Why so many 18+ related player events in the party finders

[Kishin12345]

Are your friends new to MMOs or internet culture in general?

ERP has always been around in every MMO I’ve played. And, well... we both know the 34th rule of the internet.

As for plogons:
You can’t prove that other people are modifying the game’s appearance. Unless, of course, you’re using the forbidden moon one. In which case, the only thing it proves is that you are modifying the game on your local device, meaning you’re the one breaking TOS and risking a ban.

So yeah, a lose-lose scenario.

Honestly, the best thing CS3 could do at this point is to introduce a Gooner Shard™.

A special in-game containment zone where all the gooners and goonettes can roam free and ERP to their hearts content without disturbing the rest of the 'tame' playerbase.

That ERP happens is not the problem. The problem is that it happens publicly in front of everyones noses. Keep it a secret and its fine. I hope that at some point SE lets the ban hammer down. They want to take measures against the stalker plogon, right? Wonder how they find the dude? They cant stop it. Also there will just be more malicious tools in the future with such lax safety measures, oh wait no safety measures AT ALL lmao.

[genuine_stranger]

That ERP happens is not the problem. The problem is that it happens publicly in front of everyones noses. Keep it a secret and its fine. I hope that at some point SE lets the ban hammer down. They want to take measures against the stalker plogon, right? Wonder how they find the dude? They cant stop it. Also there will just be more malicious tools in the future with such lax safety measures, oh wait no safety measures AT ALL lmao.

The thing is, SE will never actively crack down on third-party tools. They’ll maintain their stance against them, sure, but they’ll never go all-in, because there’s zero financial incentive to do so.

• Players extracting more fun from the base game? QoL fixes? Hats? Network improvements?
  ⇒ Let them do it for free, lol.
  
• New animations for jobs?
  ⇒ LMAO, let the players make them. We don’t even need to pay licensing fees for potential crossovers.
  
• New gear?
  ⇒ Sure, throw them a couple of new pieces with fancy effects, then rehash old sets so they have placeholders for their own creations.
  
• Customization options?
  ⇒ KEKW. Have you seen the insane stuff players already mod in?

Yoshi-P will step up a few times a year, scold the player base, ban a few who got caught, and then business as usual.

If they could backpedal and implement an official API to support plugins, they absolutely would, but XIV is multiplatform, so they can’t.

The whole blacklist disaster is on SE.
Why on earth would they send the account ID to the client instead of actually implementing a functional server-side blacklist that works both ways?

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

The thing is, SE will never actively crack down on third-party tools. They’ll maintain their stance against them, sure, but they’ll never go all-in, because there’s zero financial incentive to do so.
The whole blacklist disaster is on SE.
Why on earth would they send the account ID to the client instead of actually implementing a functional server-side blacklist that works both ways?

Speaking as a former game & software development, it actually makes sense why they'd do it if you're making a few assumptions that the Square devs might.

-The ID may be getting sent to the client, but in a vanilla client, it's irrelevant - there's zero way the enduser has any possible way to access it in any way shape or form. So on a theoretical level, it'd be a very safe thing to do. Even if they theoretically could access it - without insane documentation of the game code, the enduser would have effectively zero idea what they're looking at amongst the huge swathe of other variables & data being sent over. Honestly, you'd be utterly terrified how many very large & widely used programs out there use/have used similar tricks with data you would normally have zero method to access/easily obtain that could be crippling if they fell into the wrong hands (and quite frankly, have before being patched out.)

-Client based leads to less Server I/O operations overall by a huge margin. Given their talks in the past about how adding even 1 extra slot of persistent inventory is a very large undertaking that they have to spend lots of time QA'ing and testing, I have little in the way of doubts that Server I/O is a huge topic & pain point they have to plan lots of things around, since every little thing being added to a player magnifies Server I/O by titanic amounts due to being done to every player online every couple hundred milliseconds. Thus, going for a client solution makes much more sense, especially given the above point.

Their biggest issue is that they severely underestimated just how ridiculously documented the game has become to plugin developers. (And also being frank, just how many of these people have large amounts of time on their hands to spend doing this in the first place) Massive de-compilations & analyzing over the years by 3rd party peeps has basically outlined every single struct/function the game uses within the client so the plugin developers can see every tiny thing that's added to the game each patch as part of their plugin fixing routine. So finding the Account ID variable was super easy because it came with all the new stuff, putting way more visibility on it comparatively.