We anticipate that even with this update, third parties will continue

[LyssaLittleBear]

Squeenix must be getting absolutely slammed by all of the RMT cases, but this won't do anything to help crack down on RMT. The only people this hurts are customers who want to spend money on their friends.

Square Enix, you need to change this somehow because as of right now, this is a very poor business move. We hoped that when you announced coming changes on the cash shop, you would fix the convoluted UI. Why did you break it worse?

[Canadane]

SO you've basically punished the law/rule abiding players for what criminals have done

This isn't the first time this has happened, the most recent one that comes to mind is the Waymark change, where you can no longer change them while in battle.
Cheaters have always ruined games for legitimate players. If you aren't staunchly 100% anti-mod, add-on, and RMT, then I don't know what to tell you.

I do think SE needs to punish buyers more than sellers though, well punish both. A slap on the wrist, or worse, nothing at all isn't going to stop them from buying again.

[Stormpeaks]

This isn't the first time this has happened, the most recent one that comes to mind is the Waymark change, where you can no longer change them while in battle.
Cheaters have always ruined games for legitimate players. If you aren't staunchly 100% anti-mod, add-on, and RMT, then I don't know what to tell you.

I do think SE needs to punish buyers more than sellers though, well punish both. A slap on the wrist, or worse, nothing at all isn't going to stop them from buying again.

Why would you be anti mod/anti addon when it makes the game bearable ?

[LianaThorne]

This isn't the first time this has happened, the most recent one that comes to mind is the Waymark change, where you can no longer change them while in battle.
Cheaters have always ruined games for legitimate players. If you aren't staunchly 100% anti-mod, add-on, and RMT, then I don't know what to tell you.

I do think SE needs to punish buyers more than sellers though, well punish both. A slap on the wrist, or worse, nothing at all isn't going to stop them from buying again.

Real question: How does a mod that gives two races an ability the devs are seemingly unable to provide, despite plenty of vocal feedback from the playerbase, make someone a cheater? Does it provide an advantage in combat that I'm not aware of?

[Midareyukki]

This isn't the first time this has happened, the most recent one that comes to mind is the Waymark change, where you can no longer change them while in battle.
Cheaters have always ruined games for legitimate players. If you aren't staunchly 100% anti-mod, add-on, and RMT, then I don't know what to tell you.

If you don't know, then don't say anything. Mods do not affect you. And modders have found ways to make it entirely personal so that they no longer affect your character, only theirs. If you didn't know about this, then now you do. There's very little excuse for anyone using mods to influence your character, so it literally shouldn't affect you in any way.

If this were a perfect world, then yeah. Modding the game, using add-ons of any kind, and engaging in RMT would be 100% problematic. But this isn't a perfect world.

There are stuff in the game that the devs haven't moved to resolve which the fans have. Deny the fans that experience, after so much feedback has been done around it, and you'll just alienate those players. Yes, I'm referring mainly to Hrothgar and Viera, but there are plenty of other stuff, not just cosmetics. For example, do you have any idea how limited and poor the colourblind mode is? I needed specific shaders to run content because the one setting I run the game on does not allow me to see ANYTHING in E9 and P3. Trying to clear those as savages was just hell. And sure. Shaders are greenlit by the devs. But they're still a third party tool I needed to use to bridge the system, and some add-ons do quite a lot of QoL things that the game really would benefit from without giving you an upper hand in combat necessarily.

Unfortunately, you're going to find quite a lot of people who aren't "100%" against them, because user experience is subjective and even the devs acknowledge things aren't so black and white. Yeah, by all intents and purposes, using those is against the rules and you shouldn't use them. The reverse side of the coin is that there are people who will use them to enhance their user experience in ways that aren't invasive to others' experiences. Doubly so when the devs take a long time to meet feedback.

[vanaii]

There are stuff in the game that the devs haven't moved to resolve which the fans have. Deny the fans that experience, after so much feedback has been done around it, and you'll just alienate those players. Yes, I'm referring mainly to Hrothgar and Viera, but there are plenty of other stuff, not just cosmetics. For example, do you have any idea how limited and poor the colourblind mode is? I needed specific shaders to run content because the one setting I run the game on does not allow me to see ANYTHING in E9 and P3. Trying to clear those as savages was just hell. And sure. Shaders are greenlit by the devs. But they're still a third party tool I needed to use to bridge the system, and some add-ons do quite a lot of QoL things that the game really would benefit from without giving you an upper hand in combat necessarily.

Yeah, I don't see any reason to complain about texture or model changes. Especially things like hats on rabbits or lala deleters or UI skins which people are really passionate about. Purely aesthetic enhancements aren't something to take a hard line against.

"Quality of life" addons might cause problems, though. It's easy to handwave a tiny feature like "a ground circle that shows maximum melee range" or "a collection addon that tells you what you do or do not have." Taken individually, QoL addons can seem trivial, but people typically install a lot of them and put themselves at a substantial convenience advantage over anyone that isn't comfortable putting their login credentials into a third party application. The "duh" tier of these is stuff that needs to be baked into the game to begin with, and I'm concerned that "just use the third party app" will prove just as much temptation for the developer to halfass the UI as it did in XI.

FFXI had a similar issue with Windower. Windower makes some amazing changes to FFXI, but it spiraled out of control to the point where if you don't use Windower you're playing an inferior game. One of the great strengths of FFXIV is the ability to pick it up and put it down -- jumping through a Skyrim-esque (or FFXI) addon process to get things up and running again flies in the face of that. That's the friction angle, but it's also just straight up unfair to the console players for PC players to have even more of an advantage than they already have.

This isn't even touching the "don't ever put your SE account details into anything other than the patcher and our website."

[Midareyukki]

"Quality of life" addons might cause problems, though. It's easy to handwave a tiny feature like "a ground circle that shows maximum melee range" or "a collection addon that tells you what you do or do not have." Taken individually, QoL addons can seem trivial, but people typically install a lot of them and put themselves at a substantial convenience advantage over anyone that isn't comfortable putting their login credentials into a third party application. The "duh" tier of these is stuff that needs to be baked into the game to begin with, and I'm concerned that "just use the third party app" will prove just as much temptation for the developer to halfass the UI as it did in XI.

FFXI had a similar issue with Windower. Windower makes some amazing changes to FFXI, but it spiraled out of control to the point where if you don't use Windower you're playing an inferior game.

Yeah, plus it does depend on the add-on. Cosmetic changes are usually one thing, since at the end of the day the game's still going to function as intended.

If it's something that just helps you organize some stuff, then that's "fine", but when you start adding in stuff like more hotbars, indicators for job resources or stuff that automatically tells you what to do at X mechanic... like, that's not an indication that you'll clear Ultimate all of a sudden, or even that you'll play your job any better. But it's still going to give you an upper edge, and that's problematic. So yeah, that I can understand.

I was referring to stuff that's actually minor though. One that didn't have that large of an effect on gameplay, which I'm sure even among the tools people use there are functionalities that are that minor. Again, I don't really see using shaders due to being colourblind as "suddenly I'll perform better than normal". I just viewed it as "It gave me somewhat of an equal footing, given everything looks totally purple/orange to me and I can't tell my arse from my head in here..." Our in-game options don't change the colours, they just change saturation and some colour levels. That helps in very few cases, it sometimes makes other cases worse. (The in-game options, I mean, not the shaders. The shaders do change some colours. It makes everything look so ugly, but hey, if it works, it works).

I don't know how much of a difference other add-ons do, but I don't really think much of whether a Hrothgar's wearing hats/has a hairstyle. But that's me. And from what I know seeing other people talk and such, I don't think we'll find a definitive 100% consensus so soon either.

lala deleters

[Havenchild]

This isn't really an issue. You could just buy a gift card and provide the card number to the user. You can use a website like privacy.com to create virtual gift cards with set limits tied to your account. It really isn't much of an issue at all, if your aim was to truly get someone a gift.

[Stormpeaks]

This isn't really an issue. You could just buy a gift card and provide the card number to the user. You can use a website like privacy.com to create virtual gift cards with set limits tied to your account. It really isn't much of an issue at all, if your aim was to truly get someone a gift.

What a nice way to give someone a surprise than to give cash to them so they can buy it themselves, so it ruins the entire purpose of well, the surprise

[Zifeara]

This seems like such a lazy 'solution' that harms players more than the RMT bots, honestly. I understand they want to cut down on fraud -of course they do- but punishing everyone else just trying to give a nice surprise to someone is the worst way to do it. I pray they listen to the backlash and spend time on a real fix for this that doesn't screw over those of us just living life and offering silly little things to others. Or at least maybe they'll listen to the hit to their online revenue if not us because at some point, it will be MOSTLY fraud since all the legit purchases will be driven away.