They need to find a way to detect XIV Alexander and ban people

[Shurrikhan]

I don’t use Cactbot and never would because the constant ping/pong I hear in streams would annoy me to death.

I couldn't use DBM back in the day for the same reason. It was so tilting that I raided better without it.

BigWigs, muted with scrolling queue, was the first time I could find a decent compromise.

That said, I don’t think having an automated callout really matters all that much. You still have to know how to react to said callout. Be it by a bot or a person in voice-chat.

Agreed... at this point, now that it's not automating waymarks. Though, I'd have preferred to have kept the ability to place waymarks and instead just, much like many a mechanic in WoW, had the dragon placement information obfuscated from addons.

You mean as in Zodiark EX, where people just need to follow around that one person with a marker?

Like that, yeah, if it now didn't need anyone at all and was infallible.

[IdowhatIwant]

What the title says. I just found out that it literally tells you things in the game that you shouldn't know prior. For example. WHen you do the Gold Saucer Mini Cactpot, it will LIGHT UP the ones you want to click for the highest reward... That's absurd.

Further. If any contest comes back like the Firmament, it will literally tell these people what to use each step to get the best quality. It can also adjust their ping to be near zero, allowing them to hit skills/nodes much faster than others. This doesn't need to be allowed and there has got to be a way to detect it. Clearly it's reading something in the game files to allow it to tell you what buttons on the mini cact you wanna click. Which is against ToS.

I can get where you are coming from but this is not very game breaking. People make crafting macros based on there stats all the time which is not much different. As far as the mini cactpot goes its basic math. It sounds more like a mod for lazy people.

[Commander_Justitia]

The new quotes are better, but the mechanic as a whole is annoying to try and deal with when dealing with it normally.

It was even easier with the JP client as you only needed to identify the single kanji to be able to tell the whole mechanic. So I see how it didn't seem potentially problematic to them as JP devs

[grinkdaboy]

95ms ping is nothing. Absolutely nothing. One good thing about XIVAlex I read in the code was you can enjoy setting the action window to the 220-280ms range and see how we have been playing for the last 9 years.

it's not a contest, high ping is universally undesirable

[Ivtrix]

very interesting to see a lot of people who have not touched savage during relevant tiers complain about perceived cheating

your alliance raids and normal raids are quite safe, dont worry

[Koldan]

Imagine thinking that using all third party to improve your parse, call out for you and such is normal in multiplayer game tho. All those cacbot, alexander plugins people cant even raid on patch day until their 3rd party stuff fixed.

[Shougun]

It is some matter of opinon but I did want to offer a counter voice in that I think DBM like tools are potentially extremely helpful and can have a huge impact on quality of play. Content is portion knowledge portion execution. It's true if you have poor execution (gameplay skills in general) then well.... good luck! lol. But having no need to learn, nor remember, yet have high accuracy and info that is usually impractical to know in the time frames you already know it... well I believe that is a significant boon to your ability to do well if you're a person that doesn't quickly memorize / get content (or want to be that person).

In WoW I'd just show up without bothering to learn and 'get it', without I'd probably make mistakes by forgetting or not memorizing certain more complicated bits. It absolutely made a difference to me, and I believe it does for others too. Just maybe not everyone, obviously .

Also made content far less stressful since I wasn't really worried about if something was coming or not. You were told as it happened in a very accurate and informative way.

My point though is if you took a snapshot of a world with DBM and without I do believe more people would be doing more content and doing better in the DBM world, I strongly believe it has an actual impact to the game. Some people would be the same in both worlds, but as a total audience I think there is a change.

[DkFusion]

LOL - So after reading this thread I almost pee'd myself a wee bit.

Winning comment - "You can reduce your ping to 'zero'. While I'm at it, I'm going to look for a car mod to reduce my distance to work to zero. No mod changes the time it takes a packet to travel to instant. Sorry to tell you.

Should make a category in the forums called "Cancel Culture" because that's what all this crap reminds me of. How about instead of attacking mods we all come together and fight to get some of these great QoL features baked into the game....so everyone has ease of access and can enjoy complete control of the way they experience the game.

But instead....lets all just make sure those that acquire tools to enhance the enjoyment that don't AFFECT you in the slightest are yanked. Because dreary misery loves company amirite.

And it's very clear the OP does not use the mini cac solver, because if they did they would now how literally worthless it is.

[Eriane_Elis]

It's called an anti-cheat, many MMOs and multiplayer games in general have them.

No one wants this and Yoshi P said over and over again that neither does he. What we have installed is none of their business. He and other devs respects our privacy. Unlike the companies that force you to use easy anti cheat and other similar software.

[Packetdancer]

Imagine thinking that using all third party to improve your parse, call out for you and such is normal in multiplayer game tho. All those cacbot, alexander plugins people cant even raid on patch day until their 3rd party stuff fixed.

I've said before that I don't actually have any issue with Cactbot; people need to learn the fights in order to make timelines for them, and having Cactbot call mechanics seems to me little different than having a human raid-caller call them. (Save, y'know, not slipping up when tired. Not that I ever do that as a raid caller. *nervous smile, small eye twitch*)

And I will note that I know people who have audio processing issues -- I have them to some extent (if enough people are talking at once my brain goes "NOPE" and just stops processing any of those audio streams), and my best friend is even moreso. For them, using Cactbot with a visual callout -- where it says "Cleaving left" or whatever on-screen as text -- is probably a lot friendlier to that than a raid-caller (who is not going to take the time to type callouts in chat unless they're way faster at typing mid-mechanic than I am).

I will grant that Cactbot being able to call things slightly earlier than I can as a raid-caller does potentially give an advantage on some mechanics (P3N Experimental Fireplume, from what I'm told), but on others it can't call things very well in an automated manner where a human raid-caller can. For instance, I'm told that for Shackles of Time in P1S, it just looks at whoever gets the debuff and goes "Move to <whatever that person isn't on>." If you follow that blindly, and the group has agreed on, say, "fire is always safe, if you have the debuff move to light", when Cactbot says "Move to light" following that blindly is gonna end badly. (Which is how I learned what that callout was in Cactbot; someone blindly followed the automated callout in a PUG practice run of P1S and got 'sploded when the debuffed person moved as agreed-upon.)

So I think it sort of comes out in the wash.

And yeah, if you rely on Cactbot's callouts and follow them blindly, you maybe can't raid on patch day. But if you rely on your static's raid-caller, you probably can't raid effectively if they've got laryngitis or some family conflict and you run without a raid-caller one week either. (Or do PF with no Discord voice, or whatever.) Those are both problems, and moreover I don't see them as fundamentally different problems in terms of either their nature or severity. Callouts -- whether Cactbot or your raid-caller -- should only ever be a guide when you're first learning the fight, and a sanity-check on your own read of mechanics from then onwards.

Now, stuff like the cheaty tool that was shuffling around combat waymarks mid-fight to indicate to the entire party where to go for mechanics, that I find a bit beyond what's reasonable. And demonstrably, so do the developers, because that one they put an end to pretty quickly, hence why we can no longer move waymarks mid-combat.

XIVAlexander, I've got mixed feelings on. This game's netcode is highly sensitive to terrible ping, moreso than I think might be reasonable; the way the animation lock works is a little weird (albeit for understandable technical reasons), and folks who are playing on NA servers but are in South America and such are at a massive disadvantage when it comes to weaving-heavy jobs as a result. And that can be alleviated to some degree with a high-quality gaming VPN (since you can route around slow stuff and make the last-mile to the game servers as low-latency as possible), but even with that taken into account there's only so much you can realistically do to alleviate that problem solely through routing your network traffic somewhere.

So I don't really like XIVAlexander, but if someone's using it with sane parameters to make their animation lock performance (in, say, Argentina) roughly equivalent to mine (where I have very low ping just by virtue of where I live in relation to the servers), I'm also not going to really begrudge them that.