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

[Brinne_Brinn]

This thread is pretty funny on a few levels. First, OP is EXTREMELY confused about the names of the things he is complaining about and is attributing the wrong things to the wrong plugins. XIValexander does something else, it's not the one who messes with cactbot and whatnot. Second, white knight crusaders are apparently extremely confused about what is it that XIValexander actually does. It doesn't lower your ping to 0, there is no way to do that short of travelling to California and sitting on top of the servers. What it does is mess with the way things work a little bit to allow you to double weave skills as if you had lower ping. It's extremely useful if you're someone who plays with 300 ping, for instance.
Double weaving is something that people can do easily if they live on the same state or region of where the servers are. It's not cheating it's basically just you are lucky enough to not live half a world from the nearest server location, which happens to be my case. I'm not entirely sure why some people are advocating that people should be punished for being born in the countries they were born in. Do they, in some level, realize how entitled this is? Are you going to tell people to change their entire lives and move over to another country just to play an online game?

What XIValexander does is genuinely pretty good and honestly, rather than complaining that it exists (why would you genuinely complain that it exists? Honest question. Do try to answer will you?), people should be pressuring SE to wake up and implement what it does natively instead of forcing people to resort to a plugin to do something that should have been in the game to begin wtih.

[Packetdancer]

By adding add-on support what I mean is to do what Blizzard did with WoW, or other games like Warhammer Online/Wildstar, and is creating a LUA API that people will use to make addons with it. I really fail to see how hard will be to make it also available for console unless we are talking about some limitations imposed by Sony.

So, as noted in an earlier post of mine in this very thread, I was deeply involved in WildStar modding. I am what you might call a True Believer in terms of the potential value of mods, and anyone here who was in the WildStar closed beta stands a solid chance of recognizing my screen name in that context. (Heck, even some people who weren't in the closed beta might recognize my name in that context.)

Suffice it to say that I really appreciate the power that mods put in the hands of the playerbase, and the sort of quality-of-life and accessibility improvements a good mod API empowers them to make.

And despite all of that, as I noted in that earlier post, I am absolutely convinced that Square-Enix putting a mod API into this game at this point would be an immense mistake.

As background, it's necessary to understand that I and other modders spent like a year working with Jon "Bitwise" Wiesman (the lead client developer for WildStar, and thus the person behind the add-on API) to ensure the add-on API not only had features we need, but did not have features that could be misused horribly.

At his request, in addition to writing genuinely beneficial mods, a small group of us engaged in deliberately writing the most malicious things we could think of. We sat down with intent to abuse the API in the worst ways possible... not to distribute those mods outside of our group, but to find what would need to change before release. And unfortunately, some of the things we managed to come up with required some non-trivial changes to the system.

Originally, for instance, all of WildStar's own UI was written using the add-on system -- the goal was that if Carbine could do it with the game UI, we should be able to as modders. But one person came up with a way to use (if I recall correctly) the in-game mailbox API to have a mod which quietly stole little bits of your money at a time if it saw the mod author nearby (and thus knew he was online); it would silently open a mail and put just a little bit of your money into the mail, and since he was online (and the mod knew it), a matching mod on his side would open the mail, take the money, and delete the note (so you wouldn't see it in your outgoing/sent messages). This proved the way mail was handled in-game needed to be changed, and some of the functionality needed to be moved into places that weren't accessible via add-ons.

There was a mod demonstrating how you could modify the minimap and UI to cheat at PvP, which as I recall necessitated a not-small change in how network replication of objects was handled. Heck, I used the Windows clipboard as a cheaty backdoor in a proof-of-concept about how to use the deliberately-designed-to-prevent-botting mod API to write a bot.

I am sure we created an immense number of headaches for Bitwise. But the effort was well-spent, because WildStar launched with a comprehensive modding API that had already been battle-tested and corrected a lot of potential loopholes that could have empowered cheating.

The issue is that WildStar was able to do that because Carbine had a ton of time before the game was released, so the sort of necessary changes could be made. And keep in mind, WildStar was also coming from a place where it had been designed with add-ons in mind from the start, meaning there were a lot of potential issues they'd already designed around.

Would I love it if Square-Enix had an add-on system for FFXIV, so I could make some UI changes? Absolutely; if they released an add-on system, I expect that roughly 45 minutes after I got my hands on it I'd have the loot window modified to add a 'Pass All' or 'Greed All' button, just as a start. And I have a laundry list of other quality-of-life changes I'd make going on from there; I have strong opinions about UX, and there are a number of places where this game's UX choices baffle me.

But should they release that sort of system? Honestly, at this point in the game's lifecycle, I firmly believe that would be an immense mistake. Without the option to easily rework the necessary chunks of the game, any official add-on API would either have to be extremely limited (and thus disappointing to many people) or run the risk of introducing the same sort of massive but not-immediately-obvious loopholes we spent time with Bitwise finding and plugging in WildStar.

[Axxion]

Can we not keep bringing this up for 5 minutes ?

[Colten822]

As someone who has high ping due to living far from the servers, I heard about how XIV Alexander can bring your ping down enough to make classes like MCH playable and thought about getting it, but it's a shame it has all these other cheating features.

[Sarevok_Thordin]

As someone who has high ping due to living far from the servers, I heard about how XIV Alexander can bring your ping down enough to make classes like MCH playable and thought about getting it, but it's a shame it has all these other cheating features.

It would be nice if the devs just added in it's oGCD lag compenation natively to the client so everyone can be on the same footing.

[xMadcoil]

Some real fun reading to be found here. Koldan must be a troll, no one can be that simpleminded xD

[Driavna]

...

I see what you mean now about changes needed to core FFXIV code, in that case I think you are right. Good post and explanation BTW.

I guess SE need to keep improve/adding QoL. A quick example is how we can only hide all debuff instead of having an option to only show those that are important to us (like trick attack) or stuff we can remove from other players.

[Kyyuubi]

Oh no, it has a UI, that is THE worst… But seriously, this feature just exists because SE isn't capable of implementing a decent lag compensation mechanism themselves.
Unfortunately, XIVAlexander is a necessity for many people, to play and enjoy the game. Because, trust me, you do not want to play with 300 ping because of Arelion/SE. (especially as Melee or any high APM job)

Scanning the GAME FILES is legal.

No it is not, an anti-cheat software does scan temp/driver files as well as monitor running processes, but it can not and should not look through your (private) file system!

TLDR; it does not harm anyone nor compromise some competitive integrity. There are more problematic plugins out there -> cactbot. Get over it.

[dspguy]

I know this is a revived thread - scanning the game files should not be an issue. And frankly, I can't see how it could be enforced. Just like how we have a right to packet sniff what comes in (or out) of our own personal networks as well as how we have a right to listen for speed radar signals coming form a police car... this information is out in the ether - readily available to anyone listening.

They might not want us to do it, but I can't see how they can legitimately forbid it. If someone brought a lawsuit against the company, the company would probably lose it. We have the right to examine any data residing on our own hardware. That includes people datamining for stuff in the patch when it drops, parsing combat logs and reading memory. However, SE can certainly forbid HOW we use that data while playing their game. If we are going to read memory to automate our actions, that should be bannable. If we are reading memory to gain an edge, such as knowing which door to open in those treasure map zones, that should also be bannable.

The gray areas are when people are parsing logs plus memory to know how to react to a boss, for example, without needing to look for the tells... that's where there is room for interpretation. SE would probably err on the side of that being against the TOS. For what its worth, I would agree with them on that one.

[Ghost_of_Ebina]

Yoshida clearly stated he doesn't want to get involved in the whole "ban people with add-ons / mods" business, because otherwise Square / Enix would need to hire an army of people just to deal with people reporting suspected cases of mod-use.
Therefore, there's really nothing to discuss as it's the good old "don't ask, don't tell" logic, which is the best way to handle this given the complex legal implications if anything more explicit is pursued.