Cheaters and Add-ons

[Mawlzy]

I agree that its nearly impossible to stop all cheating, but it shouldn't fall on the players to report each and every case of cheatings happening. Fair play between players should be something SE enforce in the game, it's so weird that there's alot of MMOs out there way smaller than FFXIV that use better anti-cheats systems, in case of FFXIV I don't even think they use one.

As Ath192 notes, genuine anti-cheat software is extremely invasive. The only area in which I'll subject my PC to that is from online poker clients.

That said, it is possible to spot many cheats without the GMs sticking a thermometer up your butt. In other words, rather than probing for banned software, it is possible to see the results of that software through motion (in the case of speed hacking/teleporting) or patterns in and timing of button presses in the case of scripting. Why more isn't done in this area I have no idea.

[UkcsAlias]

Why more isn't done in this area I have no idea.

Because you wont win the battle anyway. Anti cheats are only made according to an effect vs cost balance. Making it very hard, and therefor the cheat itself more expensive is a very basic thing they do. Regular detection does help, but only when reputation matters. RMT bots dont care at all here.

Its also a battle that is impossible to win as there is 1 tool that defeats all anti cheats: emulation. Sure, you can make the game heavy enough to avoid emulation from properly working (and usualy this is effective), but that is still only a race as the lowest setting defines how well it works (the lower the game requirements, the easier it is to emulate).

This is where consoles have an advantage: emulation cannot mimic the key that a device is signed with. So the console dev can ban based on that and also use that to sign firmware for your device so you cannot run your own. But with PCs this is unacceptable behaviour. Linux for example wouldnt support this at all as its not open source then, yet mandatory to get linux to run as most servers use this. Even if all home pcs have such limitation, a cheater might still own a server then and emulate the hardware on that.

Server side machine learning is currently one of the better ways to detect malicious behaviour, as it can consider a lot of factors that are very hard to avoid as a cheater. Even limiting the data sent to users isnt enough, as in most cases games still need to send a location because people emitting footstep sounds. Machine learning could already notice a diffirence in player behaviour for just such footsteps. THe main downside here: it costs a lot for these servers to run. Most of the time not worth it at all (hence only top tier matches might get checked here).