No, I will not use third party tools, the devs cleared the fight without them.

[LittleImp]

A small difference in the grand scheme of things, given that you have at least three seconds to make decisions in content.

Cactbot expands the time you have to make decisions in some circumstances, up to effectively doubling or even tripling that time because of what I explain below.

So does the diagram on my other monitor.

That's not at all what I'm talking about.

Boss Abilities have unique IDs that are sent to the client as the fight progresses. Let's say in P8S for example, his snake form has an ID of "SNKAE" and his dog form has an ID of "DGO". Because Cactbot is intercepting and decoding network traffic, it can parse these IDs at the earliest stage they are available. In the case of P8S, this means that the MOMENT the castbar for the ability begins (which itself does not indicate which form the boss is going to take), Cactbot is able to tell you which form the boss is taking and how you need to react, despite the actual telegraph for the ability starting like 5 second later at the earliest and requiring you to recognize an animation. There are MANY other mechanics that are like this, and arguing that this doesn't give advantage is absurd.

So explain why FFXIV has a far more extensive modding and add-on culture compared to other online games. Explain why one can mandate Discord but not Cactpot. Cactpot is already far more widespread than you think and it's only getting more pervasive. Yoshida himself said he refuses to crackdown on add-ons.

Yoshida doesn't want to have to put invasive anti-cheat into the game that actively detects mods. Posting mods in public, in a way that is linkable to your character, has gotten people banned in cases where others chose to report them. I personally know of people who have been banned for having Cactbot and ACT running on stream with their character name exposed.

Discord can be mandated because it doesn't invasively intercept and decode network packets, or read from the games memory.

A policy without enforcement is merely a suggestion. As a result, add-on culture is widely popular in FFXIV in 2022 and will continue to explode in popularity as this game gets older. The slippery slope is more like a cliff and we've already fallen off.

The policy is enforced, and at any time we could experience a more severe and widespread crackdown. SE seems largely detached from the Western fanbase at the moment, but there are potentially major IP related issues with some of these mods that may end up forcing SEs hand. There are a lot of mod makers who are actively raking in thousands of dollars porting assets from other games, including those from other Japanese developers, and I highly doubt SE would be fine with that if they understood what was actually going on.