Hey Friends. The last few days have been really weird for the Final Fantasy XIV community, and even though I am not actively playing that game… I still care about what goes down there. It isn’t like at some point I will not return to the fold like I always do. Essentially a sequence of events has started a ball rolling and it has gathered up enough momentum that I am not entirely certain where it will stop. There are a few factors in play, not the least of which is the supposed rampant cheating in the new PVP mode of the game, and reported wide use of third-party utilities during the race for Worlds First in the new Ultimate Raid. Something that should be very clear however is that Square Enix and more specifically Yoshi P and the team have been exceptionally clear over the years that Third Party Tools are strictly prohibited.
What has led to this most recent conflagration is the fact that on May 9th, SE reiterated its stance on banning third-party utilities from the game. This was then followed up by two very public bans of players a North American player (Bagel Goose) and a Japanese player (Hiroro). There is a discussion about this taking place as a result of brigading, however to me personally it sounds like a shot across the bow. The NA/EU communities and the Japanese language communities are pretty separated and if you wanted to get the message across that they mean it “for serious” this time, a banning in each would seem like a tactical play. Whatever the case this has caused the wildest spiral of the community falling in on itself that I have seen in a while. Essentially there are two camps, those who want unfettered access to addons and those who think everyone that publicly uses them should be banned.
I have to admit one of my favorite features of Final Fantasy XIV was its strict prohibition of addons and the fact that they would legitimately ban people from using them. I felt like this added to a more friendly dungeon environment since it took away the penis measuring that came with folks posting damage meters to public chat. It also stopped folks from giving “helpful advice” that they were not carrying their weight and should “git gud”, because those sorts of actions could end up landing you in the Mordion Gaol. It personally made me way more likely to be willing to random roulettes and felt like it was providing a much less toxic dungeon environment overall than those I had experienced in World of Warcraft.
The problem was that over the years that line got a little ragged as to what was allowed and what was prohibited. All of those great Instagram shots that you see from Final Fantasy players composing outrageous screenshots… are for the most part all using third-party addons and at a very minimum Reshade/GShade. The great bards that you hear every night in Limsa Lominsa… are pretty much all using an addon that allows them to feed a musical score and translate them to keypresses. If you don’t like the feel of the UI in Final Fantasy XIV and replace it with something more akin to ElvUI from World of Warcraft, then again that is a third-party addon. There are completely pure and good reasons to be running addons in Final Fantasy XIV, but there are also a number of more nefarious options like CactBot that can give the player DBM-style boss callouts. I am not sure what addon this is but I saw a video of something yesterday that was drawing out where attacks were going to go before the in-game visualization fired.
I think this has more recently reached a head with the influx of World of Warcraft players coming into the Final Fantasy XIV community. In World of Warcraft, I have not run a stock interface since 2005, and it is just accepted as part of playing that game that you are going to need to seek addons to improve its shortcomings. For example, I specifically ran an all-in-one addon replacement called BenikUI which was a fork of ElvUI… which in itself was a fork of TukUI. Addons are just the culture of that game and not running them puts you at a significant disadvantage. As more World of Warcraft players has transferred to Final Fantasy XIV, that mindset and culture have come with them. The problem here is that over the last few years mods have come from something that players did in secret and never talked about, to something being openly shown on streams now. The tentative truce between Square Enix enforcers and the players was broken… as folks started talking about fight club openly.
As Raiding in World of Warcraft has been turned into an E-Sport, the stakes of each new event have been increased as well. There has been an arms race in WoW Raiding and the armaments have been the addons that can give each team a slight advantage in specific encounters. This is so much the case that some of the large raid guilds have an LUA programmer on staff essentially to tweak and update raid call mods between attempts so that their team has an advantage. Blizzard has taken a very light touch over the years when it comes to banning mod behavior. I remember in Burning Crusade I had an addon that would allow me to bind a key so that it would automatically target whoever in the raid had the least health and cast Flash of Light. I used this to spam heal my way to being an effective Paladin raid healer, a class and role that I am very much not well equipped for. Sure, the ability to do this specific thing was removed from the API eventually, but the exceptionally clever addon developers found ways around it. Each time a function has been removed from the libraries, some clever user figures out a way to achieve the same results through a different method.
The casualty of this arms race is that World of Warcraft raid encounters shifted significantly to include more random elements that require the player to react to conditions and take the necessary action for that moment in time. Additionally, so much fire on the ground that you have to avoid to keep from dying a horrible death… I can still hear the awful klaxon of my GTFO addon. The randomness of each encounter made it so that the addons only really gave you so much information, and it required you to still execute based on the information you are getting. Running Deadly Boss Mods became a requirement, but the encounters were also designed in a way that took that assumption into account. If everyone is exploiting the mechanics of the fight, then no one is really gaining an unfair advantage.
The problem comes into play when you realize that Final Fantasy XIV encounters are not designed around the existence of addons. They are designed in a way to be equally competitive to both console players and those players on the PC, and the team has taken great care to ensure this. They also are just functionally different in the way that they play out, because if a World of Warcraft encounter is about controlling chaos… Final Fantasy XIV is about executing a dance routine with the highest possible accuracy. FFXIV bosses are tightly scripted encounters and often so much so that if you have a stopwatch running, the same abilities will be firing at the same moment in relation to some other event every single time. Succeeding in those fights is about memorizing the pattern and executing it flawlessly, and the degree of “wiggle room” decreases each time you step up in encounter difficulty. So that if you are doing Ultimates, the highest content in the game a single mistake by any one of the eight players doing the encounter can mean a wipe for the entire team.
In the escalating arms race of competitive raiding… in Final Fantasy XIV running an addon to give you exact call-outs and draw visualizations on screen is bringing a machine gun to a sword fight. The players not running addons are at a disadvantage so it starts to facilitate the need for EVERYONE to be running addons. Now we get to the situation we find ourselves in today. Square Enix and more specifically Yoshi P and crew do not want addons to be a requirement for playing the game. More importantly, they do not want an entire mode of gameplay, which are console games… to be invalidated for competitive content. I feel like they have allowed things to get into this state with their lax “just don’t talk about it” stance, and the end result is that they are going to start having to ban anyone using addons. The only way to right the ship at this point is to sweep the deck.
Folks are not reacting to this well… and shocking to no one Pyromancer who openly attacked his then World of Warcraft focused community… turns his anger on his now Final Fantasy XIV focused community. This is but one example of what is going on right now in all of the Final Fantasy XIV devoted platforms and admittedly is a more hyperbolic take… but still representative of the faction divide. My stance is the lack of addons is good for Final Fantasy XIV. We did not need them for completing Coil, and I believe the devs when they say that every single Ultimate is capable of being completed without addons as well. Final Fantasy XIV is honestly the first game of its like that I have played happily without addons, because it gave me enough control over my UI and inventory layout that I didn’t feel that I needed them.
Essentially we are in this position where I feel that if players do not abandon these addons on their own, Square Enix will step in and solve the problem for us. As a publisher, they are already using Easy Anti Cheat for a number of games, which is absolutely capable of detecting that you are running an addon that is interfacing with the current window either by scanning memory for the executable or by looking for direct x hooks. This is the heavy-handed option, but it is an option that I feel we are on the cusp of having thrust upon us. Square will protect the validity of console gamers at all costs because they make up a huge chunk of the Final Fantasy XIV player base. If you do not want the next step in this evolution to be more DRM installed on top of your favorite game, maybe learn to live without your addons or at a minimum stop showing them on streams.
I think the only way to proceed fairly is that every streamer that can be shown to be using addons publicly, should receive a temporary ban. This is the only way that the point gets driven home. More so the official statement needs to be updated with a much clearer stance because I feel like the original point might be getting lost in translation and the obsessive politeness of this particular game team. World of Warcraft is a failed state, and there is no way back at this point to a time before the addon escalation. Final Fantasy XIV is not beyond saving, but that team is going to have to make some hard choices and take some equally stern actions. They have stated that they want every piece of content completed on all platforms and without addons, and they are going to have to back that intention up with action. I’m sorry Bards and Instagram Models… but yall are going to get damaged in the crossfire.
I’m sorry, I still absolutely do not agree with a hard ban on addons. Ones that let users cheat in PvP, sure. Ban those, nuke accounts that use them. But PvE or visual focused ones shouldn’t be targeted. I feel like it’s a people thing when it comes to dogging someone over their DPS. To someone like me, having every drop of information possible helps me not to flake on an encounter, maximize my rotation, and not be a drag on my party. Final Fantasy 11 has the same rules with addons, but, if you’re not talking about them in-game, they won’t nail you on it. People have been using addons through Windower for years and as long as they aren’t screaming it from the rooftops, SE won’t bring the hammer down.
I feel like a lot of the hands off approach the devs have had up til now was because they knew so many players were running mods to play music, modify clothing textures and the like. Things that don’t affect the game for other players in a negative way and keep the players who use them invested but can’t be officially condoned for a bunch of reasons beyond just opening the flood gates on mods in general (copyright issues, ‘decency’, etc). As long as the people using them remembered the first rule of questionable behavior, ‘Just be cool’, things could ride as they were. But now we’ve had an influx of players brought in part by streamers whose whole thing is having absolutely zero chill, and it’s all fallen apart.
It sucks, because those relatively harmless add-ons are going to get caught up in the whole mess, not just because they’re add-ons but because the folks who triggered it all will try to point to them being tacitly condoned as hypocrisy and will likely do things like actively run those mods to try to get suspended to ‘draw attention’ or ‘make a point’. Or just to burn it all down because they can’t have what they want.