Quote Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor View Post

They're talking about Cactbot, which is a different tool than ACT. They aren't going to touch parsers because they know the backlash it would have.
That is still ACT, and still using the ACT FFXIV Network module. I told you why this is a cheat tool, before, so I won't bring it up again.

The game sends the packets unencrypted is the only reason any of these tools work at all. Any counter-measures employed would break all the parsers. Now they could compress+encrypt the packets that spawn a monster, but that packet is still being sent, and if you know the mechanics of the fight, you wouldn't need to decrypt it, just know that "something is about to happen".

I don't seriously expect the dev team to change this because it would result in lag for everyone. The proper counter-measures would require randomizing the packet id's for every instance change, and that just adds a hurdle for the parser developer, not a wall. Applying and cycling an encryption key for every instance would be a higher hurdle, but not a wall, since the same network parsers can read the game client memory so digging a key out of the memory would not be an obstacle. That comes back to "you can't trust the client"

Obviously that means they need to consider that players are cheating by using parsers and thus they should not design a boss fight by pre-spawning anything.

Or you know, they could just ban players who use these tools in the first place.