Time for an anti-cheat

[HikariKurosawa]

You guys can pretend and make all this stuff up all you want but all it does is illustrate how little you care about fairness in gaming and how you don't take this game seriously. It's fine, but it makes the game and its community look bad.

Have fun while you can, technological development is inevitable and AI will make it easy to deal with cheaters soon enough.

Cheating is "abnormal".

Use of mods may be against the Terms of Service but it only becomes cheating when it gives a player an unfair advantage in completing content compared to those who don't use mods.

Most of the mod use in the game is not related to giving the player an unfair advantage in completing content. It's akin to taking a test where you're told to only use a black pen to mark your answers and you choose to use a blue one instead because you like blue more. Did you break the rule? Yes. Did you gain an unfair advantage in completing the test by doing so? No.

The amount of mod use that truly is cheating is small. If it were rampant, clear rates of high end content when still current would be much higher than they are and come much sooner after release.

So is there cheating? Yes, as you say you can't expect a game to be free of cheaters. Is it normalized? No. Most players will earn their clears and wins through honest skill and effort.

Look at the database on fflogs. "But parsing isn't cheating!!" Yes, it is. It enables you to see who is underperforming, who is overperforming, what it takes to clear content. It is a live metric of your performance and how optimal your rotation is, it takes out so much work that it is crazy. Nobody has ever or would ever add up the numbers in battle log because it would be more efficient and effective to just play the game at that point. It isn't supposed to be so easy to see who is performing. All it does is create a system where the game is taken way too seriously in the wrong way and raises the bar of expectations to unrealistic levels. Instead of letting people naturally improve at the game and be seen as human players, they are seen as numbers on a parse and considered for their performance in a parse.

Then there are people who use auto rotations, simplified rotations, cooldown meters, dot meters, auto marking, cactbot, etc. It's very common and it is all cheating. All of this provides a huge competitive advantage in the raid scene.

Pretend all you want, but this game is dead to anyone who cares about fair play.