Time for an anti-cheat

[caffe_macchiato]

I think people are forgetting one important thing.

This is Final Fantasy XIV. This game is known around the world as "that modded MMO" because of all the junk that people install. The most popular plugins have millions of downloads. There are almost as many people using Mare as the total number on Steam. Nearly every screenshot on Twitter is modded. People brazenly use them on Twitch and YouTube. There is a good chance that people's first impressions of the game are through plugins and modded screenshots. People play this game because it's moddable. That's the legacy that Final Fantasy XIV leaves for the MMO genre.

And it's funny that people bring up "other games", because even they have limits. Final Fantasy XIV has no server-side cheat detection. The game cannot even scan its own files against an internal checksum. As a result, there are no limits to what players can inject into the game. No other MMO allows for this. Final Fantasy XIV is vastly unique in its own genre. Funny for a game that wasn't supposed to have add-ons.

Square Enix isn't exactly afraid of anti-cheats, they're afraid of being involved because, ultimately, they do not care. FFXIV was supposed to be a ten-year project with FF16 following it up. We are on what they call "maintenance mode", and if that isn't clear now, it will be in 7.0 when you get 24 hours of cutscenes and no endgame.