Increasing number of players using 3rd party tools

[OdinelStarrei]

Perhaps they don't give you the info because you aren't meant to have it in the first place?

I also notice the very thing I've brought up in the past. People complain that they want harder content in the game, then make it as easy as possible for themselves when they get it because they don't actually want a challenge. They just want to try to say they are better than everyone else.

If they were actually as good as they claim, they could beat any fight in the game, including Ultimates, on their very first completely blind attempt with no deaths or third party tools.

Logistical information obfuscation is a stupid thing to do in a game that operates by numeric values. In a previous live letter, there was an really awful explanation on why things like damage type were not indicated in the game outside of trial and error. But when a significant majority of the jobs in the game have actions that only work on a specific damage type, it doesn't matter what the excuse is, that information should be clearly telegraphed by the developers(it isn't sometimes), and not assumed or data scraped by the playerbase. Same thing goes for things like UI tweaks, finding out what the actual STATS in this game do, or changing the sound settings within cutscenes via chat commands. The game simply does not have the amount of quality of life features or customizable user actions that some people would prefer.

Strawmanning people who use plugins is not the best way to go about this, because plugins, addons, pretty much everything 3rd party on XIV exists as a way to compensate for personal lack of ability OR maybe, things the developers do not have the time, or the intent to actually implement. Who are these people who are saying they're such god gamers, they knew that UWU was a trick fight designed to waste days worth of prog? You do know the Awoken buff was datamined pre-launch right? And even then, no one figured it out for days. Same thing with Enigma Codex. No one actually says this, and if you know someone who is actually using the legitimate completion of raid content as a cudgel to demean others without factual reasons to do so, such as the lack of merit/logic of their statements, why don't you just tell them to kick sand and stop being an unreasonable individual, instead of painting broadly with a "wow those people? they're actually trash!" brush? Just because you killed raids, doesn't make you 100% right or a better than another. I would think most well-adjusted people know this. There is no need to hyperbole. I complain about wanting harder content because things like Matoya's Relict are almost insulting as an Expert Dungeon, not because I need bot callouts for a protean spread for the 99th time in E11S. Actually watch some of these people do content, if you took the plugins away, I'd hazard a guess they would not immediately devolve into a gibbering mess unable to even do a standard rotation.

The issue is that SE doesn't establish actual boundaries, outside of "don't be mean", and even if they did, the playerbase is under no obligation to respect those boundaries. "But it's against ToS!!!!" Yeah, and? So is RMT, look at PF and Feast. If SE doesn't enforce it, doesn't punish and make an example of those people like they do for harassment/cheating, it doesn't matter. Remember the waymarker changes? Why wasn't everyone in that team who lead to that change immediately suspended? Because there's no real benefit to SE for doing so, no one got hurt, the content was still completed legitimately, and the PR mess would've been awful. It was just streamlining something in the game. Compare this to something to like Ungarmax, which was ACTUAL cheating despite only using in-game accessible commands. Issue is that it objectively delegitimized current content via exploits, and people were punished accordingly.

Modded content, animation and gear replacements, log uploading, packet interception, general game fixes are under the same 3rd party tool umbrella as Discord servers/overlays for content, programs that do Perform perfectly or inject a actual musical instrument into game inputs, or even just recording your own gameplay for uploading on a 3rd party site. Yoshida has said this. In fact, Duty Recorder is a perfect example on how SE continues to drop the ball on adding in features people would find incredibly useful, because their implementation is always half-baked and inferior compared to tools people already use. SSS and the aggro meter does not have enough useful information on a fight-per-fight basis on what needs to change to fix issues in a timely, respectful to those participating manner. Again, if we're not supposed to have access to damage numbers, simply don't put the damage information in the battle log, only actions. But then why do we have damage amounts to the exact number in PvP??? Why do enrages exist? Why is there a double standard, and with that, why isn't it being enforced unilaterally?

This is why the gray area exists. Because harassment and cheating are the actual issues, not the 3rd party tools themselves. If you want to hardline the 3rd party tool situation, you have to go scorched earth, and you have to do it early. The time for that was in Midas, or even debatably Final Coil. Otherwise people will just see it as developers taking away things from the community, even if the community should not have had those things in the first place. It's too ingrained now. There's nothing they can do without blowback. SE gets the best of both worlds by pretending not to notice, letting the community fix issues for them at their own "risk", and by slamming those players who use 3rd party tools when they start harassing the playerbase or going way, way too far. And if players are using triggers as a crutch to compensate of their lack of effort (not disability or some sort of mental block), I think they're doing themselves a disservice and hamstringing their own player development, but that's their choice, and I'm not here to hold their hand, lecture, and force them to play my way, even if we're in the same team together. I honestly don't care.

Side note, Nael quotes in UCOB are a bad mechanic, even after adjustments. In Nael herself they are barely tolerable, but in double trouble, particularly as the tank who is holding Twintania at the time, it is almost impossible to see that tiny chatbox between pure chaos going on around you, the flapping wings of Twin, your own battle effects, the sky being on literal fire. Perhaps if it was the larger, center of the screen textbox I wouldn't feel such ire torwards it. I still did it, but it wasn't a satisfying or interesting way to complete the mechanic, I feel like I was unfairly punished in contrast to my team, while something like A10S, which has MARKERS for what is essentially the same mechanic is immediately more understandable, it's big, it's color-coded, while still requiring the player to have eyeballs. I would've preferred 4 sets of faster Nael quotes with Markers than even 2 with textboxes. If you don't want people to feel like they are forced to use triggers, don't design bad mechanics. People are going to install triggers anyway if they're unwilling to learn, at least make the experience tolerable for those players who don't or can't use triggers. If triggers make your mechanic entirely irrelevant, that's on the developers. If you don't want people to do log review after every single pull, don't design mechanics like Light Rampant that have almost ZERO information feedback to the player. If you don't want people to use auto-markers, don't design mechanics like Titan goals, that circumvent traditional priority system solutions because of time to execute, and not because of mechanic complexity. (see:Tenstrike)