Quote Originally Posted by TheNight View Post
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?
What about you being an RMT player that masquerades on the forums as a doomsayer and troll? Plus talking about 3rd party tools and mods is against ToS on the forums.