Quote Originally Posted by TheNight View Post
How many people use ReShade? How many people use mods?
This is true. And I have heard people say they would quit without them and that could very well be a significant amount of people that would quit. But if this is all that is drawing them to the game then eventually it's probably going to lose them anyway when a game with better graphics and similar features is available. The graphics update might help a bit, although it's not doing everything that mods are.

What about raiders? What even drives people to do reclear after reclear once they get BiS?
Just, because it's a weekly. Maybe get loot for alts. I do any weeklies really. Even when I don't need to. It's like doing daily roulettes when you don't need to. Also just to experience the content for the timeframe SE seems to want me to. See what goes wrong this week. Who dies? How do they die? Do we recover?

going for high percentiles.
It's true this motivates a lot of people but I think that a lot of people are also motivated just by the joy of doing the content itself or helping others do it, so raiding would be alright without this even if some quit without it.

mechanics like the damage formula could not have been figured out without the aid of third party tools.
I don't think I agree with this because the damage formula people use is mostly using a combination of datamined information (unless you consider this obtained via a tool) and information shown on your character window. Many of the tests that were done prior to this formula being known were able to be done without tools, such as breaking your weapon to observe average results in the battle log. What it mostly helps with is confirmation, speed of analyzing battle data and precision but almost everyone's damage formulas in the past were roughly close, just not always as precise as they are now.

I came up with pretty lazy formulas that got roughly accurate results in Heavensward that weren't even using the datamined info nor any tool data, because of the obvious correlation between attack power, weapon damage, potency and actual damage. You didn't really have to be very good at maths to make this correlation give a rough damage estimate. The difficult part was really the substats such as Determination.

It was also clear back then from tests that if you synced to other levels but maintained the exact same stats, your damage got weaker as you increased in level and there is a patch from 1.x where they said they made level increases weaken your stats so that it's worthwhile to improve gear.

The openers and rotations that you copied from the Balance are partially the product of ToS-violating third party tools.
These are pretty easy to math based on potency alone though. Any rotation I've got from there has been pretty obvious to me just from reading the potencies or opening the windows calculator. Places like The Balance would still calculate what is best even if they didn't have the tools currently available to them and people would still go and use their recommendations.

Crafters and gatherers depend on having Teamcraft and simulators to create rotations and macros + set up crafting lists, then share their macros through Discord.
But before simulations people would just trial and error so that would probably happen again. SE went and implemented a lot of the crafting/gathering website features in Shadowbringers too, including trial synthesis.

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.
Not gonna count this one because voice chat has long been part of MMORPGs, especially in their raids.

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?
Never played an MMORPG that doesn't have "community developed" utilities, even before this game released. It's always been part of MMORPGs and always will be, even if its developers don't embrace them.