You're a Disgrace

[TheDustyOne]

I know, I used those examples as things we have because those are the areas where the server trusts the client. The wall they haven't broken is the server, so moving server-side programming to the client now gives a paper wall they can break down easier. Your solution would make the cheating worse, not better.

[strawberrycake]

I know, I used those examples as things we have because those are the areas where the server trusts the client. The wall they haven't broken is the server, so moving server-side programming to the client now gives a paper wall they can break down easier. Your solution would make the cheating worse, not better.

This brings me to my favorite part of the situation, More Active Enforcement now, no more Vague TOS that allows Yoshida to play nicely with all the TOS breakers. It's been a thing for years now, don't ask, don't tell. You can use your tools so long as you stay quiet and don't adversely affect others, now LOVE to play their little silent game as well and quietly ban obvious offenders. But a more Outright more make an example of people approach would quash it all in one go. Putting people on Display while making moves to to lessen your own load and Banning all the very much Obvious offenders sends a msg, suddenly you see large swaths of players going poof. The game runs better and bam we all win.

Stay Dusty My Friend.

[shiraneko]

I know, I used those examples as things we have because those are the areas where the server trusts the client. The wall they haven't broken is the server, so moving server-side programming to the client now gives a paper wall they can break down easier. Your solution would make the cheating worse, not better.

Game netcode never authenticates every action the client makes. It would be a completely laggy mess with unresponsiveness and desync/rubber banding. The netcode has to make a compromise between what the server should authenticate and what the client handles for a comfortable experience. This also has less to do with the server tickrate, and more with latency to the server. There's a reason why many korean mmos that get ported to the west have terrible pvp or multiplayer experience, and it's because the game was designed in Korea or Japan where the ping is <20ms because their regions are small and the internet infrastructure is very developed. This is why a game that plays smoothly in those regions plays like trash in NA because of excessive server checks with bad ping. I agree that FFXIV needs more server checks in many areas, but given that they're too cheap to even invest time/money in a higher server tickrate, that seems unlikely. The real solution is to implement client-side anticheat so that the client is protected from memory manipulation, like literally every other live game service in existence. For some reason, the ffixiv community is up and arms about it to a point that it weirds me out. Something something root access something something my parsers and mods. *shrug* Also, you talked about certain addons like visual mods being fine. The problem with that, other than opening a ugly can of worms for squeenix to maintain and check what mods are whitelisted, is that from an anticheat perspective it doesn't really distinguish between them, to my knowledge, bc I'm not very familiar with this area.

[TheDustyOne]

Game netcode never authenticates every action the client makes. It would be a completely laggy mess with unresponsiveness and desync/rubber banding. The netcode has to make a compromise between what the server should authenticate and what the client handles for a comfortable experience.

I know, I gave examples in regards to player movement and physics calculations being something the server has to trust from the client, goodness knows that would be murder on any server if it had to calculate the gravity and collision of hundreds of players. It's especially bad if you have high ping and had to wait for the server to tell where your character REALLY is before seeing the movement on your screen. I remember one game I played that did that and I stopped after 5 minutes, can't remember the name of it though. I think 1.0 might've been that paranoid when it came to the UI, it would authenticate whenever you wanted to open up a menu, so you had to wait for the server to say that yes, you can open up your character screen now. The client now at least retains a good deal of control whenever it needs something responsive.

I think the game is already good enough in regards to what it authenticates from the client, the most I want to see fixed is the animation lock bug that resets the lock when the client receives data back from the server that you successfully used a skill. That's something I think the client can be trusted with as, even if the client cheated and reduced the timer further, the server can still reject a skill if the timer on the server-side is still going.

In regards to the visual stuff vs cheats, yeah I know anti-cheats won't make a distinction, it'll go after both indiscriminately, I was speaking moreso on the morality of the two. I don't care if someone wants to wear a prettier dress (that I can't see anyway), but I do care if they start teleporting around the map or phasing through walls, etc. If the only way to solve the latter means destroying the former, then oh well.

As for anti-cheats, it would depend on the anti-cheat. Some are incredibly invasive and might trigger if a completely unrelated app opens up, others are system resource hogs that slow the game down too much, and others don't do jack to stop cheats. Some of these all at once. I also admit to not being familiar with how anti-cheats work, but I remember playing Maplestory back in the day and Gameguard was a useless pile of junk back then, never stopped hackers vacuuming every mob in the area towards them while they had invincibility cheats on.