Quote Originally Posted by Saraide View Post
Morals inform what is fair and what isnt, laws/rules dont do a good job at that. Unsyncing often times cuts off massive portions of fights. When I farmed o12s for the mount we never got to see hello world 2, yet I have the mount all the same. Outgearing the fight is an insanely unfair advantage over those who did the fight when it came out and you get to show of mounts and achievements anyway. Additionally, they seem to be fine with people using alexander to solve ping issues. That's an "explicitly banned cheat program" as you put it. It's just also the same program used to reduce animation lock to 0 to allow triple weaving without clipping if someone chose to go that route. Clearly we have moved beyond being a TOS herald and therefore we have to ask, what is fair?
XIVAlexander is used by people who don't even have serious ping issues because it allows them to send series' of normally impossible inputs by emulating an impossible game-state, so yeah it's also essentially a cheat program.

Really, it's not that complex of an issue at all. If a third party piece of software is offering active assistance with fight execution by doing something that would be impossible under normal circumstances, it's very easy to see why it's cheating. Even more-so when it's very explicitly prohibited by the rules created by the developers of the game.

You could make reasonable fairness argument around simple QoL plugins, graphical mods or combat loggers, but when it comes to things like Cactbot and XIVAlexander it's pretty black-and-white.