Can SQ-EN draw a line in the sand w/ 3rd Parties?

[Nethereal]

There are plenty of folks in the high-end community that look down on Cactbot.

Nothing worse than getting 10-15 minutes deep into an ultimate and someones ACT/Cacbot stops working and suddenly the entire run is over.
And then they admit to it, nah fam just say you flunked or something unless your ACT started calling mechs out over the mic(which was a big issue for one of my groups because 2 people had 2 ACTs calling out mech's in perfect alex and both were wrong) I don't want to know you can't do this fight without it..

I think calling it a cheat is a bit of a stretch considering thousands of players kill content without it on a daily basis, and the people killing the content first are 99.9% doing it without it.

I agree with your entire post except this particular part. Flawed logic imo.

This is similar to using a times table on a math test. Sure you can do the math without it but it'll be more challenging and take longer. Just because you or someone else can do it without it does not mean the act itself stops being "cheating".

[SaberMaxwell]

Elaborate? Or are you just spouting nonsense to pretend to be smart?
Also try to detail what those "times before" were. One by one.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...al-Fantasy-XIV

Here you go.

[SenseiMaria]

Dunno about addons/mods, how does XIVAlexander help with latency?

A bit of a TL : DR here on a very complex and in-depth issue. I'm also probably getting a bit of the finer details of this wrong since my knowledge of XIVAlexander comes from descriptions in discords like the Balance.

After you execute an OGCD or a GCD, there is a built in 'animation lock' that's dependent on the skill, but is always at least 500ms. You are unable to use another OGCD or GCD until this 500ms+ timer is up. When you use the OGCD, the timer begins ticking down on your client, and a packet is sent to the server saying "hey, I did this OGCD, apply the damage/effect plz". The server then sends back a confirmation that you did in fact use it. Now to highlight what the primary issue is with FF14 in particular, and what XIVAlexander does based on my second hand knowledge. For this, we'll pretend someone has 100ms latency to the server.

The server receives the packet containing your attack information, and sends its acknowledgement back which also takes 100ms. By this point, your animation lock has 300ms on it remaining. But the moment your client receives the acknowledgement, the animation lock timer resets back to 500ms for whatever reason. So rather than just counting out the remaining 300ms, your animation lock is now 500ms again. Meaning once that finishes counting down, your total time on the animation lock was 500ms + the latency of a round trip to the server and back again. What was only a 500ms lock has suddenly turned into 700ms to complete the OGCD. This would mean 2x OGCD occupies 1.4s of your GCD window. Part of that time gets eaten up by the animation lock of the actual GCD. If the GCD & 2x OGCD all take up 700ms of time to execute, this leaves you with basically 400ms or less worth of time depending on your GCD to press buttons and get everything done before you clip your GCD.

That's just with 100ms. try something like 150ms:

-Use GCD. 150ms to server., animation lock now at 350ms.
-Server sends packet back. Animation lock which was at 200ms, is now back at 500ms, meaning the total time on that GCD was 800ms.
-Use 1st OGCD. 150ms to server, 150 back. 1st OGCD takes 800ms to execute. total time on GCD is now 1.6s
-use 2nd OGCD. 150ms to server, 150 back. 2nd OGCD takes 800ms to execute. Total time on GCD is now 2.4s <--- Depending on skillspeed, this can cause GCD clipping directly, or give the person literally zero breathing room.

The higher your latency, the more exponentially you get punished.

What XIVAlexander does is basically forces the client to effectively not reset the 500ms lock when it receives the server reply by letting it reset and then forcefully subtracting the time of latency the packet took to reach the server from the newly resetted 500ms. Let's see this with an example of 150ms:
-use GCD, client sends packet out. 500ms lock begins counting down. 150ms to the server, 150ms back. Animation lock is now at 200ms, gets reset back to 500ms.
-XIVAlexander now forcefully tricks the client into subtracting that 300ms the round trip took from the 500ms, meaning it's back to 200ms. Remaining 200ms counts out, 1st GCD took 500ms + the few ms it took for the animation lock to reset + XIValexander to inject and change the variable. Total time spent is ~510 ms.
-1st OGCD follows the same routine, XIVAlexander makes it so the effective ms was only ~510. Total time on animation lock is now 1.02s.
-2nd OGCD follow the same routine. Total time on animation lock between GCD & 2x OGCDs is now only 1.53s.

Without XIVAlexander, that person with 150ms has to spend 2.4s double weaving. With it, they shave off an ENTIRE SECOND of time for wiggle room with 1.53s, making double weaving infinitely easier.

Again, details are likely not perfect in my examples, but the base idea is XIVAlexander adjusts the animation lock using your latency as a subtractor to get it as close to the base animation lock as possible.

[Sotaris]

That is the most blatant lie I have ever read on this forum, and I've seen a lot. Are you seriously going to tell me that world first groups will not hire someone to code that specific timeline? Really? I guarantee you this will happen on the new Ultimate for world first prog.

XIVAlexander does a lot, and I do mean a lot of things that are good. But it's also a blatant third party cheat because the developers made the game so dysfunctional for people with medium to high latency. Zero animation lock for perfect triple weave (which you can never ever do normally), being able to tell exactly where melee range is on the screen always via a hud display, the ability to know exactly what to do years ahead of when the mechanic comes out. It's DBD if the developers of it were allowed to completely break the flow of the game itself. If you want an extreme example, you could double weave during Hypercharge with that program.

Don't be an apologist.

Edit - Slash through is different plug in/changed wording to not associate the two. Woops.

Cactbot has to my experience and knowledge never been up for update first week just cause of the world first race. Generally ACT is down the first few days as well.

Where did I say a group wouldn't hire a developer to get it up and running? Nowhere cause I don't speculate in what a group does and does not, but I can promise that if the truth got out and a world first race team was caught to used cactbot or a AM tool, they'd be frown upon by the community, maybe former WoW racers wouldn't bat an eye due to they used to DBM and the like.

So before you attack me and accusing me for lying, take a step back please. This hostile tone isn't very constructive.

[RobynDaBank]

<super helpful info snipped>

Thank you so much for the explanation!

[_Koneko_]

they should set up a streaming taskforce and go through everyone's public streams and banning every one of them who are in violation they aren't violating your privacy because you choose to share it for the whole world to see your tos breaking

[Sotaris]

they should set up a streaming taskforce and go through everyone's public streams and banning every one of them who are in violation they aren't violating your privacy because you choose to share it for the whole world to see your tos breaking

There is no incentive for them as they'd lose money that way. Same reason we don't see more bots getting banned.
As much I'd love to see it as well.

Not to mention, they could simply hide ACT and whatever 3rd party to show up on stream. So it would just be wasted resources on monitoring twitch.

[Nexxus]

You'll have to see FFXI and Asura server to see where the damage could go by letting 3rd party without consequence.

[Sotaris]

You'll have to see FFXI and Asura server to see where the damage could go by letting 3rd party without consequence.

Please explain. If you're refering to Windower, it get same treatment as ACT or XIVlauncher. It doesn't hurt the game.
They did ban a lot of people with the savage dupe glitch, so it's not like they don't act, although this is probably 12-15 years ago.

I don't play on Asura but on most if not all servers you have a botting issue but other than that I'm not aware of any 3rd party people are generally using outside of Windower or Ashita.

[Nexxus]

No, not windower (neither Ashita), a lot of ppl use bot to exp their job point or automate reisenjima wyrm without being present. even for ENM there is an auto pop/loot coffer with rinse and repeat.
I've seen a lot of player (not RMT) using thoses bots, some friend tried to convinced me to use them because everyone does.
Some mercenary are selling Job Point too with thoses bots.
There's also a pluging that doesn't push you back when getting hit by a mechanic that should do it.
There's also some tools to teleport you anywhere even if you dont have touched it.
And some others stuffs.