/r/ffxivdiscussion Reddit Poll: Do you want anti-cheat in FFXIV?

[Johners]

Is there anyway of viewing the poll results without having a Reddit account?

As for the discussion at hand, I do find it rather amusing that the bean game crossover is the eye opener for both cheating but also the snapshotting. That is natural considering the game mode is an every man for himself race to the finish line placed over three rounds. There's no boss to fight, crystal to push, tethers to pass or whatever other mechanic exists to flesh out content. You just avoid some stuff and run to the finish line hoping to be first. The real kicker is that the "FOMO" nature of the event, as we don't know the cycle for when it'll return after December 31st, is the motivator for cheating. You better get those 100 wins for the King/Queen Bean title or the wait could be years.

Now for the cheating itself, there's the speed/wall hackers which are super obvious clowns that get the hammer dropped on them pretty quick. I know this exists in PvP as well so hopefully they can come up with better server side detection mechanisms (same for people going out of bounds in the overworld while we're at it). However, there's also that other clip of the mechanics being drawn on-screen before the spell animations kick in. We've seen a similar thing before during one of the ultimates this expansion but in that scenario, the 8 man team WINS because that group might clear the fight faster. In the bean game, someone using a cheat to see where everything will hit without learning or paying attention to patterns has a huge advantage which can lead to 23 other people LOSING. There's another element to the cheating discussion around crafting and gathering but those systems get botted in every game. Likewise with ACT functions beyond logging/parsing.

All of these situations, for a myriad of reasons, are ENTIRELY the fault of Square Enix. I will not fault the players due to this being an MMO like any other. If there's an advantage to be gained by any addon, plugin, cheat, exploit or simply just min-maxing... the players will jump on it. Island Sanctuary is a glorified spreadsheet because there was a reward and players found the most efficient way to obtain it.

Coming into XIV from World of Warcraft, I've seen all these mentalities before. There's a difference in that WoW has a LUA addon framework since day one which not only has grown with the game but also impacted it's development. Square Enix were wise enough to see this and establish a terms of service which prohibited any of this... but failed to give themselves the tools to enforce it.

Even if players genuinely think the game would be unplayable if SE finally dropped the hammer on all of this, it's probably what they should've done to begin with. I know streamers such as Zepla love to quote the Yoshi-P "keep it hidden" line but that was never a sustainable stance and merely delayed the inevitable. Combine that with the game having a huge burst in popularity and here we are.

It's a rock and a hard place. On one side cheating only gets worse and the legitimate gaming environment will only be destroyed for good. On the other you pull the rug from under many people's feet and destroy part of the community when "harmless" things like Mare get caught in the process (although SE likely wouldn't care because they sell cosmetics anyway).