Quote Originally Posted by Colt47 View Post
Anti-Cheat is to prevent malicious behavior in a game conducted by people that harms other players in the game. Modding itself does not constitute cheating and implementing anti-cheat simply to fight mods is a mistake. The terms of service are very clear what is and is not allowed and the only gray area has been the enforcement and punishment of violations.

If the company were to institute technology to detect the usage of third party software as described in the ToS, it would be a huge maintenance issue and liability for SE that provides no financial benefit to the company and if you believe this is false, imagine an anti-virus scan triggering your banning from FFXIV because it opens and scans the files for FFXIV, or getting banned for an overlay that is always active by default from some common communication software such as Discord or webex.
The terms of service establishes that all third-party tools aren't to be used when playing the game. It's not about cheating, it's about quite literally everything, I don't see why the player base keeps trying to debate this. Changing a small UI element is just as much a violation as outright cheating. Bard bots, damage meters, Viera hats and whatever else is in the same boat. The massive grey area is from Square Enix's inability to equally detect and moderate third-party tool usage. You have to publicly show yourself as a streamer or via a social media in a way that's clearly identifiable for them to do anything.

There's plenty of established anti-cheat software that Square Enix could license for use within FFXIV, the question would be the moderation stance. Valorant, for example, has a fairly aggressive stance and the game will often refuse to start or disconnect you if it detects anything wrong which is the right thing for a competitive FPS title to do. World of Warcraft will simply flag your account and the suspicious activity for Blizzard to investigate and issue bans. When new cheats come along, Blizzard will typically hit in big ban waves while also making it visible to everyone else. I recall back in Warlords of Draenor when a ban wave for a paid cheat used by raiders was issued during peak raiding hours for European players. Many Mythic guilds save some of their best DPS players banned during boss pulls. Must be embarrassing having to explain that to your raid leader.

False detection on any established anti-cheat isn't going to be a thing. A bigger concern would be running some obscure anti-cheat we've never heard of or trying to develop their own technology for doing this. That said, anti-virus operating in the background or a mainstream voice chat application isn't going to throw a wobbly and get you banned if they were to implement something like Easy Anti Cheat.