Quote Originally Posted by Absimiliard View Post
Do you fully comprehend the number of players currently employing third-party tools? Let's assume they do all get banned. You know what happens? FFXIV stops being lucrative because they will have just shot most of their cash cows in the head. This would legitimately kill the game faster than just about anything else. It won't just be this game that goes under, either - it will hit Square-Enix hard.

SE has already been having a bit of a rough time of it lately courtesy of a number of factors, not the least of which being multiple mediocre releases and their own shady business practices. Having FFXIV's influx of cash kicked out from under them would be a crippling blow to the entire company. I don't think for a minute it would be enough to put SE under fully, but it would definitely hurt them. They're already cutting a lot of corners in their games, and this would force them to cut even more. It's a spiral most gaming companies never recover from. They were only saved from it back in the 80s by the original Final Fantasy, which was named final because they very much expected it to be their last release before the company, then just Square (or SquareSoft, in the US), went under.

tl;dr: If SE gets rid of everyone using third-party tools and/or mods, they will probably deal irreparable harm to their own company.
Not to take sides too hard here, but regardless of how many people use mods, I genuinely think you're severely overestimating amount of people who would be willing to permanently quit the game over the blockage. In fact, Id say among those who use them, only superminority actually has their enjoyment of the game RELY on the mods, rather than just being enhanced by them. An annoyingly loud minority, but a minority nevertheless.