Best part of a new patch? Third party tools not working.

[SaitoHikari]

Fun fact: There used to be one extremely popular third party tool back in the Heavensward/Stormblood days known as Guildwork. One of its primary functions was to enable you to see shouts from any zone in the game, which is why you would sometimes see people shouting in dungeons - it was to communicate with everyone else who had that functionality enabled with that third party tool. But the real reason most people used it was because RMT whispers used to be RAMPANT in the Heavensward days, along with like half of Stormblood. Like as soon as you made yourself known in an earlier game major hub area, you would get like 3 bot whispers coming your way, along with RMT mail. Guildwork had the ability to block whispers based on your filters.

As soon as SE solved the rampant RMT advertisement problem by disabling the ability for free trial accounts to whisper and mail by late Stormblood, Guildwork was basically no longer necessary, so its creator opted to stop updating it.

The takeaway here is that if SE wants to stop use of third party tools, it's better to build their functions into the game itself in some way, because the simple reality is that any attempt to break them will NEVER work in the long term. Parsers, for instance, would die overnight if SE allowed you to track your performance in-game. If they have concerns about toxicity, it could always be a party finder option when forming a party that requires consent from all party members at once. You would clearly see which parties have it enabled in party finder, so joining such a party would be your consent. Since it only really matters for high-end content as well, the functionality would only be available for Extreme/Savage/Ultimate content too.