
At the end of the day the game belongs to square, they put a statement all mods are forbidden, if they implement some way of checking for said mods and start banning people it won't be pretty.
In terms of the financial side, you also have to take into consideration their culture and how honor is present within it, if it starts making headlines in Japan about overspread cheating, it might actually hurt them more than losing the money from the subs.
To many things for a console peasent like me to consider, but I do hope they move in the right direction