So about cheats at top level?

[ThaCa]

I cannot say for most of the DCs, but I think Light is in pretty good place aside from having small-ish playerpool. I haven't seen blatant cheating aside from some questionable cast times from some WHMs in past Seasons, but I think they can still fall under the player just having excellent reflexes.

I'm not part of the discords and such so I can't confirm existence of any secret cabal. There were handful of the top players previously in some of the largest PvP ones, but I think its more about playing together other games when the queue is dead.

[Towa-Musa]

Let's be real a minute, I see everybody calling the top 100 full of cheaters, hackers and match riggers and whatnot. And while I have seen very sus things here and there, let's address the elephant in the room for once.

What are your evidence, suspicions, things you think are rampant, secret linkshells full of top rankers and whatnot?

win trading hands down, super hard to prove unless you know what to look for and even if you report them mods have no idea what they are looking at when they see it so nothing ever comes of it.

[Cidel]

What are your evidence, suspicions, things you think are rampant, secret linkshells full of top rankers and whatnot?

And it would be pointless for anyone to share much about it here. I've seen people make threads and post screenshots and the like and they're all deleted rather quickly and wiped from existence due to the forum's policies on "shaming" people. It's like the one thing that gets moderated quickly around here. The other being obscenities and vulgarity...

...Which is also relevant, because I remember roughly a year or so ago somebody had made a thread full of screenshots of in-game win-trading and cheating in addition to out-of-game screenshots of convos and drama on Discord and the like to further support their claim. Naturally, something like that couldn't remain on the forums, but what exacerbated it was new, throw-away forum accounts (presumably from the accused player(s)) proceeded to flood and spam the thread with vulgar posts for a couple pages to expedite the thread getting deleted.

It absolutely does exist- not to the hyperbolic extent that some people like to claim, but between the inability to say much about or prove it in places like here and reddit, and gaslighting from the people who very well might engage in it- that makes it come off as some kind of urban legend.

[Lacksz]

t100 is not full of cheaters, I would say 95% of it is legit (Light DC)

But from what I personally witnessed, there is 1 known speed-hacker that has been at it since season 4 I believe
They usually reach crystal rank and then stop, but they got t100 in season 5 (V. U.)

There are no rewards for us t100 players so no big deal really, but still, SE should monitor their game mode to ensure everyone has fun.

Still, those cheaters (very few) should not be an excuse for preventing anyone to reach t100.. the leaderboard is literally free on Light/Chaos

[Myrha_Lhlalheva]

There used to be a lot more suspicious NIN LB's, but it's definitely fallen off (alongside the declining NIN population). If there are still cheaters, it seems like they've limited themselves at most to auto-Purify/Guard. Wintrading and sandbagging I think are still around for sure, but obviously it's very difficult to prove without DM receipts or third party tools. Let's just say that a lot of T30 players each season have no business being there, given the way they play.

[Valence]

I feel like auto purify is shooting oneself in the foot as much as it can help you purify faster when it actually matters tbh... Same-ish for Guard, how does the program know when to guard and when to refrain?

[Myrha_Lhlalheva]

I feel like auto purify is shooting oneself in the foot as much as it can help you purify faster when it actually matters tbh... Same-ish for Guard, how does the program know when to guard and when to refrain?

I have no experience with cheats in XIV PvP, but back in the day I did do lot of research and hunting for cheaters in FPS games. Lemme tell you, the cheat engines are extremely sophisticated if you want them to be. For example, for shooting games, you could tell the aimbot to introduce a % random accuracy, or to only hit the head every 4th shot, or to introduce an offset/low-FOV aimlock so that it wouldn't look super obvious that you were looking at people through walls.

Anyway, the point is that you can probably tell the engine what exactly you always want auto-Guarded, especially for things that aren't normally reactable. You can ask it to automatically Guard against MCH LB or Miracle of Nature, for example. There are certain things that you'd also almost always want to immediately Purify. Alternatively, it'd be very simple to ask the engine to automatically Purify for you if you attempt to press certain buttons. Say for example, it'll only Purify if you attempt to press a movement key (ie Thunderclap, Icarus, etc), turning any of those buttons into a discount version of Elusive Jump. You could also have it auto-Purify if you make any attempt to press Guard or Recuperate.

I'm not sure if server ticks function on rollback netcode, but if they did, it'd be very simple to ask the software to react to even instant-cast abilities.

[Ransu]

I imagine it just auto pops it at a certain HP threshold.

[Valence]

That would also mean it's actually capable of reading the damage potency of each hit you take before their actual damage resolution (that is very delayed), else you'd just die from earlier damage even if the program guards when it detects low HP...

[Ransu]

My only guess is it reads the logs. I'm not really sure how they work. I feel like they would just get in the way though.