Quote Originally Posted by Dakkon3 View Post
The trouble is that once addons are allowed and normalized you will not be raiding without them. At least not in most FC's, they will simply expect you to use them as not doing so means bringing down the performance of the group as a whole. The floor of entry will then require addons. For example, raiding in WoW without DBM is tantamount to trolling your guildmates.

This means console players will be more and more excluded from these activities.

Banning addons is the only option here to avoid their normalization and subsequent exclusion of a large portion of the playerbase from endgame.
These are all really hefty assumptions with no proof outside of you used to play another game that did things this way. Just because WoW was like that (I’m assuming, based off of your post—wouldn’t really know since I played WoW for a day back in 2007 and didn’t like it, so I never touched it again) doesn’t mean that FFXIV is like that. The communities for both games are already vastly different: it’s my understanding that WoW was more outright hostile/toxic where as FFXIV’s tends to be more passive aggressive with their toxicity. Just to name one attribute of each.

Parsers and damage meters have been a thing since ARR, which was almost 10 years ago. Other add-ons like Cactbot and Triggernometry have been in this game since Stormblood, which was 6~7 years ago. Same with cosmetic mods. They’ve always been a thing—it’s just now in light of DRU, they’re even more of A Thing due to one community’s love for creating witch-hunts against anything they deem wrong (5chan). Streamers showing them on their Twitch streams also isn’t anything new. The only new thing is they are talked about more now than they were when I first started over 6 years ago.

Console players aren’t excluded from anything. Most of the statics I’ve been in have been a mixture of PC and console players. All of the statics I’ve been in have no requirements outside of any performance requirements they might have. None have ever asked me to use any third-party program—not even ACT, which is likely one of the more common programs out there. And I’ve been in groups advertised as casual all the way to semi-hardcore. Maybe things are different in world progression/top speedkill groups, but even if they are, that is a very small portion of the raiding community. The majority of raiders don’t hold any such standards.