Possibility to open FFXIV up to a moddable UI?

[Ava]

I speak from several years of personal experience with- and without the use of mods, all types of mods, and even some personal experience with LUA coding. I see why people are concerned but I strongly feel it's being way overexagerrated, and I hope that when it comes to the implementation of UI mods, SE considers the possibility of overexagerration. I feel that FFXIV should be made as an evolution of the genre, and that they should implement what they want and with appropriate moderation, the reception should be mostly positive.

FFXI was not built with mods, and it in turn led to people using things such as windower scripts and ApRadar, these things were terrible and I am strongly strongly against such things. By allowing the use of UI mods, they gain the ability to moderate them and choose what people do with them. When you don't give people an in house option, they will use third party options that will be even worse, and SE wont be able to moderate these things.

[Loony_BoB]

Thanks again for your replies.

[Evangela]

We checked in with the dev. team about their plans for custom user interfaces and we received confirmation from Yoshida that there are plans in place for supporting UI mods in the future.

Bottom line!

who don't want it, then just don't use it when they implement it

[Nabiri]

Please keep in mind I know very little of mods, so forgive me if I'm lacking in knowledge and some of my post reflects that.

I imagine the main difference between a leader pushing out commands and a mod telling you what to do is that one involves teamwork and good leadership, making it a social experience, while the other option is you being told to click buttons by a machine and your team not really achieving so much. I for one would feel pretty unsatisfied if I just clicked buttons when the screen told me to. Compare that to watching for slight changes in the monster's appearance or movement. This could mean it's about to do something, and perhaps a mod could tell me that, but I would much rather learn from experience - learn about the movements/changes myself, gain true 'experience' and knowledge of the enemy, thus allowing me to catch on to it's habits and thus allow better chances to defeat it via knowing when to and when not to attack.

Likewise, a mod is, I imagine, rarely if ever wrong. It's too reliable. Having a leader that shouts out things to you and you taking it's advice builds trust and if they get it wrong, then the leader learns from that and (hopefully!) so do you. It's a team thing, and individual skill thing, a learning thing, an experience. It's like wanting to play a game without a walkthrough instead of with it. And for some, it's about showing off their achievements without having accusations of using mods that held your little baby-hand through the ordeal.

I like the idea of skill and knowledge of you and your teammates being more important than the knowledge of your mod and your ability to read and carry out it's instructions.

However, if mods don't tell you about the subtle things that SE would rather you learn from using your eyes, then I don't have a problem. If it's stuff that SE doesn't already have visible in the game then they don't want you to have it visible in that way. Enemy stamina, time until the enemy can next cast, weaknesses that are about to be used, stuff like that should be things you figure out from experience.

Again, I'm not experienced with mods and I'm not against them if they don't take away from the learning experience. If they tell me the HP of the enemy, fine. If they log chats and capture videos, cool. If they tell me that the enemy is going to cast ____ in ___ seconds and/or when you should use _____, that's not what it should do. The game doesn't tell me that right now, so obviously I'm not meant to know that.

I totally feel the same about this. Experience... making mistakes and learning from them. Becoming better. I prefer this than being told by some program how to react. I want to see with my own eyes.. be watchful of things.. and react based on what I've learned.

In any game I've always trusted a party more who has learning experience.
One example: In FFXI before power-leveling became over used people (well, most people) learned to watch their backs for other monsters approaching. Links could mean death.. so we learned to be careful. When power-leveling started happening in every party eventually many people stopped paying attention to their surroundings.. They would go afk in bad places or sometimes even run right into a monster. Stupid things. All because they felt safer. They stopped learning.

Edit: To clarify though, I am not against UI mods. I don't know if I'd use any, but if anything it may just be to make things look nicer or make things smaller and give me more space on the screen. I wouldn't use anything that tells me what attack a monster is using though. Just personal preference. I don't want it in shining red text or something.. I'll learn to watch for it on my own. If I miss something that's my problem and I'll learn from it.

I'm glad to see some people are happy about this UI thing. Interested to see what kind of changes it will bring.

[Nexxus]

on FFXI/XIV you can totally miss something (maybe less on FFXIV as you can now see buff/debuff icon on target, but it's still not completely readable, missing a tooltip there so you can see what the mob have on his own), because t'chat log are small and everything goes fast.

There is one way to really know, is to page up the t'chat log, or make the log larger (take nearly one side of your window), an UI could be very helpfull there, and only track thoses thing you missed, with an icon or a smaller text somewhere in a corner.

i'm not very fan of voice chat, and i used to lead event linkshell (few years ago).
I prefer people using their own reflexe also, but what our reflexe are based on ? the t'chat log... everything is about the t'chat log actually, a "TPmove" you have to watch the log to know what he is going to do, and when you see the graphical move it's already late and land.
No mod will tell you what to do after received a massive attack.

[Zenairis]

I still don't understand why people are concerned over the point of "You have to have this mod or else" that was never a issue in FFXI even though there was plenty of mods in existence that made the game much easier.

I was never in any scenario forced or needed to ever use mods even when I was in one of the top endgame LS's of my server and that was never the case.

Edit: I would like to see some minor UI improvements like showing party or alliance member's tech points and the ability to toggle which of the two you can see, or some way to tell what enfeebles spells a monster currently has on them or what enhancing + enfeebles a player currently has on them. I disagreed with people using programs for this in FFXI, although I hope to possibly see these in UI mods when SE makes it available.

[Kaedan]

Bottom line!

who don't want it, then just don't use it when they implement it

This is the most naive response ever. And it gets really old listening to people spout it over and over, since it's not a valid argument.

If meters and the like are ever introduced, it is inevitable that they will eventually become "required" by group leaders to do anything in endgame. I personally don't give a rat's petuli if people want to trivialize content by using these, but the very existence of them negatively effects others who do not want to trivialize content.

[Lapulapu]

Knowing SE they will allow you to change the appearance of your UI but not allow mods that will dumb down the experience by mods that tell you when X mob does Y action. Possibly allow us to display things that are already displayed differently? so that we can truely customize the way our screen looks? I just don't see SE allowing major changes to the UI.

[Ilean]

I understand you 100%, I hate when I am forced at gunpoint to join guilds who use UI mods too.

I also hate that I am so dumb that I don't see that if UI mods became the norm for endgame activities it must mean that the game's UI is not good enough.

This is the most naive response ever. And it gets really old listening to people spout it over and over, since it's not a valid argument.

If meters and the like are ever introduced, it is inevitable that they will eventually become "required" by group leaders to do anything in endgame. I personally don't give a rat's petuli if people want to trivialize content by using these, but the very existence of them negatively effects others who do not want to trivialize content.

[Kaedan]

First you should really make the distinction between UI mods that do harmless things like skinning, and UI mods that do harmful things like telling you what button to push and when (read: trivializing content).