Mods and cheat engine

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

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I think part of the issue with this topic is that the term 'mods' is super vague, when there are several tiers and types of 3rd party modifications that have varying ranges of effects on the game.

The term 'Mods' in FF14 for a large amount of people, refer exclusively to visual modifications of the in-game assets exclusively, such as gear modifications. These mods have no tangible advantages or benefits in player skill, and are purely aesthetic flair. And in many ways, can provide negatives due to the injected risk of a mod not loading properly and creating a DX11 error for an instant game crash. This is likely the arguing point of several people saying they're not cheating, since they're not creating a positive advantage in their game state compared to another's, skill wise.

The term 'plugins' I think fits the topic better here, as the function of plugins in FF14 is drastically different than the visual mods are and -can- increase the advantage in their game state positively. I think if the terms were better differentiated, you'd find less people arguing mods are not cheating if the topic was instead phrased as 'plugins and cheat engine' instead.

That being said on the plugins, there's plenty of people that will likely argue the plugins they use aren't cheating because (and this is a thought process I agree with) several features of some plugins out there should straight up be features in the game, so they justify it as simply fixing the devs laziness. Like, the various 'double weave regardless of latency' plugins showcase that Square could easily do the exact same thing as these plugins are doing and create an experience 100x better for every non-living next to the servers player in the game - yet mistifyingly, they refuse. There's even twitter threads where one guy went and broke down step by step how FF14 handles animation locks and its completely ludicrous how they're handled.

Things like Cactbot however, due to its ability to predict certain attacks faster than any human can (especially things like experimental fireplume where it's the same cast name but 2-3 different versions where you have to wait for a visual indicator after the fact), along with being able to transcribe all your debuffs during something like Intermediate Relativity that would be incredibly difficult and annoying for any human to manually call out for everyone in the raid group - yeah, that's straight up cheating and has no valid defense.