Recently, a footage showing world first clear of The Omega Protocol using plugins that could zoom in sparked the discussion of the use of third party tools (again). The problem was solved by SE in relatively short amount of time. The head game designer of FFXIV, Yoshida, restated that SE’s policy is against all third party tools and the GM initiated a ban, revoked the title that comes with the clear and make the player delete their cool weapon that they got from the ultimate raid.
Or did they solve the problem?
We all know that there are no changes of their policy or their statement. Nothing is changing. People still uses third party tools: ACT, xivlauncher, alexander, etc. All the difference is people do not show evidence of using it. And I’m sure that SE and Yoshida is not going to complain it.
To start with, ACT and fflogs. There are DPS checks in the game’s higher difficulty contents, which players will need to deal sufficient amount of damage before a certain timing or the boss wipes the whole party. Since this DPS check exists, ACT or damage parsers will not go away. Here, ACT and FFlogs served as a means of improvement and help with the skill rotations and know the fights better. If you checked how those non-raider fights, you will be amazed of how little they know about their jobs and how to maximize their damage. However, they only play in normal content and dealing not enough damage is not a concern. On the contrary, difficult content requires DPS, and some players brings their way of fighting in normal content with them. This is where all the parsers and sites comes in. Players could start to learn how to do rotations and improve upon themselves. Because a player not doing it right could lead to the whole party wipe and not getting the kill, therefore, it is crucial for players to know how are they doing.
Some may argue that there are training dummies could already show players if they could perform will enough, thus parsers are not needed. Training dummies are in-game content that have HP relative to the raid boss that it is suppose to represent. Players will need to “kill” the dummy before the timer goes out, therefore, could somewhat represent the players’ ability to do damages. However, I would argue that training dummies only shows how good are a player’s items are how well they could continue press buttons. That is, those training dummies barely functions. Firstly, there are party buffs in the game, where other party member will cast and buffs the players’ damage. In the current fighting meta of FFXIV, players will need to match their jobs’s ability to deal the maximum damage to the time window of the buffs. That is how players deal big damage nowadays. The effects of the buffs could not be seen with those training dummies, therefore, those dummies only show how good are player’s items. If players have good enough items and hit their buttons hard enough, it is nearly impossible for them to not kill the dummies in time. However, they still loses the fight because of enrage (wipe due to not enough damage).
Next on, appearance mods, or, RP/ERP related mods. On SE’s stand point, it is easy to understand why they said publicly that “do not use 18+ mods please”. Having a large community of erotic role play could potentially hurt the image of FF14 and might make some players to leave the game or avert new players from coming. However, if SE take actions to rule out appearance mod users, there might be more players leaving. To be more specific, there are a big portion of players that plays the game for RP/ERP. Just make a visit to crystal DC, and take a look at Quick Sand in Ul’dah. You will see how crowded the place is and amazed of how many people are doing this sort of illegal content. Those players might not be doing the right thing, but they do pay subscriptions and might even pay some cash in mog station for additional items and services. And in the world of capitalism, making revenue is everything. It would be a irrational decision to try making those players leave the game. Hence, SE made the choice to make an announcement about their stance of appearance mods and ban players if they see it. However, if they do not see it, I speculate that they are good with it.
Finally, FFXIV is a PVE game and players generally do not care about others using third parties, even cheats. For fairness reasons, games that mainly focus on PVP content normally will have some anti-cheat to prevent players from using addons. However, FFXIV is not such game. Surely there are PVP content in the game, nonetheless, it is neither the game’s strength nor the developers’s focus. Furthermore, the other competition related activity in the game is world first race for new high-end raids. But this activity is not held by the game officials and only a small handful of players are participating. Therefore, average players are not involved in competitions and someone using third party won’t really affect them in a negative way. Thus I consider that having an anti- cheat will not be a necessary for FFXIV. In addition to average players do not care about this issue, having an anti-cheat to ban all players using it will drive out many of the players, which basically is all of the people playing high-end raids (i.e. ACT users).
All in all, though Yoshida has wrote a letter for the community and state that they do not allow third parties and will ban all who violates their terms, I do not think that anything will change. No further actions will be taken by SE and players still uses ACT and mods, they just don’t show it on Twitter and billboards.
