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

[Kuroka]

Anti-cheat just ruins games.

No, cheaters do.

[Melichoir]

No, cheaters do.

That they do, but theres a lot of conflation between using a parser (which ultimately just collects combat log data) and using third party mods that affect fight difficulty. YoshiP did distinguish between these two facets. His concern regarding Parsers isnt about number crunching, its about harassment that he said ensues.

[QT_Melon]

No, cheaters do.

The amazing thing is that they're not mutually exclusive

Both ruin games.

[Packetdancer]

The amazing thing is that they're not mutually exclusive

Both ruin games.

Cheaters ruin games.

Anticheat software that's forced to run as administrator ruins operating system stability and security.

Neither is great. (One is admittedly more likely to cause catastrophic data loss than the other, though.)

[Sathona]

Anti-cheat programs are by a large majority causing more harm than good.
They can break the game and force you to reinstall it n stuff[and ffxiv has no file repair as far as im aware of so even worse]
They are scanning your entire PC[hello privacy?]
And they are easily bypassable as many MMOs who have them have proved to be.
I have a friend who legit uninstalled a game she had 'whale' gear on due to them adding an anti cheat program which searched her computer.
Privacy is important~

So no getting one is only gonna make things worse for everyone[Least those who actually researched them].

[Packetdancer]

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.

This quite possibly leads to an escalating cold war between devs and tool authors, though. Folks start hooking DX11 to inject new "cheaty markers" into the game's rendering canvas, so SquareEnix introduces an integrity check and the game quits if anything is mucking about in the graphics pipeline; that shuts down the tool—and things like ReShade—at the cost of other overlays like Discord's, StreamLabs OBS, etc. So now you can't use Discord with FFXIV, and meanwhile the tools devs write their own video driver that acts as a proxy to the real drivers and hook the rendering there, so SquareEnix makes it so that FFXIV only runs on a machine where it can validate the digital signature of the active video driver, so...

It's not a fun path for anyone involved. (Except maybe the tool authors if they genuinely enjoy the challenge of finding the next loophole, which—to be fair—many software engineers do.)

[JohnnyDevo]

To be honest, if they got rid of my ACT and of my mods, I would quit the game.

Now, I understand why it's officially in the rules. Because people can, and have, abused such things. People have installed mods to make other characters nude without their consent, or even worse, to make digital children do inappropriate things. It's a gross world out there. Some users of ACT have, as well, used it to harass others. I totally understand that. And that's exactly why they make these rules, so they can go after these folks who do bad with these tools and say "hey, this stuff is against the rules, we don't need any further excuses, you're banned."

But other people, myself included, use ACT to better themselves. Some people use mods to put their character in a pretty dress. I use mods to make my character's tail into a floofy fox tail. When you are using mods to affect only your own experience, and not to give yourself any advantage, there is no harm to it. And they have many, many players who use these tools for completely benign purposes.

They would be utterly foolish to actually go down a route to totally enforce these rules. So I'm going to keep using ACT to try and better myself, and I'm going to keep enjoying pretending my miqo is actually a fox, and if I get banned for that, then I don't want to be supporting this game anyway.

[KageTokage]

I have no beef with parsers or appearance mods if they're not being abused, but things like the AoE display overlay and bots really need to go.

Not sure what they can do about the former, but I''m not sure why it's so bloody difficult to get any users of the latter banned when they demonstrate painfully obvious and abnormal patterns of activity.

[DumdogsWorld]

snip

I never said it would be a good thing. I just meant that cold wars between devs and tool authors can and do happen. We should hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

[Hash_Browns]

So how exactly would this anti-cheat detect ACT?