At this point will FFXIV collapse if all mods and third party tools disappear?

[TheNight]

What kind of people are playing the game long-term?

How many people use ReShade? How many people use mods? We can now say that a significant portion of this game's playerbase are only here because of the mods, which allow them to fix the game's issues, like Viera hats, or for more, shall we say, mature activities. And what about more advanced mods that synchronize your modded appearance? Or poses that depict characters in... suggestive poses with others?

What about raiders? What even drives people to do reclear after reclear once they get BiS? FFLogs and going for high percentiles. And most of the game's clunky systems and opaque mechanics like the damage formula could not have been figured out without the aid of third party tools. The openers and rotations that you copied from the Balance are partially the product of ToS-violating third party tools.

Even many non-raiders depend on ToS-violating third party tools to fix this game's atrocious systems, such as being able to double-weave without clipping, or to be able to block out a persistent stalker completely from the screen.

Even third party tools that are not ToS-violating:

Crafters and gatherers depend on having Teamcraft and simulators to create rotations and macros + set up crafting lists, then share their macros through Discord.

BA and DRS depend on Discord to coordinate runs. Even Savage and Ultimate depend a lot on Discord especially if you want to get an early clear.

Achievement hunters compete on leaderboards like lalachievements.

I ask you: If all these fixes and features that the community developed disappear, with not one iota of help from the game developers, will the game even survive? To who do we owe our gratitude really? The community creators or the actual devs?

[Amenara]

Probably not.

[TheNight]

Probably not.

Oh? The number of synchronized users active online at any moment is almost equal to the number of Steam online users. Just deleting that alone will get roughly 10-20% of players unsubbing once they realize they can't ERP.

[AwesomeJr44]

No hyperbole or exaggeration here, if that happened and there was no hope of them ever coming back, then it would at least would heavily damage the game's playerbase. People really underestimate how many people use third-party things, especially if we are going to assume that 'third-party' tools encompasses external sites like Teamcraft or Discord. If everything was wiped out in an instant, many people wouldn't have a good reason to play the game long-term anymore, and this game can't survive off of the turbo casuals (the ones who play once every 4 months just for MSQ) alone.

And if you wipe out Discord... whoo boy... so many things in this game would be dead.

[Amenara]

Oh? The number of synchronized users active online at any moment is almost equal to the number of Steam online users. Just deleting that alone will get roughly 10-20% of players unsubbing once they realize they can't ERP.

Just not a fan of making up numbers with no basis on scenarios that aren't currently happening and no way of knowing or really even giving an intelligent guess towards because who knows if the players using mods are solely playing FF14 because of them. It feels like rage baiting because you are bored or something.

[TheNight]

No hyperbole or exaggeration here, if that happened and there was no hope of them every coming back, then probably yes, or at least it would heavily damage the game's playerbase. People really underestimate how many people use third-party things, especially if we are going to assume that 'third-party' tools encompasses external sites like Teamcraft or Discord. If everything was wiped out in an instant, many people wouldn't have a good reason to play the game long-term anymore, and this game can't survive off of the turbo casuals (the ones who play once every 4 months just for MSQ) alone.

And if you wipe Discord... whoo boy... so many things in this game would be dead.

It's quite clear then the game itself has next to no staying power. The reason people stay is not because of what the developers created but because of the community's creations. CBU3 is quite literally coasting on the community's effort, and this dark premonition from the previous Square Enix CEO has never been more relevant:

I realize that some people who “play to have fun” and who currently form the majority of players have voiced their reservations toward these new trends, and understandably so. However, I believe that there will be a certain number of people whose motivation is to “play to contribute,” by which I mean to help make the game more exciting. Traditional gaming has offered no explicit incentive to this latter group of people, who were motivated strictly by such inconsistent personal feelings as goodwill and volunteer spirit. This fact is not unrelated to the limitations of existing UGC (user-generated content). UGC has been brought into being solely because of individuals’ desire for self-expression and not because any explicit incentive existed to reward them for their creative efforts. I see this as one reason that there haven’t been as many major game-changing content that were user generated as one would expect.

Yes, they want players who contribute, because much like Skyrim, they are exploiting the free labor of thousands of volunteers to fix the game for them and implement features that the playerbase has asked for a decade. Much like Skyrim, barely anyone would play the game in 2023 if it weren't for the mods.

[Deo14]

From sheer number of mods, FFXIV seems to be 3rd most popular game in the history. 2nd if you ignore LE/SE versions of Skyrim. I have no doubts this will cause some major issues.

Twitter, discords, and all social media where people using all the E/RP mods reside will burst in flames. This will inevitably gain serious media attention. It could further evolve into some psychos doing some very stupid stuff, people did some really stupid stuff for much less. This has further potential to gain traction in mainstream and boomer media.

Raiders wouldn't be happy either, ACT is just needed to find out what you're doing wrong. Game will just generally become more annoying, because people are used to QoL stuff plugins do. No plugins means no universalis, so even crafters will hate this.

It would be fair to assume that if we talk about disappearing, you mean that SE implemented some anti cheat, in that case, botting might become harder, which in turn will make RMT gil more expensive, which will further anger paypiggies (high possibility of overlap with the first group of people).

All in all, game would be in flames, I wouldn't be surprised if some SE frontman went and made an apology.

Will the game survive? Very likely, you cannot kill game big like this, WoW survived what, like 3 bad expansions in a row, while they were in plethora of drama and legal problems at the same time?

But yes, plugin creators definitely deserve more credit. Putting their free time to create better game for us is good cause, especially since many of them do it out of goodwill.

[TheNight]

Just not a fan of making up numbers with no basis on scenarios that aren't currently happening and no way of knowing or really even giving an intelligent guess towards because who knows if the players using mods are solely playing FF14 because of them. It feels like rage baiting because you are bored or something.

Regardless of the numbers it is very clear that Square Enix is exploiting free labor while they rest on their laurels and put minimum effort into developing content for FF14.

[Oizen]

It would definitely take a significant hit, both on the raiding side and the casual RP side.

I know people who only play this game because its modding scene is so easy to get into, and I know hardcore raiders who say that if they couldn't use some key plugin that makes the game more functional they would probably stop raiding. While its not a majority of players, it isn't an insignificant ammount either.

I honestly think SE has more to lose than gain by going scorched earth on plugins or mods.

[ZephyrMenodora]

I honestly think SE has more to lose than gain by going scorched earth on plugins or mods.

Hence why they haven't. It's just these forums that brings up this issue repeatedly.