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

[Shougun]

Honestly Alexander's built in latency mitigation is a godsend for certain players and i'd hate to see it go away for that reason alone, and most of these are rather benign, instead of trying to get rid of them for PC players, we should really be asking if some of these couldn't be baked into in game systems so that console also has access to things like better ui customization and such

I've been a little bit more on the oddball side here since LONG ago being pro-addons and SE actively trying to make the UI as gracious as possible (as for addons I think being strict on parse shaming is important, but I've never been against people learning from their parse). Maybe on SE aggressively improving their UI isn't so odd, and I do have a number of UI threads (which I feel a number of people were listened to explicitly in this last expansion, since there were like 5 or more unique posts some of them mine that I was like "eehhhYY thank you!" lol).

The addons existing don't really mind me, if you parse my stuff and keep it to yourself (or at least give me friendly tips) then whatever- you do you, I just think calling them minor benefits is wrong or at least a bit disingenuous. Some of those would add a significant QoL to some players. And that means they're not nothing.

[Packetdancer]

I've been a little bit more on the oddball side here since LONG ago being pro-addons and SE actively trying to make the UI as gracious as possible (as for addons I think being strict on parse shaming is important, but I've never been against people learning from their parse). Maybe on SE aggressively improving their UI isn't so odd, and I do have a number of UI threads (which I feel a number of people were listened to explicitly in this last expansion, since there were like 5 or more unique posts some of them mine that I was like "eehhhYY thank you!" lol).

I mean, I am in general in favor of add-ons myself... which is not going to come as a shock to anyone who knew me back in the WildStar community.

I was the lunatic that noticed Bitwise over at Carbine had included a mod development kit in the very first closed beta build, then noticed that the friends list was broken in the first build we got in closed beta, and promptly posted a replacement friends list as a mod to the closed beta forums 4 hours later. I then spent like a year and change working with Bitwise and the others at Carbine -- along with various other early mod authors -- to make sure the add-on API was audited heavily before release.

See, I firmly believe that add-ons can be hugely beneficial: one person made an accessibility add-on for those with impaired vision, turning the game's UI extremely high-contrast (to make it more legible) and adding little sound cues to let you know "oh, that's a vendor you're standing next to" and so on. We also made add-ons that helped RPers, by providing extensions to the base chatbox log (allowing you to create tabs for a specific 'scene' and save them out, among other things). Add-ons that let you keep notes as you wandered around the world, so if you discovered a little bit of lore tucked away in a corner, you could open the window for my "Journalism" mod and drop a pin and type up a little note associated with that pin.

All sorts of quality-of-life stuff.

But we also made a lot of add-ons that were borderline cheat-y, or even outright malicious. At Bitwise's request, mind you! He said "make add-ons to do the most evil stuff you can think of, so that we can find the issues and make the API hard to abuse before release." (The 'evil' add-ons were, obviously, never published to the rest of the closed beta players, just within the add-on crew who were supposed to be trying to break stuff.)

For instance, mods couldn't control your character, thus preventing botting. Sensible! But I demonstrated a proof-of-concept where I made an IPC channel (inter-process communication) using, of all things, the Windows clipboard, and an external program that would read commands from the clipboard and could then drive your character by 'pushing keys'; the add-on in game could read game state and decide what your character should do, write the 'this is what I need you to do' to the clipboard, and the external program would generate keystrokes and mouse movements to drive your character as requested.

This demonstrated there was a hole in the add-on design; no one had thought anything would be wrong with letting add-ons write to the system clipboard. Hey, could be nice, right? Click on a thing and get the map location to paste into chat, or Discord, or whatnot. But the clipboard functionality had to be removed, because demonstrably you could abuse it to drive external programs (which could, in turn, generate keystrokes to drive the game itself).

We spent like a year deliberately poking holes in stuff, and then helping devise fixes.

And that's the thing. If you just graft add-ons onto the side of the program, you run the risk that they can do all sorts of not-great stuff. You really want add-ons designed into the game from day one, or else it's gonna be painful.

So while I'm in favor of add-ons in the abstract, I do not necessarily think it'd be a great idea for Square-Enix to stuff them officially into FFXIV, because I think when the add-ons aren't part of the system design from day one, you run the risk of some serious bad actors abusing your system. And if it's via an official avenue, not unauthorized modifications, then cracking down on that stuff becomes a great deal more difficult.

So, do I wish FFXIV had proper support for add-ons? Often. Do I think they should add them at this point in the game's life-cycle? Absolutely not.