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

[Packetdancer]

How do you know they set their parameters to match yours?

You don't. That's why I have such mixed feelings on XIVAlexander; it legitimately helps a lot of people who have terrible connections play at a level that's equal to just the baseline normal state for folks who have better internet (or at least, internet closer to the data centers), but it can also be used to cheat.

And you have no way of knowing for certain which way someone who has it plans to use it.

How do you know they dont reduce it to negative to tripple weave (you can see plenty of parses where DRG tripple weave jumps)? It all creates unfair environment. All tools that improve game client and game functions do that, expecially for console players. All of that should be disabled on dev lvl or made baseline simple as that (hide game packets or something, its not our job to figure it out)

My mixed feelings on the thing aside, according to the readme file from the program itself posted by others, if you tweak your parameters too far out of the norm, the server will spot and flag you as a cheater. So you can't go completely bonkers with it, or you'll get yourself banned. You can't even go moderately bonkers and still be able to be a raider who wants to point to parses, since -- as others have noted -- FFLogs and such will spot abnormalities and invalidate the parse (at the very least), and if it happens repeatedly they'll just ban you outright.

So there are some limiting factors.

Now, that said, honestly it would make a lot of sense if the game itself kept a running average of your ping time and just subtracted the round-trip value from the animation lock itself, since -- as we've seen with XIVAlexander -- it would potentially dramatically improve performance for many people who have less-than-ideal ping. But that was likely a nightmare to consider doing on the PS3. (And honestly, possibly the PS4; I couldn't say since I haven't touched Sony's APIs recently enough to have familiarity with the PS4 from a dev side.)

And given the devs have a demonstrated policy of "if we can't implement it on the console, we're not going to officially implement it at all" with only a handful of exceptions (like the colorblind filter on Windows)... well, here we are.