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

[Johners]

Snip for characters

You know they'd only be able to fully detect cheating with an anti-cheat, right? That's the entire point of anti-cheat software being part of multiplayer games. The difference maker between say an MMO and an FPS game is the enforcement policy. In a game like Valorant, for example, you'll want to remove cheaters as quickly as you detect them due to the game relying on quick matchmaking and rounds lasting around 30 minutes. In an MMO, such as World of Warcraft of Final Fantasy XIV, ban waves are methodical and are timed for impact.

I think WoW serves as two great examples for XIV to be honest. The first being in how far players push the officially supported LUA-based addon framework and the second being in how ban waves should be handled. Blizzard control the addon framework in WoW and even with the ability to change or remove functionality on the fly (they can live patch the game without needing to do server/client restarts these days), players have really pushed the boundaries to an extent that Square Enix doesn't want in this game.

As for cheating, you only need to look at the Honorbuddy ban waves in Warlords of Draenor and Legion. For context, Honorbuddy was a paid cheat that included a rotation bot. This wasn't boss timers which the game allows via the LUA addon framework, it was an external program playing your rotation for you. After identifying the tool and players using it via anti-cheat data (plus the fact they log everything you do in-game), the ban waves were issued. Except it wasn't done quietly or in the middle of the night, they chose peak hours when everyone is online and most likely to be raiding. MMOs are social games and thanks to platforms like Reddit and the official WoW forums, news spread fast. Your top 2 or 3 DPS players that suddenly went offline? Probably cheating, especially if they never came back online.

The removing of titles, weapons and achievement from the Japanese static that cheated in TOP is great but they've made an example from one prominent team. This kind of enforcement also needs to be targeted at the normal, non-streaming and non-world first players also. I'd probably extend it into savage (cheaters play there), ranked PvP (cheaters and win traders play there) and even crafting (you think all those people are actually crafting 6+ hours every day legitimately?). Actively and openly removing the rewards from cheating is a great enforcement policy. It's a social game, turn the social against them. It does work.

[Thaciscokidd]

This kind of enforcement also needs to be targeted at the normal, non-streaming and non-world first players also.

That's the problem unless they stream or post it on Social Media there is literally no way for the Game Masters to even know who is doing what with what. I mean there's a pretty nasty PvP plugin that has been around since about midway through Season 1 of CC but you don't see people even talking about that because they keep it on the DL.

That's the real reason why the hardcore plugin users really try to keep to themselves. The more they are out the more chance they have to get discovered.

[Larirawiel]

You know they'd only be able to fully detect cheating with an anti-cheat, right? That's the entire point of anti-cheat software being part of multiplayer games.

No, you are not able to fully detect cheating until the halting problem is solved. The only thing you can do is throwing heuristics on suspicious software. And then you have to deal with false positives and still not detectable cheats. And if the cheaters start using virtual machines like KVM then the propability to detect something is going to almost zero.




Cheers

[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.