Would you be opposed to SE implementing a program to scan for addons/parsers?

[Absimiliard]

Lots of words

A few quick points.

Firstly, some of the most notorious addons currently used in WoW rely on/interact with core components of the game so integral to its functionality that they cannot do anything about them without first rebuilding the engine. They have admitted this themselves, even directly citing it as the reason they haven't done anything about certain addons. No way are they going to rebuild the engine this late in its lifespan, especially with MMOs in general showing every sign of being on their way out.

Secondly, Blizzard is pretty awful in the anti-cheat department. They've used a few different ones, most notably Warden, their own proprietary anti-cheat, and practically all of them fall well short of their intended success rate. Moreover, Warden in particular was demonstrated to collect far more data than what was necessary to maintain the integrity of games that used it, causing several cybersecurity firms and even some governments to declare it spyware. In some instances, those governments even went so far as to ban its use in games, or just outright ban the games that used it.

Thirdly, most of the people using Honorbuddy didn't get banned. In fact, the vast majority of them received no punishment at all. The same can be said of the lion's share of cheaters in WoW in general. Most will go completely unnoticed and unpunished so long as they aren't doing stuff so blatant as to get themselves mass reported.

I'm inclined to say FFXIV actually has far fewer cheaters than WoW, especially these days. Well, unless you consider parsers and aesthetic mods to be cheating, in which case the terms of the debate change significantly.

The housing plugins are definitely not just aesthetic mods tho. The one that they're talking about genuinely lets you place housing items outside of the game limits, at least for the most part.

This is already possible without the use of third-party tools or modifications to the game. There are a number of readily exploitable bugs in the housing system that were never fixed, this being but one.