Dear SE, please address the exploitation of "face target" command in PVP

[Shurrikhan]

how is it different from locking on?

Lock on doesn't actually poll as quickly as, say, a .1 to .01 second hardware re-action. Try locking on to someone running through you while you cast. It will still interrupt. A "face target exploit" will not have that issue.

Heck, just spamming the Face Target key itself has better results than Lock-On. Just know that every other hit removes the face target, so if you want 3 checks per second, that's 5 hits. Unless macros can coincidentally avoid that cancellation step, an XIV macro won't actually be able to do that, however, given the minimum interval between macro steps, not to mention being cancelled by any other macro's use.

I'd personally rather just spin my camera around by mouse unless chasing in melee, for which lock-on is fine until I need to get ahead of the enemy for a side positional. If my mouse had programmable macros and Auto-attacks were still capable of interrupts, though... I'll admit I'd be tempted for as long as the exploit goes without any punitive action (which seems unlikely to occur).

You don't need a 3rd party program to do this effectively. When Ifrit Extreme was a thing, I would have macros of all of my BRD abilites not only with Bloodletter macro'd in, but with /facetarget in any free space that the macro could hold. The result was me out DPSing everyone by miles because while I was spamming my abilities, I would always be facing Ifrit and would never have to worry about clipping Barrage when we had to run from eruptions. You lose the ability to queue up your attacks but that's a small price to pay.

/facetarget is the issue here. I really don't think this was to be the intended use of the command and while I really don't see it as much of a big deal in PvE, something needs to be done about it in PvP. I've never used it in PvP and will never do so, as it's not fair at all.

Alternatively, you can just leave Auto-face target on and jump for each shot while directing your camera. Use face-target itself with a jump and character-camera-turn like any other ability as auto-attack comes back up to maintain perfect uptime on that as well. No lost movement, no macros necessary.

I don't personally see how /facetarget is an issue in itself, even if its removal in PvP may be the only way to truly deal with the very few who use the face-target exploit to be positional-proof, etc, while further maintaining perfect uptime with zero effort. In itself, face target, due to the game's poling speed, is rather shitty. It provides nothing more than situational convenience.