I think Square Enix should look into possibly using Easy Anti Cheat for XIV

[linay]

Am I misunderstanding something here or is there a large influx of "See see, I told you Parsers were bad!" threads and commentary when that wasnt what YoshiP actually said. Unless I misread the entire thing, his greatest criticism and "Dont do this or youll fined yourself in a six foot deep hole" was regarding third party mods that altered the view of the game (nude mods particularly) and third party programs that directly affected the difficulty of a fight. In regards to ACT and parsing itself, it wasnt a huge offense because at it's core it just takes numbers and information out of the available combat log and displays them for you and that the issue there isnt the parser itself, its the harassment that ensues (though I think that his opinion, while well intentioned, is a bit misguided but I digress). If anything, didnt he say something along the lines of "Stop being so overt about using parsers in streams and such"?

You're right, but even parsers are not in the clear, just in the gray area where the official stance is they still don't want you to use it and refuses to have an official parser built into the game.

But yes, tools that go beyond parsing public data and into manipulating data is the real concern and will have more severe punishment if you get caught using it, or so they claim.

[linay]

The problem is that any type of add-on prevention will have a tradeoff that everyone else will pay for. I'm not directly familiar with how some of the mods out there work, but based on the way those sort of things usually work—former game developer, so I've seen this from the other side—my take is:

• Preventing the hair/clothing mods could likely be done by forcing an integrity check on all game data on-disk on startup each time, but that would likely make for exceedingly slow startups. (There's caveats here, but the forums limit me to 3000 characters, so I'll just skip them.)
• You could prevent GShade/ReShade type mods which adjust the rendering (tweak colors, change depth-of-field, turn the game into an oil painting or a pencil sketch for screenshots, etc.) by coming up with ways to detect if anything's mucking with the output... though this would potentially also break in-game overlays for other tools like Discord, StreamLabs OBS, etc.
• You can't easily prevent ACT, Teamcraft, etc., by modifying the game itself because those aren't actually touching the game itself; they're literally just entirely-separate applications which watch and process data the game generates, whether as logfiles on disk or as network traffic between the client and server. If I understand right, the waymark program that's caused all this fuss doesn't even touch the game; it just hijacks the network stream at the Windows level and sends the commands as though it were the client. So the only way to stop that is with the false-positive-prone anticheat software mentioned earlier.

You never want the folks breaking the rules to have the better user experience than the ones following them do, and unfortunately, going down the road of aggressively blocking external mods is a good way to ensure you do precisely that.

I don't think they need to bother with tools that don't modify game data, except perhaps encrypting certain data to prevent data mining.

For those tools that do affect game data, they would of course have to be careful in how they will secure their data, but I don't think it's something they should give up on researching.

[Risvertasashi]

I don't think they need to bother with tools that don't modify game data, except perhaps encrypting certain data to prevent data mining.

For those tools that do affect game data, they would of course have to be careful in how they will secure their data, but I don't think it's something they should give up on researching.

If they really wanted to do this, I think it would be a lot simpler than most people realize.

It's possible to have parts of the running game encrypted in memory, and to have greater protections around especially sensitive parts. I've seen some other games do this when the devs, like the FF14 devs, really don't like the idea of scanning the players' computers. It can be pretty effective. And even if the community "breaks" the encryption within a few weeks, that would be plenty enough to kill its use in say, raid prog, and to make many addon devs give up simply from the effort required. And the FF14 devs could change the scheme every new major patch.

That's just one approach I know from having seen other games' devs do it. I'm not a game dev, so actual game devs may know of other alternatives too.

The downside is, well, this sort of thing doesn't discriminate. It really is scorched earth. And the more certain addons push the limits more and more, SE might feel more tempted to do something like this despite the community backlash they would receive.

Anyways I don't mean this post to say what SE should or shouldn't do (I have other posts for that), but I just want to highlight that SE's passivity shouldn't be taken for granted. With enough of a push, it could change.

[linay]

SE's passivity shouldn't be taken for granted. With enough of a push, it could change.

That's what I think too. And they probably have already started thinking about what they will have to do when people ignore them and tool developers attempt to bypass any restriction they put, or they should anyway after making their stance known.

[Arillyn]

That's what I think too. And they probably have already started thinking about what they will have to do when people ignore them and tool developers attempt to bypass any restriction they put, or they should anyway after making their stance known.

I think you're right. I think this was their "last warning" because the FFXIV community can't seem to not do stupid things. I think this was them putting it out there so when they start tightening things and/or laying down the ban hammer that they can then say "we did warn you it's against TOS".

[Packetdancer]

It's possible to have parts of the running game encrypted in memory, and to have greater protections around especially sensitive parts.

I've never used the problematic waymark tool so I don't actually know how it works for certain, mind you. But were I writing a tool to do that, rather than trying to read things out of memory (which will change from build to build), I'd read what's sent back and forth across the network. A waymark tool might watch and see a series of messages back and forth that are basically "Load Hades EX, connect to instance <whatever>" and then "Waymark A placed at this location", "Waymark B placed at this location", etc. The tool could keep track of this: 'in Hades EX, waymark A at pos1, waymark B at pos 2' and so on. And when you wanted to save the waymarks, it would save that data. Then to put them back, it would just generate the network packets to the FFXIV server as if it were the client: "place waymark A at pos1". So the server accepts the command—it's coming from the right computer, after all—and dutifully sends back to everyone 'Waymark A placed at this location' and everyone sees the waymark appear.

Now, you could probably break the ability to send the commands by putting a sequence number in the packets; if something else uses the next sequence number that the client was expecting to use, you spot that something else has been using your network stream and promptly error out, disconnecting the user. (There's other caveats there, of course. There's always caveats.) But the only way to stop folks reading the network traffic (for things like Teamcraft's automatic inventory updates) would be to encrypt the network traffic, which would have a decent amount of overhead and wouldn't even still be guaranteed to stop it; MITM (man-in-the-middle) security attacks are a thing.

Mind you, that's just a guess; I haven't dug deeply into the FFXIV network protocol. They may already do a sequence number thing and the waymark tool might be handling setting things differently. I'm speaking from the standpoint of "I used to be a video game developer for my day job, saw various shenanigans, and hear from former co-workers and various friends still in the industry about the shenanigans they see", and assuming these shenanigans are not appreciably different than many others.

At any rate, I think if SquareEnix is forced to crack down on mods from an engineering standpoint, writing things to prevent them entirely, it'll introduce new annoyances and inconveniences for everyone else, because that sort of security is never free. Not in that sense. So, y'know, I'd personally prefer they not.

But if the mods truly become enough of a problem to merit it... well, maybe that'll be the price we pay.

[DumdogsWorld]

....

I mean, to be fair, FFXIV is software and software is infinitely malleable if you have the understanding to do so. If people really wanted their combat markers back for statics, it would be child's play for a 3rd party marker overlay to be made. Hook D3D11, extract the various orientation and position matrices of the camera, implement some kind of editor, and use something like the Steamworks API for separate, peer-to-peer networking without passing around IP addresses.

Square Enix encrypting their executable and process memory would be just another gunshot in the war. It wouldn't end - people would just improvise.

[Enla]

Heck no. Those programs are awful and often cause way more issues than they solve as others have pointed out. If it's not DCing because of a false flag it's lag. If it's not lag it's the program being so badly coded that it just decides to stop working. This is a can of worms you REALLY do not want opened.

[Ursa_Vonfiebryd]

Other than dps meters that empower a small number of d-bags to actively and sometimes vocally discriminate against other players, the bulk of the 'game modding, that actually occurs is visual mods that don't actually affect anyone besides that single user. Sure there's a bunch 3rd party meters you can install that will tell you very esosteric borderline idiotic things--like where the next aoe is going to fall, but for the most part its just junk that affects the individual user. What would be a better use of resources is trying to circumvent botting, both crafter/gatherer and spam/battle bots. The rest is eh.

[Saradain]

Okay hold up just hear me out on this one before you grab your pitchforks..

With the most recent Live Letter, we've received a statement from YoshiP urging players to not modify their game or use 3rd Party Software which is what everyone should be doing in the first place.

BUT.. that won't stop users from ignoring that statement and carry on as normal breaking rules & being punished as per usual.

This is why I recommend SE try to seek out Easy Anti Cheat, they can offer so many perks and stop tampering of the XIV client in one fell swoop, weither it be reading certain information from files or editing information or even yet check to see if certain information is being sent to SE that it shouldn't be altogether.

Just think, with this software we can get rid of everything in one fell swoop and everyone can actually be happier where people are trying their best without numbers, ToS-breaking material or greasy simps getting in our way.

It'll be heaven where we can all dance around and be happy in our lives.

Jokes aside, I do find it concerning that they don't try to seek out third party anti-tamper companies to try and see if they can offer assistance in such a manner that doesn't impact us playing the game or them from doing their jobs..

Did Yoshi-P not say scanning our PCs would be illegal?

I'm sorry to inform you, if you think wiping out these programs will reduce the amount of toxicity...

...As if the player himself is a source of toxicity, not the tools he uses...

It won't be a heaven to dance around in, it will be the truest, purest hell once frustrated players start to make up incredibly subtle reasons to kick people for ANYTHING, as they do not know or cannot know why the boss is not dying. They will start an inquisition and not even the actual extraordinary players are safe anymore. I don't know about you, but I see nothing but darkness in your idea.