At this point will FFXIV collapse if all mods and third party tools disappear?

[Shurrikhan]

First step is getting people who don't care about how they play to care. At the end of the day, people are paying a sub to do whatever they want in the game. If someone wants to spend 6h ERPing in a house before spamming Cure 1 in all roulettes, why would they bother to care about doing more damage or optimizing?

The analysis would be good for those who want it but completely ignored by those who don't and the problem still wouldn't be solved for anyone who wants people to perform at their best.

I feel like we too often assume that those who don't care do so out of willful avoidance rather than simply because they haven't been given a reason to find the learning itself engaging. Most people learn when learning is fun. Yes, some part of that incentive can rely on externalities like progression, but they can only go so far without becoming self-defeating; at the end of the day, a lot relies on intrinsics -- namely how the experience itself frames that learning.

If tiny fraction of a percent of players will nonetheless purposely play poorly out of spite, sure, there's no helping that, and likely even an otherwise very conservative/lenient/"hyper-accessible" level of gatekeeping will, well, gatekeep them, likely for the best for the game's total population regardless (given how many would leave over otherwise dealing with them). But I suspect more can be given reason to enjoy that learning and thereby end up caring simply as a side-effect.

[Snorky]

Hahahahaha hahahah this thread hahahha

[myssy]

^
Honestly the biggest issue with the modding community.

They don't know where to draw the line and keep pushing the boundries of what they can get away with, i really hope SQE do crack down and they might learn their lesson.
I used twitter for a few days and was just bombarded with hardcore XIV porn on a constant basis, and it was disgusting. If that is what the playerbase has become, SQE should have cracked down earlier.

This! All 3rd party programs are not ok just doesn't work. We need to draw the line somewhere and it's SE's job to draw the line. For example there is a huge difference between using discord, getting a hat mode for viera, using ACT, using cactbot, housing mods, botting ones that automate crafting & gathering or botting an ultimate or market board. All add ons are not the same and shouldn't be treated the same way. All 3rd party programs are against toss benefits most the people who stretch the rules furthest. We need more open discussion like wow where dews are clear about what is ok and what is not.

Other thing i don't understand why people say that they are ok with mods, i'm personally ok with some of them but for me i don't like botting mods and feel they are unfair. Are you really ok with all mods and not just some?

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

They keep pushing it, yes. I'm just glad that it isn't so invasive like weakauras for WoW where the Dev team admitted that they made encounters and trash mobs so annoying and full of mechanics because they built around weakauras and the such instead of banning that addon entirely. Now the wall to get into high M+ and Raiding is too high and if you aren't using those addons then you're a liability and will be kicked.

[Raikai]

They keep pushing it, yes. I'm just glad that it isn't so invasive like weakauras for WoW where the Dev team admitted that they made encounters and trash mobs so annoying and full of mechanics because they built around weakauras and the such instead of banning that addon entirely. Now the wall to get into high M+ and Raiding is too high and if you aren't using those addons then you're a liability and will be kicked.

That's an unfortunate truth, and one of the things that when I played WoW drove me off any kind of serious PVE harder than mild m+ or normal modes. The idea of having to keep up with multiple addons that are constantly updating to keep competitive was really obnoxious.

On the OP, I don't think that this kind of crusade against 3rd party things of any kind will ever happen, because even if the game doesn't die or near close to it, the corporate would scream louder at the subscription leak that it would cause.

At best, I could see them just upgrading their code infrastructure and there's a (possibly predicted?) side-effect of that causing 3rd party software to bug out. Regarding visual mods, I'm also curious to see whether or not the graphic upgrade background workings will break everything for them.

[Xaruko_Nexume]

I don't think so. People who use mods is a very small percentage of player base despite what people in this forums says. Even the people who uses it will shrug and continue playing without them. You also should count the people who plays on consoles, which cannot use mods even if they want. I would say only very small mount will actually quit if they can't mod.

I wish it wouldn't violate TOS to prove just how wrong you are.

[myssy]

They keep pushing it, yes. I'm just glad that it isn't so invasive like weakauras for WoW where the Dev team admitted that they made encounters and trash mobs so annoying and full of mechanics because they built around weakauras and the such instead of banning that addon entirely. Now the wall to get into high M+ and Raiding is too high and if you aren't using those addons then you're a liability and will be kicked.

That is actually what i'm worried about. Ffxiv has gotten More add ons and they just keep coming Will add ons affect on how people expect others to learn on a learning parties when they have add ons that help them learn faster or help them being more consistent.

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

That's an unfortunate truth, and one of the things that when I played WoW drove me off any kind of serious PVE harder than mild m+ or normal modes. The idea of having to keep up with multiple addons that are constantly updating to keep competitive was really obnoxious.

On the OP, I don't think that this kind of crusade against 3rd party things of any kind will ever happen, because even if the game doesn't die or near close to it, the corporate would scream louder at the subscription leak that it would cause.

At best, I could see them just upgrading their code infrastructure and there's a (possibly predicted?) side-effect of that causing 3rd party software to bug out. Regarding visual mods, I'm also curious to see whether or not the graphic upgrade background workings will break everything for them.

Oh yeah... The add-on race in WoW is why I hate healing. Blizzard keeps balancing around the top players and weakauras. It is extremely stressful to heal on high M+ even with the best addons. I gave up caring, as I cannot even Raid as Raiders are expected to do M+ for gear just to get in as Raid drops are all RNG based and it never drops enough loot. While M+ gives loot much faster.

[Jojoya]

I wish it wouldn't violate TOS to prove just how wrong you are.

Tell the mod community to unsub for all of patch 6.5 and only return for 7.0. That doesn't violate the ToS and would demonstrate just how much (or how little) of the community only plays because of mods.

[Sindele]

Leaving aside any technical discussion about whether they can put the lid on the box even if they want to:

The hit would be massive, but survivable. Anyone saying it would be insignificant literally just hasn't been paying attention; anyone saying it would be fatal is drawing wrong conclusions from bad data.

Some fairly conservative estimates of how many people are using tools and what percentage would quit quickly sum up to wiping out two entire NA servers worth of endgame population - a number pushing up against 8 digits of annual revenue. This is the kind of number that draws immediate and overwhelming attention from the C-suite, and absolutely the kind of number that ends careers. However, it's also not that big of a number weighed against the totality of the playerbase and revenue generated. Even more generous estimates don't come close to the existentially-dangerous level for the entire game, though they would most certainly come with an increasing amount of heads rolling.

One of the most fundamental problems here is that if you tacitly allow a greater deal of personal expression in how people see their characters, you have a very large problem on your hands if you want to take that back. People get attached to their characters and their perception of those characters, and they are nearly never willing to 'hand it back'. This is one thing that I think the more conservative estimates miss - sure, for gameplay tool users, you probably won't see that high of an attrition rate. But visual modders? You'd lose so, so many of them, and you'll never get them back.

If it needed to be solved, the time to solve it was 4 years ago. It's far, far too late now.