With Activision and Bungies recent wins against cheat providers it is time SE's

[LianaThorne]

1. can always get a pc and have them while on pc

This is pretty out of touch. Not everyone has the ability to drop the money on a decent PC, especially in the current economy.

2. the game will have sexual stuff regardless of it and vanilla ffxiv has plenty of things that screams it any and all mmorpgs will always be sexual by nature period

The furthest vanilla 14 touches on sexual stuff are the dancers in Ul'dah/Eulmore. They aren't having sex in the middle of a main city or taking nude pictures of our characters without permission. There is a massive difference there and that should be obvious.

3. eh not a big deal

To you, let's specify that. It is a big deal otherwise to people who actually raid and want it to be about skill and not plugin use.

4 is about the only one i can agree on since thats an actrual cheat

Still waiting on someone to explain what cheats are being used.

It would be nice if games could just admit the fact that in alot of ways they design them around to be sexual because sex sells way better lol but they afraid to do it

14 was never designed to be a sexual game, some of the community took advantage of the game being moddable when Covid happened and the venue scene exploded because people were horny and couldn't go anywhere.

We now have a portion (large or small is debatable) that treats the game as a sex outlet because it's (ironically enough) able to be modded to comparable levels as sex games like Second Life and 3DX in a way other MMORPGs aren't and will never be.

This was never Square's doing lol. The community did this all on their own.

[LianaThorne]

But, I do have a sincere question. The community's rhetoric from 2013-2021 (before Dalamud integration) portrayed FFXIV as being a great MMO because of its content, story and quality. That is, it didn't need add-ons to be good. Are those days just seen as dystopian now? Like, if we returned to the "golden age" of FFXIV when this game was growing exponentially, would you all have a fit? Because all these posts seem to portray a modless FFXIV as some sort of nightmare. How did this game ever get popular if it didn't have your favorite third-party tools for most of its history?

Depends on who you ask.
The vanilla/console community wouldn't leave because they're already rocking the modless life.

ERP/venue community most likely would take the biggest hit which, if I remember correctly, last sat around 40-50k active people on Mare at most hours of the day. I definitely don't see many of those staying since sex-based venues would lose a lot of their appeal if dances/emotes/etc. aren't moddable anymore for those reasons. People who just want to vibe to music and just RP might hang around though since I don't see this really affecting DJs or SFW nightclubs.

Raid community would depend on the raider, if they require plugins to raid they might leave but I feel like a majority would still stay around and at least attempt to do it without plugins.

Everyone else would probably be a case by case basis? Like if someone mods their character appearance but isn't a part of the venue scene, they might hang around or leave if their character doesn't look how they want them to anymore.

[Xylira]

I wonder what’s wrong with people.
How a FFXIV mod/plugin (which works client side meaning that it affects only the user who’s using it) can affect your gameplay?
Mh?

...

Zoom hack gives an advantage in both PvE and PvP settings by giving the user of the hack a far wider field of view of their surroundings that they otherwise wouldn't have. In PvE this can trivialize certain boss mechanics, in PvP it obviously gives an advantage over opponents who have a more limited view of the battlefield.

For ACT, it literally does lead to exclusion of players, naming and shaming of them, etc. I don't even bother with progression, yet my characters ACT data is plastered on a third party site without my consent because of players who run ACT during roulettes and upload party parses. Why is my character's parse data being hosted on a third party site I want no part of?

'Dress mods' impact me because the RP community has been becoming increasingly insular and pushing away players who aren't also running the custom client with a particular plugin that allows them to see their 'custom looks'.

Generic 'cheats' in PvE ruin progression races. They're supposed to be tests of skill for those pushing for world first. Many of those cheats, zoom hack included, minimize or trivialize what are supposed to be challenging mechanics. And of course, if 'cheats' exist for PvE, they'll inevitably be used by players in a PvP setting as well, there's no decoupling one from the other.

[ArcaviusGreyashe]

My point is that any external tool can have an impact if it becomes widespread. You have games that calibrate their combat by taking addons into account, because so many players use them that it becomes impossible to ignore them. So yes, it has an impact. But in the long term, on games where these ‘crutches’ have become commonplace. It's a bit more perverse than just saying ‘well, it's none of my business’.

That much is true, theoretically, but it doesn't apply to XIV. The best rotations are not determined by any in game input, nowadays, it's just excel sheets that take potency, combos, and so on into account. Yes, you can use tools like xivanalysis, when you parse, to compare to this optimal rotation, but most people don't do that. And, even then, fights are designed (or were designed at least, don't know if it's still true) by having devs playtesting it, notably the HP amount, so that fights are killable with minimum ilvl and optimal playing. They don't take parsers into account because they don't need to, they just play the game.

However, it is an issue when it comes to automatic markings. SE shows no interest in building mechanics that can't be understood and solved organically, though.

So yeah, I feel closer to Doozer on that : people cheating in a non-competitive PvE game don't matter, don't change what I feel when I kill a raid, and shouldn't change what others feel. Cheats, mods, plugins and so on do not matter for anything in game other than the behavior of some people segregating against non-users, and that's a community issue, not a game issue.

It is an issue for world firsts and so on, but let's be clear, nobody here is participating to those.

And if a RP community excludes you because you can't use "custom looks", they are bad RPers and you dodged a bullet.

[Vallerie]

But, I do have a sincere question. The community's rhetoric from 2013-2021 (before Dalamud integration) portrayed FFXIV as being a great MMO because of its content, story and quality. That is, it didn't need add-ons to be good. Are those days just seen as dystopian now? Like, if we returned to the "golden age" of FFXIV when this game was growing exponentially, would you all have a fit? Because all these posts seem to portray a modless FFXIV as some sort of nightmare. How did this game ever get popular if it didn't have your favorite third-party tools for most of its history?

I would argue that FFXIV is great with or without mods. Like there are, and always have been, some obvious flaws with the game and its UI, but they are not crippling...except maybe the interaction between animation lock and latency if you don't have 60ms or less ping.

But some people just...like mods. Generally speaking (i.e., not just in XIV), if you like tinkering with stuff and know what you like, they can be a great way to enhance or introduce variety to your own personal experience with the game.
- To be clear, I'm speaking entirely about understanding things like visual mods and UI QoL stuff. I will never understand people who use plugins for mechanics callouts and automation, but admittedly I can't get myself particularly worked up about their existence since they don't exactly affect my experience with the game.

[ForteNightshade]

But, I do have a sincere question. The community's rhetoric from 2013-2021 (before Dalamud integration) portrayed FFXIV as being a great MMO because of its content, story and quality. That is, it didn't need add-ons to be good. Are those days just seen as dystopian now? Like, if we returned to the "golden age" of FFXIV when this game was growing exponentially, would you all have a fit? Because all these posts seem to portray a modless FFXIV as some sort of nightmare. How did this game ever get popular if it didn't have your favorite third-party tools for most of its history?

Perhaps the worst kept secret is FFXIV had several of these third party tools long before they became more widely known. ACT and everything associated with it have been around since Heavensward (2015) while an early iteration of it existed near the end of ARR. Mods where far more obscure but came around near the end of HW.

Regardless, the problem with all the things you've listed is many of them are finite. I've generally enjoyed the story but it's one and done. Likewise, content has very little longevity. Hence why the RP and venue scenes took off. Or on the raid side of the community, parsing. They filled the void that long lulls created, especially given how lackluster Endwalker has been in that respect. It isn't so much people view the supposed "golden age" as dystopian nowadays but they simply want aesthetic and QoL improvements that can't be developed fast enough or aren't considered a priority. A prime example of this is ping. Yoshida infamously claimed this game is perfectly serviceable at 200ms. While he technically isn't wrong, anyone who's played at that ping can attest it's absolutely awful. Even being over 100ms can be frustrating due to how reliant this game is on snapshots.

Ultimately, the devs don't see a problem where a good chunk of the playerbase does. Especially when tackling higher end content like Extremes and Savage where snapshots will actually kill you. So when a plugin fixes this problem, suddenly removing it will, indeed, upset a not insignificant amount of players. Heck, several additions to the game have come directly as a response to popular plugins being caught on stream. Basically, players before couldn't miss what they didn't know existed. Now that they do... trying to put that rabbit back in his hat isn't so easy. None of this is to say FF would die without third party but it would be undeniably hurt by any sort of attempt to block them. Which is precisely why SE hasn't done anything. It's simply not worth the investment when, frankly speaking, they benefit from all those programs.

[Graveyardprincess]

Zoom hack gives an advantage in both PvE and PvP settings by giving the user of the hack a far wider field of view of their surroundings that they otherwise wouldn't have. In PvE this can trivialize certain boss mechanics, in PvP it obviously gives an advantage over opponents who have a more limited view of the battlefield.

For ACT, it literally does lead to exclusion of players, naming and shaming of them, etc. I don't even bother with progression, yet my characters ACT data is plastered on a third party site without my consent because of players who run ACT during roulettes and upload party parses. Why is my character's parse data being hosted on a third party site I want no part of?

'Dress mods' impact me because the RP community has been becoming increasingly insular and pushing away players who aren't also running the custom client with a particular plugin that allows them to see their 'custom looks'.

Generic 'cheats' in PvE ruin progression races. They're supposed to be tests of skill for those pushing for world first. Many of those cheats, zoom hack included, minimize or trivialize what are supposed to be challenging mechanics. And of course, if 'cheats' exist for PvE, they'll inevitably be used by players in a PvP setting as well, there's no decoupling one from the other.

lets be honest combat that depends on how far a person can see and how much of the battle they can see are kinda bad to start with the zoom in way makes the fight more reasonable i have no issue with ppl using zoom since you should have that baseline in the game

[Sayo_]

lets be honest combat that depends on how far a person can see and how much of the battle they can see are kinda bad to start with the zoom in way makes the fight more reasonable i have no issue with ppl using zoom since you should have that baseline in the game

All fights are completely do-able without any type of plugins, so no it shouldn't be in the base game.

[Racen]

I'm confused, what cheats does FFXIV have besides botters?

[Xylira]

lets be honest combat that depends on how far a person can see and how much of the battle they can see are kinda bad to start with the zoom in way makes the fight more reasonable i have no issue with ppl using zoom since you should have that baseline in the game

What players should have and what they do have are still two very different things. By all means, ask SE to increase the camera zoom range if you feel it should be larger than it is in the unmodified game client, and if they decide to increase that amount in the game client I'd have no problem with the change. That said, currently players who use the zoom hack have a distinct advantage over players who are not modifying the game client in any way, which make it effectively a cheat.