Mods and cheat engine

[Packetdancer]

You bet that, if I download cactpot, I still won't be able to land into a random ultimate party and clear it.

So, I know this was a typo, but I realized that I'm noticing a lot of things getting conflated in this thread, so it might be worth adding a little clarity.

"Cactpot" is the minigame at the Gold Saucer, both the Jumbo Cactpot (which is basically a lottery once a week) and Mini Cactpot (which is a daily scratch ticket with much smaller prizes). There is a mod that will give you suggestions on which square to scratch on a Mini Cactpot ticket. It doesn't guarantee good results—it's often wrong!—but it gives you the most likely line to have the biggest payout. The math behind that can be done with a pencil and paper or on any number of websites, though, so the mod doesn't give anything other than "convenience" by putting the solver into the game itself rather than on a webpage (or your notebook). This mod was discussed early on in the thread.

"Cactbot" is an addon for ACT (the external tool many raiders use to parse and analyze fights to improve their performance); it's named as a punny reference to the above-mentioned cactpot. Though folks keep referring to specifically the raid callouts it can do, Cactbot itself is basically a scripting engine which allows you to trigger off of and react to data as ACT processes it. So "Cactbot" is actually a collection of a variety of different modules with different purposes built on the same engine, though folks here are basically referring to one specific module.

Now, I don't use the "Raidboss" module in Cactbot that handles callouts (and which is being conflated with Cactbot as a whole); I honestly have no ethical problem with it, but I am the raid-caller in most of my groups and suspect I would find something giving me automated callouts distracting and actively detrimental rather than beneficial. (I mean, I certainly find it distracting when a second actual person decides to chime in with callouts of their own on the voice chat, so I figure I don't need to add a robot to that as well.)

That said, there are a number of other modules built on Cactbot, and the one that I do think is invaluable is "Oopsy Raidsy". When a wipe happens, Oopsy Raidsy will give you a breakdown of deaths and debuffs, showing (for instance) that the NIN died because they took 38k worth of damage when they only had 32k of health (meaning "if they'd been healed more they probably could've survived that"), or that the BRD took 98k worth of damage (meaning "something went wrong here, and healing wouldn't have been any help"). If you click on a death it'll show a log of damage and healing leading up to that death. It'll also show any instances of avoidable damage (i.e. any time someone took a vuln stack or damage down, meaning there was a way to avoid being hit by something there). When a pull goes bad and someone's like "I don't know why I died there" or "okay, did we just need more healing?" or whatever, Oopsy Raidsy can be amazingly valuable at helping a static break down just where everything took a hard left into disaster after a pull turns into a wipe.

There's also the Eureka module, which provides the functionality of the Eureka or Bozja tracker websites (i.e. tracking how long until it's possible to spawn a given Notorious Monster, Skirmish, or Critical Engagement) just in a map window right in game. Stuff like that.

"xivalexander" is a tool which subtracts a best estimate of network round-trip time from the game's inbuilt animation lock, allowing people with terrible ping to double-weave with the same degree of consistency that folks with non-terrible connections to the game can have. It could also hypothetically be used in a cheat-y manner to enable triple-weaving, though one imagines that would trip some alarms on the servers and send up a warning flag that might get someone banned; enabling double-weaving wouldn't, because it would functionally just look the same on the server side as someone who has less-terrible ping. (Because as it is, some jobs -- notably NIN -- are just straight unplayable with bad ping unless you negate the animation lock that gets added on top of that.)

There are other tools, some of which are definitely cheaty. Anything that violates the normal rules of how PvP operates, for instance. Or there used to be a tool that would shift the waymarkers around mid-fight, meaning you didn't even need a raid-caller because it'd be like "Okay, you are marker A, just follow that" and then you went wherever the tool put that marker. That one, Square-Enix quite obviously thought was cheaty, because they addressed it by making it impossible to move or place waymarks once combat begins.

And that's why I think it's hard to speak of "mods" as a single whole. There's stuff like the Mini Cactpot solver or the Eureka module built on Cactbot (which are just convenience, providing information you can get from an external website anyway, or even do by hand for the Cactpot solver). There's stuff like Cactbot's Oopsy Raidsy, which gives no actual performance aid but can be really useful for figuring out where stuff went wrong in prog. There's stuff like Cactbot's Raidboss, which I think is little different than a human raid-caller; yes, it can call some mechanics before a human raid-caller would, but it can call other ones poorly (if at all), so it's still no substitute for learning the mechanics—any more than a raid caller is. There's stuff like xivalexander, which can be cheaty but can also be used to level the playing field. There's stuff out there that's purely aesthetic, like mods to change the UI style or do artistic screenshots or whatnot. And there's stuff out there that's just straight-up cheaty and should absolutely be shut down.

[Melorie]

So, I know this was a typo, but I realized that I'm noticing a lot of things getting conflated in this thread, so it might be worth adding a little clarity.

Ooops! hah Thanks for the correction. And yes, people might branch this discussion as simply "waaah it's against the ToS ban it all" but it is way more nuanced than that. Look at the community built around g-shade, and creating their original characters exactly like they would want... There's a lot of room for creativity with these things, so acting like they're all bad isn't doing anyone favours. Seems over the top imo.

[Packetdancer]

Look at the community built around g-shade, and creating their original characters exactly like they would want... There's a lot of room for creativity with these things, so acting like they're all bad isn't doing anyone favours. Seems over the top imo.

GShade (and other ReShade variants) is kind of an odd duck with regards to third-party software, since the devs have explicitly said—on these forums, even—that they have no problem with it, though they have asked in the past that folks not include the copyright line that the game usually includes in images, just so folks don't mistake it for the stock game. Nvidia's ReShade variant—Freestyle—even lists FFXIV on the officially-supported-software page; if you've got an Nvidia card and are running an even remotely recent version of GeForce Experience, Freestyle's already enabled in-game and you can pull up that particular ReShade variant with Alt+F2 (unless you've changed the keybinding, obviously).

So those are less "unauthorized third-party software" and more "authorized third-party software". I mention this only because that renders them (mostly) irrelevant to the topic at hand.

(Though in the interests of full disclosure, I'm also a contributor to GShade; I write shaders that are included with it and have made bundled presets that are also included. So where my interest in most of the tools folks have brought up in this thread is academic, that one I'll confess to having some actual direct relevance to me.)

[Risvertasashi]

GShade (and other ReShade variants) is kind of an odd duck with regards to third-party software, since the devs have explicitly said—on these forums, even—that they have no problem with it, though they have asked in the past that folks not include the copyright line that the game usually includes in images, just so folks don't mistake it for the stock game. Nvidia's ReShade variant—Freestyle—even lists FFXIV on the officially-supported-software page; if you've got an Nvidia card and are running an even remotely recent version of GeForce Experience, Freestyle's already enabled in-game and you can pull up that particular ReShade variant with Alt+F2 (unless you've changed the keybinding, obviously).

So those are less "unauthorized third-party software" and more "authorized third-party software". I mention this only because that renders them (mostly) irrelevant to the topic at hand.

(Though in the interests of full disclosure, I'm also a contributor to GShade; I write shaders that are included with it and have made bundled presets that are also included. So where my interest in most of the tools folks have brought up in this thread is academic, that one I'll confess to having some actual direct relevance to me.)

The problem here is if you consider this "authorization", SE has also said in interviews they know people are using ACT and don't really have a problem with people using it for self improvement. You can call it "authorized" from that but it's a stretch and you can still get suspended if you say you use it in game. SE's official policy is no third party apps, full stop. They've also noted in a live letter that technically this could include discord or using microsoft excel to calculate DPS.

So, GShade, ReShade, etc aren't really in any better standing. SE's official policy is "just don't use it." For everything, including shaders.

Though, it's also worth noting - on games willing to implement anticheat, they often tell people not to use shaders because, apparently, it looks just like a cheat program in how it interacts with the game. If official anticheat ever comes to FF14, shader mods would probably be in the same boat. (But, probably one more reason SE feels it's not worth it...)

[Packetdancer]

So, GShade, ReShade, etc aren't really in any better standing. SE's official policy is "just don't use it." For everything, including shaders.

Fair, but someone oughta tell Nvidia that, then, because they have it on the list of Officially Supported with Developer Blessing games on the Freestyle website.

(To be fair, though, while most ReShade forks function by replacing the Direct3D DLLs and getting loaded into the game, then proxying all calls it makes to Direct3D and post-processing the resulting frame, Freestyle went way off the beaten path; it doesn't seem to hook/replace anything because it post-processes everything in the actual Nvidia driver, and just uses GeForce Experience to hook the activation hotkey outside of the game itself and provide the Freestyle UI.)