Third party tools are a game design failing in a multi-platform game

[Grebeny]

2) IMHO it's much more like the Windower situation that FFXI faced where the QoL improvements on offer were just impossible to ignore and it only ever improved whereas the official client just sat around being stagnant and stuck in the past.

They banned very specific players from groups where everyone were using addons. They players that were banned had information not provited to the player intentionally even if it was UI, it was not QoL change. FFXIV devs were very responsive in the past about changes, but now people just download addons and never actually ask for changes. Lets not hide straight up cheating behind "QoL", otherwise we will not take any QoL updates in FF.

3) Eeehhhhh, this is a point with no correct answer that everyone will be happy with. Would console players be playing at the same level without strats and optimisations derived...

I played most of the content blind without external tools, cleaning it, absolutely YES, not that fast absolutely why using tools is called "cheating". I will go to the main arguments for console really fast:
Capture video (consoles can capture video, on ps4, you can start video at any time. On ps5 you don't even need to start a video, you can just click to show you last 30 minutes, I am personally using this feature during high end blind runs).
Can't find out if physical/magical - this is myth that came up from streamers with addons. I personally use Log 4 with only "actions initiated by engaged enemies". Boss casts mean magical, boss readies/uses means physical. Most of the times you can recognize that by the visual feedback of the attack or testing too, but I feel like log is pretty comfortable.
And lastely, the best ninja rotation of the Shadowbringers expansion didn't came from FFlogs optimization, but from a youtuber who used dummy and Stone, Sky, Sea calculator +controller, yes controller.
And no, youtube is not third party tool. Yet I already told you, yes we complete blind runs without any issues. I personally play on both PC and PS5, depends on my mood or where I am, if you understand the game it is equally playable on both (only annoying thing is I need external device for discord while on Ps5 because I don't gather group exclusively on PS to use their voice program).

I know exactly how QA works at these sorts of large studios...

I am working in the game industry from almost 10 years now, not only I don't know how testing works in all big companies, I can't tell you how it works even for all of the games in the company I work in. There are projects with "balance dev test team" that have nothing to do with QA, because they are working exclusively in the studio and their job is to push the limits of content. In FF we know from years Yoshi P have his dev group that are some the best players in the world, not only in Square. The argument "I worked and I know all about it" is so ilogical.

[MiaShino]

Most amusing that all of this begins occurring after the new Ultimate appears and world first groups/others begin clearing.

Estimated projections by Yoshi P and the team for casual player was 4+ months. Am assuming he believed it might take two plus weeks to clear for world first groups. It was vanquished in six days. My uncle believes the developers themselves may be somewhat of the salty about this. He mentioned how he will work for months on good puzzles as a DM only for players to rip them apart in five minutes. If he allowed this to bother him that would be stoopid.

See this with Starcraft/Overwatch/CSGO professionals all the fricken time. "They are cheating!", "Ban them!". No these players are just that good, deal with it.

Have seen streams take eleven or more days with addons installed. Have seen streams without addons take same amount of time. People here and on JP should get over themselves. The sooner you accept that there are others out there who really really are better then you and learn to live with this the happier you shall be.

[anhaato]

Most amusing that all of this begins occurring after the new Ultimate appears and world first groups/others begin clearing.

Estimated projections by Yoshi P and the team for casual player was 4+ months. Am assuming he believed it might take two plus weeks to clear for world first groups. It was vanquished in six days. My uncle believes the developers themselves may be somewhat of the salty about this. He mentioned how he will work for months on good puzzles as a DM only for players to rip them apart in five minutes. If he allowed this to bother him that would be stoopid.

See this with Starcraft/Overwatch/CSGO professionals all the fricken time. "They are cheating!", "Ban them!". No these players are just that good, deal with it.

Have seen streams take eleven or more days with addons installed. Have seen streams without addons take same amount of time. People here and on JP should get over themselves. The sooner you accept that there are others out there who really really are better then you and learn to live with this the happier you shall be.

The way people speak about addons, even the typical stuff like ACT, you’d think they were playing the game for them. It’s like “digital art isn’t real art because the computer just draws stuff for you” but for a game.

[SaltyDaddy]

Asmongold interviews a plugin developer

1. Its true, but everyone, even Yoshida was taking it as a grey zone. We didnt knew about many bans before. And 10 DAYS (Again, 10 days out of nowhere during a prog) ban is devastating for the team.

2. WoW players played many years with same GUI. Making GUI in FF14 looking more what they were used to for 15 years helps them a lot. You dont even know.

3. I dont know where do you hear that. Rewatch the video again.

4. He didnt said SE is lying. He said duty testing is way different than blind prog from the start and you cant deny that. Or do you seriously think Yoshida cleared this ultimate blind with their internal team? Oh cmon. You are naive.

5. Housing plugin is not allowed. You need to inject it yourself. Because thats automatic glitching = cheating. Official plugin devs do not offer any way of automatization.

6. Im rly not sure who do you call a dumb here. Is it a person, who enjoys freedom of PC and want to use it, or person, who will always cry about PS limitation. Why dont you go to be mad at sony forum. This is not funny anymore. This is just consolist salt.

[Sebazy]

They banned very specific players from groups where everyone were using addons. They players that were banned had information not provited to the player intentionally even if it was UI, it was not QoL change. FFXIV devs were very responsive in the past about changes, but now people just download addons and never actually ask for changes. Lets not hide straight up cheating behind "QoL", otherwise we will not take any QoL updates in FF.

Put the narrative koolaid down and back away because it's clouding your judgement it seems.

They banned very specific players because those were the players that got mass reported. Lets not forget what started all of this, it wasn't a sudden crusade because Yoshida got out of the wrong side of his bed that morning. It was a crusade set in motion by angry little forum kiddies who decided to set up lynch mobs because that's what they do. Go find some PoVs of Bagelgoose, there should be plenty since his group was actually leading on day one of DSR prog and they got a ton of exposure for it.

If you still don't believe me? Note the timing in which all of these bans started. Right after Neverland (Whoops) beat TPS to the clear. Before that? You had plenty of streams and povs that were far worse than anything seen on Bagelgoose's stream and nothing was being said.

People just need to stop being salty little crybabies because their favourite team got dethroned. And yes, that goes to both sides of the fence here.

I played most of the content blind without external tools, cleaning it, absolutely YES, not that fast absolutely why using tools is called "cheating". I will go to the main arguments for console really fast:

Cool, now go back to E8S, use your PS4 video clip to try and analyse what went wrong with a mechanic like Lights Rampant. It's figureable with video for sure, but you need frame by frame playback to find the first failure on mechanics like that. PS4 playback just isn't viable in cases like these.

I've got nothing against controller input and there's good reason why some people use it on PC. I don't think it's optimal but it's certainly not a hindrance either, not really sure how that's relevant here.

I am working in the game industry from almost 10 years now, not only I don't know how testing works in all big companies, I can't tell you how it works even for all of the games in the company I work in. There are projects with "balance dev test team" that have nothing to do with QA, because they are working exclusively in the studio and their job is to push the limits of content. In FF we know from years Yoshi P have his dev group that are some the best players in the world, not only in Square. The argument "I worked and I know all about it" is so ilogical.

I know because at the EA Chertsey building we actually had our QA team located on the ground floor of our office and at least every other person in there had aspirations of moving upstairs to the development floor at some stage. Given that Chertsey was a ghost town and the building was in the middle of a glorified M25 industrial estate, developers, office staff and testers alike all ended up mingling in the same areas so we all had a pretty good idea of what everyone was up to. Large scale QA has been an established standard for a long time and outside of the impact of covid. Nothing has really changed. You have a large shared pool of testers which will get tickets for various projects assigned amongst them. FFXIV won't have it's own unique sizeable pool of veteran QA testers FYI, that's not realistic (Due to poor retention in the profession) nor is it efficient (Because you want to vary the eyes on the project to maximise the number of bugs spotted within a timeframe).

Your comment about Yoshi's dev group being some of the best players in the world is particularly far off the mark btw.

- For the last 5 years checks on balance for dungeons have been done by the same team members. The tank is a casual player, the DPS is Yoshida himself as a serious player, the other DPS is project manager M-chan, the healer is a player with experience as far as the Extreme Primal fights, but everyone ended up becoming more skilled than before. Recently the job distribution has been changed up, the healer became too good so a replacement was requested.

Do I know all about it? No. But I know enough to form some opinions and theories that both hold water given Yoshida's comments in the past and make sense in the scale of the team.

[SaltyDaddy]

...

I dont think you are speaking full truth. Did you really cleared these fight you are reffering to? Because Im not so sure about you speaking truth. We all know clearing content on console is no problem. There is no point in lying that you are the example, when not.

Also, stop thinking that Yoshida is some meta gamer. He is a busy old man managing two big projects. The only thing we know about him is he loved old hard MMOs and few old parses. Do you seriously think, he have so much time to min max his gameplay and clearing ultimate blind like WFR group? Naaah. He would love that, truth. But he doesnt have that much time for this effort. Any of the top FF14 statics that were in WFR are much better than internal testing team. Or do you think gamers, who are that good would not like to join the race, instead of just testing the fight?

[MiaShino]

The way people speak about addons, even the typical stuff like ACT, you’d think they were playing the game for them. It’s like “digital art isn’t real art because the computer just draws stuff for you” but for a game.

Had no idea stuffs like Cactbot even existed (or most of the things I hath seen) because am not as much mmo vet as others I know. Even if automated tool were to call out East/West towers the player would not only require understanding of what this means, but poses skill to react to the callout.

So yup yup! Someone had to program and discover algorithm to produce that digital art much like someone was required to learn those mechanics before they can be shot called. Seeing your damage numbers or listening to your team shot caller doing their thing does not make you suddenly able to resolve mechanics.

Hearing "Stack on orbs" will not make you any more capable of making the quick movements necessary for the twin dragons phase. Even identifying that beginning on first set of orbs might be optimal takes problem solving skills. Cactbot/ACT/Etc will not solve this for you until it is provided with the solution. A player devised that solution and those players are incredibly skilled problem solvers.

You could erase all of these tools from existence before next Ultimate and world first prog groups would still be world first because they really are that fricken good. This is why they are above average and welp, we are not. Someone must be average for the above average to exist and that is as friends have told me before; "A tough pill to swallow."

[Johners]

I dont think you are speaking full truth. Did you really cleared these fight you are reffering to? Because Im not so sure about you speaking truth. We all know clearing content on console is no problem. There is no point in lying that you are the example, when not.

Also, stop thinking that Yoshida is some meta gamer. He is a busy old man managing two big projects. The only thing we know about him is he loved old hard MMOs and few old parses. Do you seriously think, he have so much time to min max his gameplay and clearing ultimate blind like WFR group? Naaah. He would love that, truth. But he doesnt have that much time for this effort. Any of the top FF14 statics that were in WFR are much better than internal testing team. Or do you think gamers, who are that good would not like to join the race, instead of just testing the fight?

The telling thing is that fights are cleared without balance changes. World of Warcraft, in comparison, has a public test realm that the majority of new bosses get raid tested on and some are still buggy or unbalanced when they hit live servers. Not to mention much hot fixing and nerfing from Blizzard over the lifespan of a raid tier. Square Enix do a much better job of just releasing a savage tier or ultimate and having it playable while also being a surprise to everyone.

Yosih-P works at a level in which a lot of his role will be oversight and delegation anyway, it's not like he's personally making and testing everything, that would be truly insane. I'd imagine the vast majority of raid design and development is entirely removed from him and it just launches in a balanced state.

[SaltyDaddy]

The telling thing is that fights are cleared without balance changes. World of Warcraft, in comparison, has a public test realm that the majority of new bosses get raid tested on and some are still buggy or unbalanced when they hit live servers. Not to mention much hot fixing and nerfing from Blizzard over the lifespan of a raid tier. Square Enix do a much better job of just releasing a savage tier or ultimate and having it playable while also being a surprise to everyone.

Yosih-P works at a level in which a lot of his role will be oversight and delegation anyway, it's not like he's personally making and testing everything, that would be truly insane. I'd imagine the vast majority of raid design and development is entirely removed from him and it just launches in a balanced state.

Why are you taking back WoW. Do you have some WoW hate boner? We all are completly fine how fights are balanced and clearable. But we dont need to say "WoW have it worse" in every thread. That wasnt the purpose of this thread.

But I agree on second part. He is a director. He have small look at every new feature in the game. But he doesnt have time to be raid tester. That is foolish to think.

[Darthgummibear]

And you'd be arguing from a position of no understanding, and in extremely bad faith, much like the rest of the arguments in this thread and on this forum. Do you do difficult endgame content? Judging by your statement, I do not believe that you do.

The vast majority of people I have raided with that use parsers, never talk about them in game, and never harass anyone because they're not stupid and they know it's bad behavior that will get them banned, as it should. I've been playing this game since 2017 and I've never seen anyone get harassed over DPS in matched content, ever. Granted that my experience is not reflective of the entire community, but neither is yours, and neither is your analogy.

Also worth saying that nobody is trying to argue that harassing people over metrics is okay, so not sure why you're even using it as an argument to be honest.

Translation: You don't agree with me, so you're wrong.