Patch 7.2's Account ID protection measures have already been circumvented

[Kazuke_Miso]

There's a reason why devs like Riot have bounties, challenging people to defeat their security and tell them how they did it.

What makes you think Square Enix wants to spend $100k on a bounty when they can just half-ass the fix and hope people forget about it?

WHEN THAT'S BEEN THEIR APPROACH TO EVERY SINGLE THIRD PARTY PLUGIN RELATED ISSUE?

Their strategy since ShB has been: STERNLY WARN THE COMMUNITY TO NOT USE THIRD PARTY PLUGINS, then do the bare minimum to patch the issue, and hope everyone forgets about it!

This entire game is infested with bots, cheating, stalking plugins, RMT, wintrading, bots that do entire rotations for you at a 99th percentile level, an entire ERP scene supported by a modding community rivaling that of Skyrim, a game that encourages modding. This game officially BANS third party plugins and it has nearly as many mods as a game that ENCOURAGES MODDING!

Literally why did anyone think this would be any different this time? They half-ass the fix, and hope you'll quietly forget about it! And frankly, at this point, their business is SUSTAINED by all these activities that are officially against the ToS.

[DiaDeem]

This entire game is infested with bots

Well yeah, but you can't put those intrusive apps on the same level of evil as a bunny hat enabler, right? I'm not crazy, am I? But because it's not regulated, it's just the wild west.

There's also now somewhat of a chance this thread may get nuked just because we mentioned it at all.

[Kazuke_Miso]

Well yeah, but you can't put those intrusive apps on the same level of evil as a bunny hat enabler, right? I'm not crazy, am I? But because it's not regulated, it's just the wild west.

Because it's not about every plugin or mod being "bad".

It's that Square Enix has constantly threatened that "UNNNGH DON'T PASS OUR RED LINE OR ELSE" and yet has never actually seem to have taken any substantial action to root out the problem, no matter how egregious the offense is.

And in fact, I agree with your logic, which is why SE's actions are even more pathetic:

They have banned a ton of people posting ERP screenshots on Twitter (which harms no one let's be real). But the people using the stalking plugin? Wintraders? Cheaters? Nah.

They go after raiders using a parser to track their DPS on stream. They hunted down the guy who used an "illegal waymark" that gave a minor boost to clarity in P7S and banned him. They killed all those people using Ungarmax for fun trolling around.

But now when the time comes to finally hunt the big shark instead of these small fish, they.... pathetically flail and just plead with the community to "pweaase stop using the third party!!! or we'll sue D:< D:<".

All they do in this game is go after the easy targets, because that's all they can do:

The most comical part...?

There was probably a solid length debate on how to fix this, what measures to put in place, and the shameful part is... This is something I would expect from a first year undergrad.

A lot of people have finally figured this out after a decade of SE's bluffing. They don't actually have the power to go after the "evil". They can only hunt down the people who jaywalked through a red light. When's the last time they have actually gone after the people making CP in FF14? Patched out any way to stalk people? Banned wintrading rings? The Savage "raiders" botting their entire rotations day after day? Or even make any substantial dent in RMT? LOL. No, they will go after a few cheeky players who used Ungarmax instead.

Square Enix's policy against ToS violation has not made any dent against the "evil" plugins or bots. They mostly hunt down players who went just a bit too far, fooling around a bit too much, or maybe saying a naughty swear word in Limsa chat. They only have the power to do that, nothing more.

[GrizzlyTank]

Yeah, so long as that ID is being distributed to client it's not safe to use.

And even then, the damage is also largely done to existing accounts.

[BelegErkhten]

I hope square manages to find a way to Nuke Dalamud

[Pokefan5]

I hope square manages to find a way to Nuke Dalamud

All that's needed is packet sniffing. 3rd party injections aren't needed.

[Daralii]

All that's needed is packet sniffing. 3rd party injections aren't needed.

People still can't or don't want to understand that packet sniffing wasn't suddenly invented by this plugin.

[Kazuke_Miso]

I hope square manages to find a way to Nuke Dalamud

They won't. The moment they do that they'll lose like 30% of the players.