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

[Atelier-Bagur]

honestly the FFXIV dev team cant ever win this battle. Modding is so ingrained in gaming culture both positively and negatively that its commendable and expected for them to take that "dont ask, dont tell" stance about it. Because yes really, modding in MMOs imo have done more harm than good with letting the fans do the work that the devs should be doing. People already pointed out how ridiculous WoW is with its addon usage that it made the devs super lazy and complacent with their game design and letting the game further stagnate as the years go by because of no potential new blood to come in and play the game. You're expected to download a million things just to do the basic content and while this works favorable with veteran players, its one of the major factors for its slow stagnation.

Really, the biggest reason for why they dont go full Robocop on the modding community is because they dont want to be policing every single player. Honestly I just wish they hire a team that would just go incognito and look at all the popular mods and add those QoL features rather than slowly wait for a huge drama scandal to get them to notice.

And I also dont agree on the sentiment of SE stealing the modder's work. First of all, its their game, they hold all the rights to it especially when they expect players to follow basic ToS. Modders going behind their back to do what they want is still breaking the terms of service they agreed to, so I always roll my eyes whenever somebody gets caught and act like theyre not at fault. And I also roll my eyes when they get upset with SE doing the sensible thing and adding those features into the game and feel like its unfair, not realizing that they got banned not because of the mod itself (for the most part) but for breaking the ToS to use it in the first place.

I always refer to this analogy with modding that the issue isnt about if somebody broke into your house but had good intentions by giving you some cookies. The issue is that you broke into somebody's house in the first place.

This is an obvious hot take considering past discussion with modding being more into the favor with a lot of people. I personally dont really care, but I still have my opinions on the matter anyway.