Mod users in FFXIV are getting out of control

[Malkria]

Like it or not, MMORPGs are not just games: they're social spaces. And believe it or not multiple research studies have proven time and again that we as social beings do bring our behaviors from our offline lives into gaming spaces and communities (without even meaning to). That includes judging people by how they type in game, to how they designed their avatar (and therefore look in game), right down to the very content they take part in within the game itself (and outside of the game).

First off you can't be offended if you don't even know TO be offended. If I was walking around wal-mart and some perv was using X-ray specs on me without my consent...A) how would I know, and B) why would I care? I can't be offended or embarrassed unless I know TO be embarrassed or offended. Same here, unless they sent me a live stream of my character in the buff I wouldn't ever know they have the mods up, and even if they told me the rest of the party probably doesn't have them up so the easiest solution is to boot the perv and move on.

As for judging by people's typing or outfit, maybe some do. Probably most don't though, and getting upset at someone's outfit is like an RP player getting mad at all the 'not actual names' people name their characters with. I gave my character an actual name, and I dress in what I feel is an actual outfit rather then tank in the buff or run around in a chocobo suit. That is my aesthetic, and if you have a problem with a 'mystic cowgirl' themed magic user...oh well. Yes it may impact 'your social space' but at the same time it's a personality thing, and frankly that kind of is the point of playing these games to begin with.

[Yeol]

I can't help but wonder if they watched any of the streams where people were hacking the camera so they could zoom out far enough to see the entire arena at all times and thus make the divebombs and other mechanics easier to avoid.

You don't need it if you play on Ultrawide monitor.

[DreadRabbit]

snip

That's actually been a topic of study too Have you heard of the phrase "clothes make the man"? (not being sarcastic, I ask because we do have non-native English speakers on these forums too).

Part of the reason why the fashion industry is so vast is because we do perceive people differently by what they wear (and don't wear). A guy who walks by in a perfectly tailored suit gives off the image that he's confidant, powerful, and knows what he's doing. Yet if that same man walked by you in baggy jeans down to his knees and tattoos, a lot of people would be far more wary of being around him (just to give some extreme examples). In the case of women, there's always been people judging a woman's personality according to what she wears and how little she may wear (or overdressing).

You can see similar effects in the "show your ___" threads. People comment all the time about how a character looks innocent/evil/etc. purely by the glamour they wear, even if someone else with the exact same face and body preset is nearby wearing something else. So removing that, even the base underwear and hempen sets, can possibly (keyword: possibly) have an impact on how that person is perceived in game. I mean the most common example is usually most people assume female Miqo'te dressed in metal bikini tank armor tend to be played by men (for various reasons). We all know that's not necessarily true, but that doesn't stop that initial judgement being made.

Now whether an individual cares about that is a whole different level because we move into a discussion of personal boundaries, and no two people are the same with those. Some people care more about how they look than others.

Yes it may impact 'your social space' but at the same time it's a personality thing, and frankly that kind of is the point of playing these games to begin with.

I never said "your," "mine," or "their" social space. I said that MMORPGs are social spaces, period. Your living room is a social space. The shopping mall is a social space. School is a social space. This forum is a social space. Anywhere that you have to interact with other people is a social space. Trust me, it's not a brand new term made up to protect people's feelings as you seem to imply here (and if you're not I'm sorry for the assumption).

Otherwise...yeah I have to admit I don't really know where you were going with this post. You're allowed to have your preferred aesthetic, but that's not going to stop people from making judgement about you from your choice in aesthetic. Everyone does it, as I said it takes mere milliseconds, and we're often not aware of it (something as simple as even noticing "Oh hey, that man's wearing pink!" and then moving on is a sign of how society has formed our views of what's normal for a dude to wear and what isn't). It's not typically done to hurt anyone's feelings or to offend, we're just conditioned to be that way. Now most mature people can get past those initial first impressions, if they have an interest to do so with you. Otherwise the judgement is made, and they move on and forget about you in most instances. That's not done to be rude or offend anyone either, it's just how people are.

[KisaiTenshi]

I can't help but wonder if they watched any of the streams where people were hacking the camera so they could zoom out far enough to see the entire arena at all times and thus make the divebombs and other mechanics easier to avoid.

If you play in 4K, you can make your character less than 120 pixels tall in some cases. It's dependent on the arena/field size. on a 4K screen that's 5.5% height. This is actually problematic in early ARR dungeons where if you zoom all the way out, the actual backgrounds get in the way. But this is not a mod, this is the content that was produced before 4K was doable.

SE hasn’t focused on banning people that use third-party tools because it would hurt their bottom line. They are already well aware that people use mods, ACT, ReShade, and the like. It’s not like this suddenly came up within the last six months or so, and they aren’t as ignorant about it as you think.

Also, the developers were watching Ultimate streams. ACT was very vividly present on those said streams.

FFXIV suffers from broken windows theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

Under the impression that a broken window left unfixed leads to more serious problems, residents begin to change the way they see their community. In an attempt to stay safe, a cohesive community starts to fall apart, as individuals start to spend less time in communal space to avoid potential violent attacks by strangers. The slow deterioration of a community as a result of broken windows modifies the way people behave when it comes to their communal space, which, in turn, breaks down community control. As rowdy teenagers, panhandlers, addicts, and prostitutes slowly make their way into a community, it signifies that the community cannot assert informal social control, and citizens become afraid that worse things will happen. As a result, they spend less time in the streets to avoid these subjects and feel less and less connected from their community if the problems persist.

In the context of a game, the more egregious modders, ACT users, and botters chase out other paying players, and we've all see this activity, if not experienced first hand from the "parser" users who harass and kick people just so they can get a better score on fflogs, to this thread with the lewd mods, and players maxing sexual advances on players who they think are into erotic role play because their client-side mods show them naked.

ACT use is the easiest low-hanging fruit they can go after, because you've all been warned before about it by Yoshi-P. Yet people keep posting about how they use it on the official forums. SE could just turn on a silent "hook check" and track exactly what's been hooked into the memory space of the game client upon connection to the game world lobby, and one day everyone who tripped that flag get's warned, then banned if it continues. ACT actually works in exactly the same way bots do. So if they want to kill the bots, they have to kill ACT.

Texture mods are incredibly easy to detect by running checksums on the files, it takes 4 seconds per 2GB file. So it would add an entire minute to the launcher or a self-test on zone changes for someone with a SSD, or possibly several minutes for people on laptops with 5400RPM drives. But the way modders tend to get around checksum checks is by not running the official launcher, and instead running the game with outdated versions of game data, or re-patching the game data every time the game is launched. So that makes everyone suffer with additional loading time just because the modders wouldn't behave.

You guys using ACT don't even know what ACT does.
It can read/write to memory in the game client for:
Targets
Chat log
Monsters
Party members
Server time
ZoneID's
Player

So there is nothing stopping anyone from writing a bot using ACT, and it's likely bots exist that use it.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Part of the reason why the fashion industry is so vast is because we do perceive people differently by what they wear (and don't wear). A guy who walks by in a perfectly tailored suit gives off the image that he's confidant, powerful, and knows what he's doing. Yet if that same man walked by you in baggy jeans down to his knees and tattoos, a lot of people would be far more wary of being around him (just to give some extreme examples). In the case of women, there's always been people judging a woman's personality according to what she wears and how little she may wear (or overdressing).

... this has never been up for debate though. You are literally arguing an entirely different subject now. The discussion boiled down to why it matters what people do with mods on their own screen. Putting your example into gameplay context, people who mod their game are not going to care whatsoever whether your character is well dressed or wearing baggy blue jeans. They aren't likely to bat an eyelash towards you one way or another. Likewise, without prior knowledge that particular person has a mod run, you will also be none the wiser. An equivalent is, once again, if someone were to imagine me naked while I was talking down the street. I can't control their thoughts nor does it matter what types of clothing I'm wearing. If they want to imagine me naked, they will. Mods occupy a similar space, except as stated, modders generally aren't interested in anyone else but themselves.

This is what prompted accusations of people being overly sensitive, especially since the OP went out of their way to join the very discord where all these mods exist, knowing it was going to bother them.

snip

I sincerely hope you realize this post, were it taken purely at face value, depict Square Enix and the FFXIV development team has wholly incompetent at even an amateur level.

ACT does not work the way bot programs do. The former simply reads data relayed into the chat logs. Were that information made unavailable, ACT cannot parse. Bot programs, meanwhile, prompt script to play the game for you—something ACT cannot do. In crude terms, parsers are little more than live calculators. If getting around these things were as simple as you make it sound, piracy and ad blockers wouldn't exist. Facebook boasted the same rhetoric you have—claiming to have beaten Ad Block. They were made to look foolish in two days.

Could they attempt to block ACT? Theoretically, yes. It, however, would garner an immense amount of backlash, and change little as people would make alternatives.

[KaivaC]

snip

There is just so much 'no' in this post. With the way the game engine is set up, you cannot write a bot through ACT. Good luck using a bot for that in V5S if someone were to try, what with its random elements. Good luck doing that in V7S, what with the OT having to drag Ultros to the opposite corner he spawned from (which changes based on the order in which it was summoned). There are too many variables in an actual Savage fight that its next to useless to try to writing a bot through ACT. ACT reads data and relays it to you. That's all it does. It does not work in the way that bots do.

[Sebazy]

You guys using ACT don't even know what ACT does.
It can read/write to memory in the game client for:
Targets
Chat log
Monsters
Party members
Server time
ZoneID's
Player

So there is nothing stopping anyone from writing a bot using ACT, and it's likely bots exist that use it.

I think you're reaching a little too far with this frankly.

There is nothing stopping anyone from writing a bot using keyboard macros, and it's likely bots exist that use it.

I could add pretty much any software that could be used to parse the logs FFXIV puts out to that list, even simply pixel peeping at the frame buffer could be used to write a bot (This is how I fished in XI).

Please keep in mind that ACT isn't the Windower framework from FFXI, don't confuse the two as they are very different in the functionality they offer and as such it'd be good if you could stop trying to paint it as something that it isn't.

[channell]

I'll just leave this here...

[KageTokage]

They honestly don't seem to understand how to address the botting issue when the only "lasting" measures they've taken against it so far were band-aid fixes that were laughably easy to get around.

They made it so the Report RMT function will auto-mute the RMT spammers if they say certain things, but now they just break up their sentences with weird symbols.

They introduced that "The fish sense something amiss" mechanic to prevent macro/bot fishing in the same spot for prolonged periods, but it's easily circumvented by just casting your line at a different fishing hole every once in a while, and programming variables that will tell the bot to do so seems fairly trivial judging from what I've seen both gathering and FATE bots doing (The former will adjust their collectible rotations in response to Discerning Eye procs, while the latter know how to heal themselves and/or flee if they're in danger of dying).

They moved the items the bots were farming for gil in Amdapor Keep to a boss chest later in the dungeon, which didn't matter at all because the bots just teleport over there instead and go about their business as usual.


They don't need anything other then a competent team policing the small-scale botters, as their numbers are low enough even on high population servers they could be cleaned out in a matter of days if they know what to look for and don't rely exclusively on faulty monitoring tools to pass judgment. There's literally no way to differentiate a properly programmed bot from a real player judging strictly from the data they're sending the server, and I'd assume the few people who do get punished are spamming the server with invalid/faulty data from a shoddy bot that their monitoring tools easily catch, while the guys who keep getting away with it only manage to do so because they're not actually observing them in person to see how abnormal they look.

[Levarius]

I think you're reaching a little too far with this frankly.

There is nothing stopping anyone from writing a bot using keyboard macros, and it's likely bots exist that use it.

I could add pretty much any software that could be used to parse the logs FFXIV puts out to that list, even simply pixel peeping at the frame buffer could be used to write a bot (This is how I fished in XI).

Please keep in mind that ACT isn't the Windower framework from FFXI, don't confuse the two as they are very different in the functionality they offer and as such it'd be good if you could stop trying to paint it as something that it isn't.

While it would be hard to create a fully autonomous bot, you absolutely can use Triggernometry to send keypresses to FFXIV based on triggers. I'd imagine you actually could automate a fair bit with the plugin.