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

[Kazhar]

If you are putting 3 months of your personal time on an Excel spreadsheet to try and go over the logs of one battle I'll commend your effort, as soon as you use and add-on, I'll report your cheating.

I have genuinely no idea what people like you who proudly claim they're blind to any sort of nuance or rational thinking want to accomplish.
If ACT didn't exist, people would probably develop browser applications (which technically doesn't break ToS as it's completely outside the game) where you could upload your battle log and do the exact same thing. It would just be a more annoying process for everyone involved, so what's the actual point? "Purity"?

[solimiano]

I have genuinely no idea what people like you who proudly claim they're blind to any sort of nuance or rational thinking want to accomplish.

End of third party add-ons since it's forbidden by the tos, either it's part of the official software made by square enix or it gets banned.
That's the goal

[Saraide]

If you are putting 3 months of your personal time on an Excel spreadsheet to try and go over the logs of one battle I'll commend your effort, as soon as you use and add-on, I'll report your cheating.

I love how you pretend Excel wouldnt be a third party tool in that case.

[solimiano]

I love how you pretend Excel wouldnt be a third party tool in that case.

If it takes you 3 months to analyze one single fight, and it doesn't interact with the FFXIV official game in any way shape or form, like providing you real time data, I'm more than happy with it, because if nothing else it's already new patch time and you clearly haven't cleared the fight...
Now if on the other hand, the Devs would update the game next maintenance with every single addon that exists, that would also be fine since it's now part of the official game, either way you are not breaking the rules.
How hard is it to understand, do not break the rules.

[Lium]

You are the ones trying to justify one addons, on my side there are no addons, you only use official software from square.
I wasn't the one that said "At present, endgame content is tuned in such a way that not having access to this information would in fact make it virtually, if not impossible to complete."
If you can't complete it its all for the best. That means eventually square will make the difficulty accessible to those that don't cheat and use add-ons.

I really have no dog in this fight since I only do normal raids but how does ACT give players an unfair advantage? I actually googled it and it looks like it's just a parser, and is not something unique to FFXIV. It is apparently used in many MMOs and other games.

[Vrankyl]

If it takes you 3 months to analyze one single fight, and it doesn't interact with the FFXIV official game in any way shape or form, like providing you real time data, I'm more than happy with it, because if nothing else it's already new patch time and you clearly haven't cleared the fight...
Now if on the other hand, the Devs would update the game next maintenance with every single addon that exists, that would also be fine since it's now part of the official game, either way you are not breaking the rules.
How hard is it to understand, do not break the rules.

Not sure where you are getting the three month portion. It might take a few days if you dedicated the time to it to analyze it, maybe longer for those who are bad at math/excel. That said, if ACT were suddenly not to exist, the people behind such things would likely do as another suggested and create a browser app/prebuilt excel sheet for you to just copy/paste the information into and get an immediate response. Sure, you can't see it mid fight but uh.... no one looks at that stuff mid fight. If you are looking at your parse during a fight in any game it means you aren't paying attention to the fight and there for reducing your DPS. Thus it would be used in the exact same way as a browser app would be, and said browser app would be completely immune to any 'anti-cheat' system or detection.

[solimiano]

Not sure where you are getting the three month portion. It might take a few days if you dedicated the time to it to analyze it, maybe longer for those who are bad at math/excel. That said, if ACT were suddenly not to exist, the people behind such things would likely do as another suggested and create a browser app/prebuilt excel sheet for you to just copy/paste the information into and get an immediate response. Sure, you can't see it mid fight but uh.... no one looks at that stuff mid fight. If you are looking at your parse during a fight in any game it means you aren't paying attention to the fight and there for reducing your DPS. Thus it would be used in the exact same way as a browser app would be, and said browser app would be completely immune to any 'anti-cheat' system or detection.

Ok, thanks for educating me, since I have no idea how it works, i've only seen screens of it showing as an overlay like the in-game HUD. So it's a more refined way of looking at data, the same way you would look at the in-game recordings to figure out mechanics.
Seems simple enough to understand and use if it was part of the official game like the recording function is.
But until such time, it's a third party addon, breach of tos, and as such it's considered cheating.

[Absimiliard]

Shhhh. Nobody tell it there are DPS trackers that don't come anywhere near violating TOS because all they do is read the combat log.

[SlouchyBard]

Shhhh. Nobody tell it there are DPS trackers that don't come anywhere near violating TOS because all they do is read the combat log.

Isn't reading a third party tool? Lol

[Absimiliard]

Isn't reading a third party tool? Lol

Not every third-party tool violates TOS. Those tools have to function in certain ways to qualify as a TOS violation. In the case of tools that analyze data, what determines whether or not a TOS violation has taken place is how that data is acquired. If everything third-party used with the game qualified, we'd all be in trouble. Discord and other third-party chat mediums would go have to go right out the window as well, by the logic being thrown around by some forum posters.