Integrity matters

[Kup]

Mods started getting big in 2017, so what kept you until 2026?

If anyone wanted to find some real meaning beyond virtual points in an MMO, then try a new hobby, ideally something away from tech overall since the idea that someone else can use their own PC and their own paid sub is actually extremely upsetting to OP and everyone else here. No one can take the exp of learning guitar away from you too.

Mods were not big until well into Shadowbringers which launched in 2019 and didn't truly become popular until a certain plugin functionality to make modding extremely simple was created. They were extremely niche and kept quiet before that.

What a strange thing to say that people who enjoy MMOs should find a new hobby if they don't like people cheating in the game. It's a fairly standard stance across the genre. People don't like cheaters. Most games don't have tools so readily available and take so little action towards egregious use of them. There is a big difference between someone paying a sub and playing the game as intended (or with a little cosmetic and qol modding) vs paying a sub and then modding it however they like to be able to cheat at the game.

[Rosenoire]

I think you are right. Mods, plug-ins, and hacks took over the game a while ago. If you don't use them, many people think of you as the boring, ugly vanilla player. This is also why visual mods are a problem nowadays. They have become the new standard, and everyone who doesn't use them is often looked down upon.

Citation needed.

I've been playing for more than 12 years. I don't use mods because I honestly can't be bothered to figure out how they work--and I say that as someone who very much would like to be able to have the long braids that I headcanon my character has and I don't think we'll ever get in game. I have never once felt like I was "looked down upon" for not modding. No one has ever said to my face that I was boring, ugly, or vanilla.

And if they did? That's what the blacklist is for. Why in the Fury's name should I care about some random jerk who wants to insult my character? I have better things to do than worry about strangers thinking my character is boring.

[VanillaWafer]

I think that there would have to be a huge overhaul of the game in order to satiate these issues. But I also think like you're not gonna like the result of that overhaul. "A Finger Curls On The Monkey's Paw"-kind of thing.

For example: A lot of games today kind of solve most of this by just doing away with player-to-player trading as a whole, and solely doing any kind of "trading" by way of a very heavily restrictive player market where the devs control how high or low you can sell an item for.

Given how inflated the gil system is because of FC airships/submarines, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a nerf of that come Evercold.

I don't know if people in both camps would like that for FF14.

As for mods, it's very true that PC players have always had that advantage over console players. And in time, there were some mods that got implemented into the game for everyone to have. I think they should keep doing this, because quite frankly we could use more QoL changes to make some things more autonomous such as crafting and gathering. Especially since recipes tend to demand more materials by both variety and quantity at higher levels.

I will 100% agree that using mods in Savage and Ultimate shouldn't be allowed, as that's usually where players feel the most prestige in and I think they're valid to feel that it's being cheapened by cheaters.

As much as I like to collect Achievements, there's not a lot of rewards attached to them. Which makes getting them done have even less meaning. It's not like other games where they add different stats to your character/job for completing them. Would be nice, but that would incentivize more botting in general, I guess.

At the end of the day, it really does fall onto the dev team to make these changes, but I don't know how one would try to balance the market with botting. They're gonna be there whether we like it or not.

[Caesitas]

As much as I like to collect Achievements, there's not a lot of rewards attached to them. Which makes getting them done have even less meaning. It's not like other games where they add different stats to your character/job for completing them. Would be nice, but that would incentivize more botting in general, I guess.

A cold chill runs down the spine at the thought of grinding 2000 treasure pots for +5 vitality



Though that being said I do kind of like that system in DC universe online as it always got me out to do something different...

[Carighan]

At the end of the day, it really does fall onto the dev team to make these changes, but I don't know how one would try to balance the market with botting. They're gonna be there whether we like it or not.

Exactly my perspective. WoW has an anti-cheat. Yet cheating and botting happens in WoW just as well, and we have no indicator that it is less (or more) common there, despite having anti-cheat measures.

FFXIV has some resistiveness to automation baked into its design, like I said before (a point conveniently never commented on by people who decry modding in all forms but pretend to just care about botting and cheating, mind you). Its encounter design in particular is resistive to boss mods, while its crafting design is inherently mitigating the impact of craft-botting. It's gathering is as susceptible to bot-trains as any other MMO's gathering is except fishing, so maybe there's some ideas for Botanist and Miner in that, I dunno. Beyond that no MMO has solved botting issues with static gathering, and in particular not via anti-cheat or memory-protection measures.

What works better is server-side behavior metrics and flagging, but this is also a per-problem solution, it cannot be applied universally. Examples:
* Bot-trains show movement behavior that players cannot match. Easy to auto-flag.
* Crafting via solver-sites and copying macros looks like fully botted crafting with marginal delays. Nearly impossible to auto-flag.
* Someone using a tool to remove their latency delay and animation lock sends way too many ability executions way too quick to the server. Not easy to auto-flag, but if consistent over some hours of combat, flaggable.
* Someone using a tool to remove just their latency delay doesn't actually send more abilities than someone with just less latency to begin with, and in fact still has slightly less output. Impossible to auto-flag, as that'd automatically also flag all players that are just closer to the server location. (edit) Before someone asks, some competitive games do reverse-ping checks regularly to ensure your perceived to-server ping-behavior matches your server-to-client ping at least somewhat. This is doable, but also works only for games with optimistic netcode behavior which would just mean SQEX enabling this mod for every single player forcibly, basically.

And so on, and so forth.

To loop back around to the original sin of people like the OP: You assume your solution matches your perceived problem. It does not. You avoid engaging with this core mismatch (beyond the problem that you did not notice it yourself), and hence it is very difficult to take your feedback serious, especially at face value.

[ParadinightYT]

I'm coming back to the game on a fresh account after a break of several years has been a genuinely disheartening wake-up call for me. Returning to Eorzea with a clean slate made me realize how much worse the overall atmosphere and ecosystem have become compared to how things used to be.

The social landscape has shifted dramatically. On platforms like X, it feels nearly impossible to browse community tags without being bombarded by hyper-sexualized, heavily modded character overhauls. Ingame, the constant shout advertisements for "love hotels" openly promoting ERP are inescapable in major cities.
I recently introduced my wife to the game, hoping to share a great world with her, but seeing all of this made both of us deeply uncomfortable. It gave her a terrible first impression of the player base and honestly, I can’t blame her for that.

The widespread normalization of third-party tools also completely ruins the casual and mid-core experience in ways people rarely talk about like the constant anxiety of surveillance.
Even in normal duties, there is a lingering paranoia of being silently judged or tracked by players running parsing overlays and analytical plugins. It turns routine runs into stressful performances where you constantly feel watched.

Also the devaluation of crafting and gathering. Every time I spend hours leveling gathering nodes or planning crafts legitimately, that effort feels entirely hollow. It’s hard to stay motivated knowing that market boards and resource loops are dominated by players running automated bots or hyper-optimized plugin suites that do everything flawlessly while they aren't even at their desks.

When achievement, economy, and honest effort are completely eclipsed by automation and unregulated client tools, the sense of personal progression simply vanishes. It’s discouraging to see how much the game has drifted from being a genuine MMO where player integrity actually meant something.

[VanillaWafer]

snipp'd.

I think you're attributing a much stronger position to my post than I actually made.

I wasn't arguing that restrictive markets, a submarine nerf, or any other single change would "solve botting." I was using those as examples of potentially drastic systemic interventions, specifically to illustrate my Monkey's Paw point: if the devs seriously address some of these problems, the resulting changes may themselves be things players end up disliking.

I also agree that different forms of automation present different detection problems. That's actually consistent with my broader point that there isn't a simple fix.

So I don't think the issue is that I'm assuming my solution matches the problem. I wasn't presenting a universal solution in the first place. I was pointing out that solving these problems meaningfully would likely involve trade-offs.

[BigCheez]

- Removed for post length -

Botting happens in WoW (moreso Classic than Retail), but only on gold farming RMT accounts that do get banned. It's just profitable enough that they can replace the bots with fresh accounts after they get banned.

You will not see players botting in WoW ever, because they don't want to risk their accounts, which is the major difference when compared with FFXIV.

When your players would rather AFK and let the game play itself than actively engage with your content, there is clearly a problem. When your players will openly cheat like this without any fear of repercussions, there is another problem.

[Carighan]

So I don't think the issue is that I'm assuming my solution matches the problem. I wasn't presenting a universal solution in the first place. I was pointing out that solving these problems meaningfully would likely involve trade-offs.

No I didn't mean you had that position, either. Rather your line made a similar rebuttal, that cheating/botting would still be around even with such changes, and that's a crucial element to always keep in mind. The solution has to match the problem.

Botting happens in WoW (moreso Classic than Retail), but only on gold farming RMT accounts that do get banned. It's just profitable enough that they can replace the bots with fresh accounts after they get banned.

You will not see players botting in WoW ever, because they don't want to risk their accounts, which is the major difference when compared with FFXIV.

When your players would rather AFK and let the game play itself than actively engage with your content, there is clearly a problem. When your players will openly cheat like this without any fear of repercussions, there is another problem.

You're mixing things here. Your first point is the exact same in FFXIV, they even update us whenever they banned a wave of RMT bots again.

The second line is first of all [citation needed], in particular because a simple google search readily finds an endless litany of battle.net posts complaining about being banned for automation, in particular around gathering tasks such as fishing. Seems to happen, at least to me? /shrug
Secondary [citation needed] about the claim that this differs from FFXIV, which would imply you don't get banned for botting here. Well... do you not?

And the third line gets weird, because automation is baked into the very game. Take crafting automation, the game already allows executing 15 actions in sequence with a single button, with many crafting recipes need <15 actions (and the rest <30). We also can already copy these macros from external websites, there is no player-discovery needed, you just create a bunch of macros based on the stats of the items you want to craft, and press them. Effectively, crafting 20 items, full automation collapses 20-40 actions into 1, despite the character performing 300-600 actions total. (that is, 260-580 actions are automated officially, cheaters automate up to 39 more).
Yes, that's definitely full automation, and definitely bannable. But you gotta admit that the relative impact here is small compared to the damage it can do in other games, no? This is also what I meant above when I said FFXIV is designed to be partially mitigate to such cheating efforts, it's design just reduces the comparable benefit this could bring you in other MMORPGs to make cheating less a problem for the non-cheating players (this does not excuse cheating, of course).

[VanillaWafer]

No I didn't mean you had that position, either. Rather your line made a similar rebuttal, that cheating/botting would still be around even with such changes, and that's a crucial element to always keep in mind. The solution has to match the problem.

Ah, that makes more sense. Same page, then. My point was basically that there's probably no universal solution to botting, and any changes would have to target the specific problem without creating new ones. That's where the Monkey's Paw concern comes in.