Resurgence of people using third-party programs to find hunt marks?

[Vivi_Bushido]

The term you look for is called "Radar".

Simply said S Ranks and several FATEs have a extremely huge draw Distance, so if you stand on the edge of the Zone Map, you still will see the S Rank being on the other side of the Map.
Now what those Tools do is basically scanning the Memory ID of the S Ranks / FATEs and poof.

These tools do exist and players use them all the time. In fact, ACT has a feature on it that does the same thing with the use of triggers. These triggers are posted on FFXIV reddit and most ACT users use them. (Parse programs can do a whole lot more than parse). From the description of the triggers, it calls out any hunt regardless of rank when you reach a specific amount of yalms to the target. It's most probable that ACT triggers are the radar that these suspicious individuals are using.

[Godofhealing]

I wont say the FC's name but lets just say there is an FC on Odin thats known by the entire server as grief pullers for the last year or so.
As in they spend the entire day pulling any s rank and a rank as soon as humanly possible to try prevent any players getting credit for the kills.
But they are at nearly every S rank spawn and at every A rank spawn too.They are banned from most if not all hunt linkshells.But are magically at every hunt before most hunt linkshells even get there.
I suspect thy are useing 3rd party tools to detect hunt spawns.
On top of that they also troll all the s rank and a rank report sites to hide spawn times so they can try prevent players from killing them.

sounds juicy who is it.

[KageTokage]

These tools do exist and players use them all the time. In fact, ACT has a feature on it that does the same thing with the use of triggers. These triggers are posted on FFXIV reddit and most ACT users use them. (Parse programs can do a whole lot more than parse). From the description of the triggers, it calls out any hunt regardless of rank when you reach a specific amount of yalms to the target. It's most probable that ACT triggers are the radar that these suspicious individuals are using.

ACT isn't able to tell the exact location of a hunt, only if it's present in the zone somewhere.

People have been using an offshoot of Guildworks client that was popular in the 2.x days to automatically ping them the location of S ranks so they can find them immediately even in zones with lots of obstructions that prevent you from spotting them until you get close.

As I mentioned earlier, there are people who subtly stalk me and others in my hunting linkshell, lingering around in zones where they see us being active and insta-calling the S ranks as they're spawned. Which wouldn't be an issue if there weren't players with a tendency to immediately pull said S ranks, sometimes resulting in them dying before all of us can even get there.

TLDR; lazy players with hunt detectors are causing harm for the people actually doing the hunting.

[Shouko]

Snip

Is it all A/S ranks from ARR to SB? Or just SB ones? If it's all and every day I would be flagging a gm about this, I know generally they don't do anything about this sort of thing but if it happens to the point of purposely trying to prevent other players they might step in at that point.

[Themarvin]

it may be an old post, but could SE close the outlet of information or the likes, as a leak is needed to use these exploitable solutions in terms of third party software

[KageTokage]

Holy necroposts Batman.

In any case, there isn't really any "leak" that can reasonably be fixed, as the third party programs in general function by reading data that's being sent to the game client.

Client-side data is like an open book, but server-side data is much harder to get access to in order to read/modify, and while handling more data server-side can prevent cheating, it also slows down the gameplay. For an excellent example of this, it's the reason why chocobo races at the Gold Saucer have such a massive input delay as everything is processed server side in an attempt to prevent cheating via methods like speed hacks and such...but it still doesn't prevent cheating done strictly through client-side methods like the bots that just spam races endlessly.

Though looking back on things, hunting is somehow more sane at the moment then it was back then even with crossworld being a thing now...at least on my DC.

[dspguy]

Holy necroposts Batman.

In any case, there isn't really any "leak" that can reasonably be fixed, as the third party programs in general function by reading data that's being sent to the game client.

Right. It just boils down to the fact that the server has to tell the client to draw that enemy on your map. It likely does this by sending a unique ID and a location (surely more complicated) to the client. All mobs have an ID. If you figure out which ID is your A/S rank, the moment your client (and your program sniffing the data coming into your client) detects it, it notifies the player (and apparently a whole lot of other people) that a particular mob spawned in a particular zone. And if the mob's draw distance is the entire zone, all you need is someone anywhere in the zone and they'd have this information the moment it pops.

I don't know what they can do to obfuscate it.

[Ronduwil]

I hadn't really noticed this being a thing on Cactaur up until about a month ago, where a whole mess of strangers started showing up at S ranks my LS spawns, despite us not giving any in-game indication of one being present by creating a PF or calling it in a different linkshell (I suspect somebody in the LS is secretly using the program, which supposedly will automatically inform anyone else who's using the thing of when a hunt spawns...).

As you yourself noted, there are linkshells devoted to hunts, and that's going to account for most of the crowd. On top of that, all those players in those linkshells are apt to forward the news to their FC, which is going to bring even more players. I'm not sure what's annoying you about this. It's not like your drops are dependent on the number of players who are in on the kill. As long as you're in a group, you should get still full credit regardless of how many groups there are.

[Jojoya]

As you yourself noted, there are linkshells devoted to hunts, and that's going to account for most of the crowd. On top of that, all those players in those linkshells are apt to forward the news to their FC, which is going to bring even more players. I'm not sure what's annoying you about this. It's not like your drops are dependent on the number of players who are in on the kill. As long as you're in a group, you should get still full credit regardless of how many groups there are.

You're quoting a post from 4 years ago. What's "normal" now within the hunt community was not normal back then.

[Faafetai]

I use the website and discord for relays for the hunts. I guess it could be considered third party, but honestly it is doing what I could do with a huge google document categorizing the spawn timers for each target. I also forgot the hunt linkshell, but that isn't third party.