You're a Disgrace

[caffe_macchiato]

If youa've used TOS breaking addons or directly cheated for the Fall Guys event, I hope you get banned. I hope everyone knows it. I hope you are shamed for the rest of your entire life.

They can't get banned, but it doesn't matter. All Square Enix needs to do is mandate that their official launcher is used instead of XIVLauncher. Make sure that no third-party programs can authenticate the login. All of these plugins are only becoming wildly popular because of the launcher, including the Fall Guys one. Cheating would still exist but not be nearly as prevalent, and it would be non-intrusive to normal players. The quality of the game culture would improve overnight.

Of course, Square Enix won't do that either. Why would they? It's Square Enix. Who cares as long as the game prints money?

[Sindele]

They can't get banned, but it doesn't matter. All Square Enix needs to do is mandate that their official launcher is used instead of XIVLauncher. Make sure that no third-party programs can authenticate the login. All of these plugins are only becoming wildly popular because of the launcher, including the Fall Guys one. Cheating would still exist but not be nearly as prevalent, and it would be non-intrusive to normal players. The quality of the game culture would improve overnight.

Of course, Square Enix won't do that either. Why would they? It's Square Enix. Who cares as long as the game prints money?

Or because what you've just proposed is a problem somewhere between nightmarishly difficult and outright impossible while completely failing to solve the problem you think it solves.

SE's failure continues to be its complete refusal to invest in proper moderation for a worldwide audience. This is another facet of a very old problem coming home to roost, just like the server capacity debacles during COVID were. The most cost-effective way to deal with cheating is to produce a culture of unpredictable fear by doing the brute-force work of monitoring the tools space, figuring out where activity is growing, and then bundling up groups of people pushing it too far and knocking them all off in one fell swoop.

It's a well-worn strategy for a reason - fighting at the zero tolerance level is ridiculously expensive, ridiculously intrusive, and largely unnecessary particularly in the MMO space. Do it anything less than perfectly, and, well... remember when there was ransomware vectored through Genshin's kernel anti-cheat? (Which did very little in terms of productively stopping cheating in the first place?)

E: Also, the final stage could be pretty much autorun to victory from day zero. Very, very predictable once you understand the delays. Some of this definitely strikes me as reminiscent of the CC cheating screamfests - one twitter video of someone cheating was all every permabronze player needed to justify every match loss they ever experienced.