Quote Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa View Post
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You know they'd only be able to fully detect cheating with an anti-cheat, right? That's the entire point of anti-cheat software being part of multiplayer games. The difference maker between say an MMO and an FPS game is the enforcement policy. In a game like Valorant, for example, you'll want to remove cheaters as quickly as you detect them due to the game relying on quick matchmaking and rounds lasting around 30 minutes. In an MMO, such as World of Warcraft of Final Fantasy XIV, ban waves are methodical and are timed for impact.

I think WoW serves as two great examples for XIV to be honest. The first being in how far players push the officially supported LUA-based addon framework and the second being in how ban waves should be handled. Blizzard control the addon framework in WoW and even with the ability to change or remove functionality on the fly (they can live patch the game without needing to do server/client restarts these days), players have really pushed the boundaries to an extent that Square Enix doesn't want in this game.

As for cheating, you only need to look at the Honorbuddy ban waves in Warlords of Draenor and Legion. For context, Honorbuddy was a paid cheat that included a rotation bot. This wasn't boss timers which the game allows via the LUA addon framework, it was an external program playing your rotation for you. After identifying the tool and players using it via anti-cheat data (plus the fact they log everything you do in-game), the ban waves were issued. Except it wasn't done quietly or in the middle of the night, they chose peak hours when everyone is online and most likely to be raiding. MMOs are social games and thanks to platforms like Reddit and the official WoW forums, news spread fast. Your top 2 or 3 DPS players that suddenly went offline? Probably cheating, especially if they never came back online.

The removing of titles, weapons and achievement from the Japanese static that cheated in TOP is great but they've made an example from one prominent team. This kind of enforcement also needs to be targeted at the normal, non-streaming and non-world first players also. I'd probably extend it into savage (cheaters play there), ranked PvP (cheaters and win traders play there) and even crafting (you think all those people are actually crafting 6+ hours every day legitimately?). Actively and openly removing the rewards from cheating is a great enforcement policy. It's a social game, turn the social against them. It does work.