Re: Regarding the Use of Third-Party Programs and Player Safety

[YumieYumiki]

It would deal with the rampant botting and cheating though, but that's a separate conversation.

If they wanted to fight bots they could apply a number of server side heuristics to prevent them from teleporting around, from getting under the map, from speed hacking. Same thing as the blacklisting issue though, it would increase the server costs and evidently they are content to let people believe that nothing can be done, rather than outright tell us "it would cost us money so fu"

[VanillaWafer]

If they wanted to fight bots they could apply a number of server side heuristics to prevent them from teleporting around, from getting under the map, from speed hacking. Same thing as the blacklisting issue though, it would increase the server costs and evidently they are content to let people believe that nothing can be done, rather than outright tell us "it would cost us money so fu"

Well, one thing you gotta remember is that the whole teleporting around has been used by staff in preparation for Fan Fests. Does that excuse bots from using this channel to level characters? Of course not. My concern would be that if they decide to implement something more instant, then that would likely allow people with malicious intent to figure it out and deploy their bots to use that, too.

Or maybe that's already happened and people who are on the surface level just don't know that, yet.

[ovIm]

Well, one thing you gotta remember is that the whole teleporting around has been used by staff in preparation for Fan Fests. Does that excuse bots from using this channel to level characters? Of course not. My concern would be that if they decide to implement something more instant, then that would likely allow people with malicious intent to figure it out and deploy their bots to use that, too.

Well, if the check is server side, they could just enable a flag server side for specific Square Enix Accounts that says "yeah, this character is allowed run underneath the map at 500% speed, this is gucci."
And if that flag is set on an account basis, any account that does the same thing without that flag could get tagged for investigation. Automatically. Its a much more elegant solution than trashing customer computers with a useless anticheat application.

[YumieYumiki]

Well, one thing you gotta remember is that the whole teleporting around has been used by staff in preparation for Fan Fests.

I mean they can have special GM privileges allowing them to do that, they don't need to let everyone do it through client side cheats.

[BigCheez]

If they wanted to fight bots they could apply a number of server side heuristics to prevent them from teleporting around, from getting under the map, from speed hacking. Same thing as the blacklisting issue though, it would increase the server costs and evidently they are content to let people believe that nothing can be done, rather than outright tell us "it would cost us money so fu"

I'm not talking about those bots. I mean the ridiculous number of players botting things like diadem/firmament, and general crafting/gathering, and HoH for the accursed hoard achievements, or fully automating their rotations in raid content.

I don't think people realise how much these plugins can do or how many people are using them.