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

[QT_Melon]

That was sarcasm. I forgot to bring the sign.

Nah it's cool, my bad for not looking to see you had another reply before the one I responded to

[Risvertasashi]

If SE goes scorched earth, they will lose a lot of customers. Of course there would be a bunch of people on the forums going "serves you all right, cheaters!" even though maybe someone just imported a hairstyle or wanted to improve their own play, but you know.

That said, I do worry a bit that some addon dev will eventually push things too far. Like the TEA stuff that Yoshi talked so much about in the most recent PLL. Even if they don't bend to installing anticheat software, there are things they could do to break addons, but it would break all of them, not just the "black" ones.

[linay]

there are things they could do to break addons, but it would break all of them, not just the "black" ones.

If their official stance is they don't want the use of addons, then might as well break them all or it might come off as being hypocritical. At the very least, they could try to break all addons that try to manipulate game data. It would be better than an anti-cheat software.

[Packetdancer]

If their official stance is they don't want the use of addons, then might as well break them all or it might come off as being hypocritical. At the very least, they could try to break all addons that try to manipulate game data. It would be better than an anti-cheat software.

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, even 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 to place waymarks 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.

[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.

[Melichoir]

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"?

[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.

[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.