Integrity matters

[justausername]

Your attitude is a big part of the problem. Believe it or not, some of us actually want accomplishments and participation in the game to matter. It's nice for you that rampant cheating doesn't impact your game experience, but what about the game experience of other people who aren't cheating or automating content? Why should others be forced to accept cheating and automation as a regular, normal thing? How is this even a controversial position to have?

If someone else using crutches diminishes your enjoyment of the game, thats honestly a you problem. Are people who use these automation plugins in the right? No of course not. But if you are not using them then how does that diminish your achievements? Do they get them faster maybe? Sure. But so does someone who gets up at 4am when servers go live and no life's all day vs someone who has to wait until they get off work and can only play for an hour. Are those peoples achievements diminished? Or if you get an achievement 3 years later because you only started the game 6 months ago?
Your achievements belong to you. You should be proud you did them without assistance. Regardless of what others are doing. Whether thats cheating, or simply by having more time then you to play.

An anti cheat in this game would be a death sentence. But not for the reasons you think.

[Shialan]

Classic "mods destroy the game" rant.


Also, 95 % don't care about the titles.

[Valence]

Modbeast culture
There have been many scandals with these types of player, but I don’t think a lot of people realise how deep it goes. It’s far more than just billboards in Texas or X-rated Bluesky and Twitter accounts. There is a scandal currently unfolding whereby the developer and several users of popular “modbeast” tools and assets are under criminal investigation for producing and distributing CSAM from children they met in game and then groomed.

Is this really the sort of culture and conduct we want to encourage and condone? These individuals often hide behind a sexual identity to shield themselves from criticism and have their friends, orbiters and supporters mass report, stalk and harass anybody they disagree with or do not like. If you are ever on the receiving end of that, I feel sorry for you, because the moderation in this game is pathetic.

I want to point that I do agree roughly with the spirit of your points, but this one seems like a stretch to me.

The CSAM offenders and others certainly didn't wait for mods to become a thing in the game.
Players that have played for long enough may still remember older scandals like the Old Bear / Mooglepost one during Stormblood for example.

It's unfortunately a dark reality of our world and online games. Pretending that mods are the source of the problem is misleading.

If your point is that they amplify the problem, then I'd like to see numbers. I can believe it, but I honestly have no idea, and pulling this out of our hat with a big fat "my source is that I made it the fuck up" serves nobody.

GMs are unable or unwilling to act on cheating reports (this is instead, apparently handled by a purported “Special Task Force” who, as far as I am aware, have never actually achieved anything)

I can say for a fact that unlike GMs that are mostly useless when dealing with cases of hacking and cheating, notably in pvp, the STF actually does act upon those, especially with video evidence.
Many hackers and cheaters in pvp have been banned in multiple seasons recently for example — what people are discontent with is the glacial pace SE seems to take action upon those, letting them ruin games for weeks or months.

I do agree that the moderation policies are bad, especially when they don't even seem to enforce their actual TOS properly.

[JohnLakeside]

Modbeast culture

There is a scandal currently unfolding whereby the developer and several users of popular “modbeast” tools and assets are under criminal investigation for producing and distributing CSAM from children they met in game and then groomed.

If those allegations are true, this honestly doesn’t surprise me that much. FF14's e-dating and hypersexualized social culture is weirdly tolerated and insanely defended. Just look at how many venues are openly advertising “21+,” “NSFW RP,” ERP, courtesans, etc etc. Like, bruh, why the heck are there so many bathhouses LOL. And anytime someone says maybe this scene has gotten a little too weird or too normalized, people immediately jump to calling you some sort of puritan incel. That kind of attitude makes it really easy for actual creeps to hide behind the same “mind your own business” defense.

All I’m saying is a community that is this protective of sexualized behavior, and this hostile to anyone questioning it, is going to have blind spots around boundaries and predatory conduct.

[0blivion]

Automation isn't even close to being the biggest FFXIV problem. Poeple don't actually do it that much. Chill. Also, the PvP thing is a skill issue - people aren't botting much in there. so if you lose, that is on you.

[Caesitas]

I can't believe we have a thread on integrity posted by someone name cosplaying beloved lore forum poster Anonymoose the audacity!

[TeresaFortell]

Modbeast culture

There have been many scandals with these types of player, but I don’t think a lot of people realise how deep it goes. It’s far more than just billboards in Texas or X-rated Bluesky and Twitter accounts. There is a scandal currently unfolding whereby the developer and several users of popular “modbeast” tools and assets are under criminal investigation for producing and distributing CSAM from children they met in game and then groomed.

Is this really the sort of culture and conduct we want to encourage and condone? These individuals often hide behind a sexual identity to shield themselves from criticism and have their friends, orbiters and supporters mass report, stalk and harass anybody they disagree with or do not like. If you are ever on the receiving end of that, I feel sorry for you, because the moderation in this game is pathetic.

These cultures and conduct stem from and propagate across dozens of social media platforms, Discord included, rather than being heavily localised in the game itself. In these instances, moderators of those platforms are responsible for policing the disseminated materials, rather than here in-game.

[Carighan]

What started years ago as innocent user interface tweaks has metastasized like a cancer into what we all refer to as “modbeasting”, players who have overhauled their character models, animations and environments into hyper-sexualised or distorted forms using client injectors.

That is, genuinely, the very first time I have seen someone say that term, or describe it that way. I understand it exists, sure. and you can sometimes see it in screenshots on reddit or so.

But also be aware that a simple texture or model swap is virtually unpreventable. As it only changes how things appear to that particular user, it has no interaction that is identifyable. It's like sticking a picture over a particular piece of the screen. In fact, nowadays you can use tools that in-realtime identify and replace parts of the rendered image, so you could do this at the rendering layer instead of modifying the files in the first place. And for a very very benign way of using this, ages ago someone made a change that replaced spiders in WoW with pandas for those with arachnophobia, so we can't even say that the intend being malicious is an identifyable pattern to this, it seems to be used for altruistic purposes, too.

You mention cheat detection and enforcement, but you seemingly do not realize such measures would not interact what you decry here. Right? What specific measure do you want to see to identify and deal with this?

These cultures and conduct stem from and propagate across dozens of social media platforms, Discord included, rather than being heavily localised in the game itself. In these instances, moderators of those platforms are responsible for policing the disseminated materials, rather than here in-game.

Plus this is a legal matter. It cannot and importantly should not be dealt with by something like an automated AI-flagging system, it needs to be handled by the authorities.

[Alice_Rivers]

Further to a couple of posts earlier, rotation botting is a content design problem. If content had any conceptual variety, were interesting at the low end and perfectionist in actual skill at the high end rather than just moving from one predetermined safe spot to another, then bots would be harder to make work and less appealing anyway because actually playing the game would be more fun. Also if jobs had actual decision making to go with content using that decision making, people would prefer to play the game rather than making rotation bots. So far I've seen nothing from Dawntrail's "improved fight design" or Evercold's job changes to suggest the devs have any interest in fixing the fundamental problems with the game's design and for so long as they insist on making the content not engaging, people will bot it.

The same goes for crafting, from what I hear crafting is mindless and boring. It should have depth, it should be interactive but again, CBU3 seems entirely disinterested in those things.

[Carighan]

Yeah there's a lot of things that other games solve at the design level.

You cannot hard-macro your crafting rotation if it's not a static rotation in the first place. You cannot autocombo a filler combo if you don't have a (trivial) filler combo like every class in FFXIV has and in fact it's not just the filler combo here, it's the entire rotation. You cannot automate gathering beyond total botting if skill usage requirement is unpredictable (see Fishing for a gathering class that solves this).

And even if the critique then becomes "But this breaks with the simplicity of access, just pressing my static rotation is what allows me to play this game", that's a very understandable thing to worry about (I'm genuine here, I understand this worry) but WoW has shown us that for accessibility reasons, even a full 1-button-mode could be added to the game - even for non-static rotations. It would absolutely not be optimal, but we're not talking about making optimal accessible to 100% of players to begin with, so that'd be missing the point.