You're a Disgrace

[Seymour_Rainecourt]

Can we at least acknowledge that there's a huge difference between using an addon to change how your glam looks or add in a timer for your garden, versus allowing you to cheat at raids or a PvP event?

No. Both are third-party tools and both are disallowed by the ToS.

[Saraide]

No. Both are third-party tools and both are disallowed by the ToS.

Wearing hats on viera is the same as cheating in fall guys, got it. /s

[Boblawblah]

Wearing hats on viera is the same as cheating in fall guys, got it. /s

I can believe that someone thinks mods like that are 'illegal'. I remember some people saying that using mods in Skyrim was cheating, even if the mods made the game significantly harder.



People are weird.

[Raige]

I feel people who use TOS breaking addons for anything, not just fall guys, should be shamed. And banned of course.




Absolutely not.
Play with the same limitations a PS5 player has. If you want a timer, use some non-integrated app. A cellphone. A web page.
If you don't like how your glam looks, get better glam and/or taste.

If you are giving yourself a different experience than a vanilla player I will not be shedding tears if you lose your characters. One day SE will step up and pull the trigger. Do you want to lose years of your time for that?

You've been here a long time. You should know by now that SE will not do anything in any meaningful way.
FFXI Windower came out in 2003. The same discussions were had in the forums back then. Windower is a key component in playing XI today.

I too dream of the day when vanilla will be enough for everyone, but be realistic. SE doesn't care. They pretend to care to appease the gamer police. They only really care about $$$. Literally 20 years has shown us that.

[TheDustyOne]

Difficulty mods in single player games are more like homebrew rules in board games; sure it's not how you're technically supposed to play, but who actually cares? As long as everyone at the table agrees to those rules, there's no cheating taking place. The good part about difficulty mods in single player games is you only need one person to consent to that agreement, the only time it gets murky is when things like achievements/trophies get involved, but that's a separate issue (and honestly, I don't usually care about those, I'm fine with having those disabled when I mod my games).

Online games of course are a separate problem, the only time a difficulty mod is acceptable is when it's on a separate server, which is usually only allowed for games where devs are okay with separate servers.

Anyway; who cares if someone wants to use visual mods or superfluous graphical changes? Who cares if someone wants chat bubbles clogging up their screen? These things, as far as I'm concerned, don't constitute cheating, it's either purely visual, or relaying the same information that you already have in the HUD.

I can agree with going after legitimate cheaters, but someone wanting a plugin that lets them change their minimap to a compass, lets them hide their hotbars when they're not in combat, or wants to have a prettier dress than normal, is hardly what I'd call cheating. Against ToS sure, that can't be disputed, but it's not cheating, and going on a witchhunt when most people who use these things tend to keep it to themselves doesn't really help anyone. Those who don't keep it to themselves and become a nuisance? Sure, give them a slap on the wrist and a 7-day ban or so. Permanent if it's continuous. Anyone who also bars people from entering parties because they won't use certain addons should also be discouraged, and a GM should intervene in those situations and hand out warnings.

Instead, go after people who manipulate character position beyond natural movement (RMT style teleports), who ignore collision detection, who manipulate the camera beyond the games usual boundaries, etc. Go after people who automate their character in combat and crafting without any player input (macros at least require you being there to press them again). Go after people who engage in RMT. Those are legitimate cheaters that should be punished, not someone who wanted a chat command for teleporting or wanted a hat on their bunny.

[strawberrycake]

I'm still just saying that none of this would be an issue if the game was client side and we had better server tick rates. Ban all the mods, we're left with the core problem that people are cheating against.
Fix. The. Server. Issues.

[TheDustyOne]

I'm still just saying that none of this would be an issue if the game was client side and we had better server tick rates. Ban all the mods, we're left with the core problem that people are cheating against.
Fix. The. Server. Issues.

That... doesn't make sense. It's the other way around, the server is harder to manipulate than the client, there's a reason any client-server related programming has the mantra of "don't trust the client".

https://security.stackexchange.com/q...ust-the-client

I'll blame Square for many things in their netcode, but making sure that the client doesn't have total control isn't one of them, it's the thing that's preventing even bigger cheats.

Unless you mean things like letting the client having a bit more control over things like say, animation lock, where the server would authenticate if it's valid anyway, then I agree.

[strawberrycake]

That... doesn't make sense. It's the other way around, the server is harder to manipulate than the client, there's a reason any client-server related programming has the mantra of "don't trust the client".

https://security.stackexchange.com/q...ust-the-client

I'll blame Square for many things in their netcode, but making sure that the client doesn't have total control isn't one of them, it's the thing that's preventing even bigger cheats.

Unless you mean things like letting the client having a bit more control over things like say, animation lock, where the server would authenticate if it's valid anyway, then I agree.

Nah just less of a load for them to handle plain and simple. The servers are handling the game, saving all of our character prog moment to moment and everything inbetween. If we handle the bulk the servers just handle the data. Bam more resource on how servers handle player positioning and making sure it's mor eor less accurate. then it's on you if you have bad internet.

This ofc is more of a working with what we have solution as buying more servers isn't exactly the best answer.

[TheDustyOne]

Again, that requires a lot of trust in player clients that whatever information they're sending to the servers is legitimate, and if the server has to authenticate it anyway, then no load was saved.

I don't have access to their servers, so I can't speak on how they programmed the game server-side, but it's better to refactor and make sure it can authenticate more efficiently, rather than putting trust in the client to give legitimate info. The plugins the game has are all client-side and don't typically interact with the servers. Put the entire game "client-side" and suddenly those plugins have access to everything and can just send any illegitimate data they want, which means the server would not only have to authenticate it anyway, but now has to spend more time undoing loads of bunk data (and also has to receive more data at once, increasing bandwidth).

Imagine if the game client did all the damage calculations itself, including the high rolls and crit rates. A cheater then goes in and modifies that client with a plugin to let him override that damage value with one of their own, like say, 9999999 damage with every hit. Well we can't have that, so the server now authenticates it and says no you have to use this calculation, which it needs to do the calculation itself to discover that anyway. Okay, but the calculation also involves a random multiplier at the end (which simulates high/low rolls), so as long as the number we send is within the random threshold, we can always high roll and the server can't tell unless it ignores the client (i.e. doesn't trust it) and does the random multiplier itself. If it's ultimately going to do it anyway, don't bother getting that data from the client, it only increases the bandwidth needed between the server and client.

The better solution is to just not let the client handle too much and let the server handle the damage calculations. Some things we already have to be trusting of the client, like player position, physics collisions, and that's usually where we have the biggest cheating problems; zoomhacks, speedhacks, camera hacks (the server never has our camera data), wallhacks. Making the entire game like that is a recipe for disaster.

[strawberrycake]

Again, that requires a lot of trust in player clients that whatever information they're sending to the servers is legitimate, and if the server has to authenticate it anyway, then no load was saved.

I don't have access to their servers, so I can't speak on how they programmed the game server-side, but it's better to refactor and make sure it can authenticate more efficiently, rather than putting trust in the client to give legitimate info. The plugins the game has are all client-side and don't typically interact with the servers. Put the entire game "client-side" and suddenly those plugins have access to everything and can just send any illegitimate data they want, which means the server would not only have to authenticate it anyway, but now has to spend more time undoing loads of bunk data (and also has to receive more data at once, increasing bandwidth).

Imagine if the game client did all the damage calculations itself, including the high rolls and crit rates. A cheater then goes in and modifies that client with a plugin to let him override that damage value with one of their own, like say, 9999999 damage with every hit. Well we can't have that, so the server now authenticates it and says no you have to use this calculation, which it needs to do the calculation itself to discover that anyway. Okay, but the calculation also involves a random multiplier at the end (which simulates high/low rolls), so as long as the number we send is within the random threshold, we can always high roll and the server can't tell unless it ignores the client (i.e. doesn't trust it) and does the random multiplier itself. If it's ultimately going to do it anyway, don't bother getting that data from the client, it only increases the bandwidth needed between the server and client.

The better solution is to just not let the client handle too much and let the server handle the damage calculations. Some things we already have to be trusting of the client, like player position, physics collisions, and that's usually where we have the biggest cheating problems; zoomhacks, speedhacks, camera hacks (the server never has our camera data), wallhacks. Making the entire game like that is a recipe for disaster.

It's already liek that, people already datamine, it;s not hard, people already cheat, zoom hack, wall hack, etc. This has been proven to literally not be a wall they cannot break down.