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

[Kaurhz]

If this hypothetical were to come to pass - I don't think the game would collapse, but the quality in many facets of the game would severely deteriorate as a result. I mean, sure no small measure of players use these tools, and indisputably, many of these players would have their experience diminished, but how many people would outright quit as a result is a greater question. People could ERP before this, and they could certainly still do it afterward.

Whilst I do think some of these tools are a woven part of the game or community, again, I don't think the loss of them would collapse the game, just deteriorate it quite significantly. It would be bad for them, for sure, and they wouldn't win - The reward of satiating those with a moral crusade going on wouldn't justify the price, but killing/collapsing would be a hard move. I'm willing to say I could be wrong though.

Gratitude is owed on both sides, I do think, but that depends on what you're giving gratitude for. I would argue some of the QoL features we have gotten have been as a result of third-party -- At least if reactions to the feature showcase they did is anything to go by. For what it's worth, I don't think community developments/creations outclassing or incorporating features that the game doesn't have natively is entirely a bad thing.

It's worth acknowledging that there are simply some tools that the developers would really struggle to replicate or have natively in the game, e.g., Teamcraft. Whilst it is a community creation, it's a very, very substantial creation to say the least with everything that it has now - They could expand their own trial synthesis, but by any stretch, it'd be difficult to compete with or replace. Something such as Lalachievements they probably could have natively. They already have a leaderboard for deep dungeons, so it is something they could feasibly expand on if they so wished.

[Minifie]

They opted for the safest approach: Don't bring them up/advertise them/stream use them heavily etc (and a lot of those were just involved with raiding/pvp, though the PvP ones REALLY need to be neutered if they haven't already).

As to the free labour nonsense: Same could be said of people who make fan games, art, stories, videos. . . Creatives will always find outlets and participate in things they like, I'll be worried if they design things with the thought process that people have mods installed already so build around that, since then the argument now applies to benefiting from other people's donated labour.

[Absimiliard]

Being completely honest, I definitely think the game will die if SE goes nuclear on the numerous mods and third-party tools. The loss of ACT and connection-stabilizing plugins would essentially be the same thing as calling the raiding scene out behind the woodshed with a shotgun in hand. The loss of various role-playing plugins, not to mention third-party tools like Mare and the plethora of graphical mods these people typically install, would have the same effect on the role-playing demographic. It would also pretty much annihilate the venues.

There's really no version of this story where SE comes out on top.

[Hurlstone]

Yes, as a PS5 player, I see no reason why I would play without mods and third party tools.

Wait...

[SaberMaxwell]

Big secondary to this hypothetical: are users who were modding banned? If yes, then probably yes because in addition to the gamechanging mods being gone a huge chunk of the community goes with them.

If no, then...hard to say. I'm of the opinion the raid scene dies without ACT/FFLogs, and without a strong raid scene we're left with truly casual one month subscribers.

[Jeeqbit]

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.

[Amenara]

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.

That would be a lot of games. Look at WoW for instance. How many mods in that game are essentially required to even play it and how ingrained the modding mindset is with it. The obvious difference is that Blizz sorta embraces the modding aspect compared to SE. For example it took Blizz about 20 years to update their terrible UI to a slightly less terrible UI after letting modders essentially fix the problem for them for all of those years. You can look at another game like Skyrim and make a similar argument against Bethesda and how they continue to milk it for all it's worth.

I am also not a fan of equating mods to content that SE puts out for FF14 as the two seem to not really relate to one another. It's kind of a weird argument too when SE has seemingly started to implement some of the QoL mods (which was long overdue). I guess you can say they are taking the modders ideas with that, but I don't think there would be a lot of people who would complain about that.

[Renathras]

No. All console players play without mods, and probably a good chunk of PC players. I think some of you drastically underestimate how many people just play the game as-is.

especially if we are going to assume that 'third-party' tools encompasses external sites like Teamcraft or Discord.

Discord the chat program? That'd be like saying you can't have your cell phone next to your computer on a speaker conference call or be on Microsoft Teams. There's a pretty big gulf between programs that interact directly with the game and chat programs. The only direct interaction Discord has (with all games, more or less) is showing your voice chat people in the upper left, but that's an overlay that's not part of the game engine, I think...

I think the only one MIGHT be parsers...

EDIT:

Reread the OP. I'm aware that Discord being banned is stupid and never going to happen, but it was included in the hypothetical. Respond to TheNight if you have a problem with his hypothetical scenario.

In that case, I'd say "TheNight" (we all know it's another Titanmen alt) is a moron, but...I suppose known quantities and all that.

[AwesomeJr44]

Discord the chat program? That'd be like saying you can't have your cell phone next to your computer on a speaker conference call or be on Microsoft Teams.

Reread the OP. I'm aware that Discord being banned is stupid and never going to happen, but it was included in the hypothetical. Respond to TheNight if you have a problem with his hypothetical scenario.

In that case, I'd say "TheNight" (we all know it's another Titanmen alt) is a moron, but...I suppose known quantities and all that.

*qualities. Not quantities. I wouldn't bother correcting you if you weren't calling someone else a moron in the same sentence.

EDIT: Apparently there's another use of 'quantities' I wasn't aware of. I'll take an L on this one.

[ICountFrom0]

Can we have a conversation about this where people don't pretend that discord is what the Dev's mean?