They need to find a way to detect XIV Alexander and ban people (2024)

Originally Posted by Driavna

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Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV addon cheaters undermine the game – and themselvesNoClippy vs XivAlexander - compare differences and reviews? | LibHuntXivAlexander vs NoClippy - compare differences and reviews? | LibHunt

By adding add-on support what I mean is to do what Blizzard did with WoW, or other games like Warhammer Online/Wildstar, and is creating a LUA API that people will use to make addons with it. I really fail to see how hard will be to make it also available for console unless we are talking about some limitations imposed by Sony.

So, as noted in an earlier post of mine in this very thread, I was deeply involved in WildStar modding. I am what you might call a True Believer in terms of the potential value of mods, and anyone here who was in the WildStar closed beta stands a solid chance of recognizing my screen name in that context. (Heck, even some people who weren't in the closed beta might recognize my name in that context.)

Suffice it to say that I really appreciate the power that mods put in the hands of the playerbase, and the sort of quality-of-life and accessibility improvements a good mod API empowers them to make.

And despite all of that, as I noted in that earlier post, I am absolutely convinced that Square-Enix putting a mod API into this game at this point would be an immense mistake.

As background, it's necessary to understand that I and other modders spent like a year working with Jon "Bitwise" Wiesman (the lead client developer for WildStar, and thus the person behind the add-on API) to ensure the add-on API not only had features we need, but did not have features that could be misused horribly.

At his request, in addition to writing genuinely beneficial mods, a small group of us engaged in deliberately writing the most malicious things we could think of. We sat down with intent to abuse the API in the worst ways possible... not to distribute those mods outside of our group, but to find what would need to change before release. And unfortunately, some of the things we managed to come up with required some non-trivial changes to the system.

Originally, for instance, all of WildStar's own UI was written using the add-on system -- the goal was that if Carbine could do it with the game UI, we should be able to as modders. But one person came up with a way to use (if I recall correctly) the in-game mailbox API to have a mod which quietly stole little bits of your money at a time if it saw the mod author nearby (and thus knew he was online); it would silently open a mail and put just a little bit of your money into the mail, and since he was online (and the mod knew it), a matching mod on his side would open the mail, take the money, and delete the note (so you wouldn't see it in your outgoing/sent messages). This proved the way mail was handled in-game needed to be changed, and some of the functionality needed to be moved into places that weren't accessible via add-ons.

There was a mod demonstrating how you could modify the minimap and UI to cheat at PvP, which as I recall necessitated a not-small change in how network replication of objects was handled. Heck, I used the Windows clipboard as a cheaty backdoor in a proof-of-concept about how to use the deliberately-designed-to-prevent-botting mod API to write a bot.

I am sure we created an immense number of headaches for Bitwise. But the effort was well-spent, because WildStar launched with a comprehensive modding API that had already been battle-tested and corrected a lot of potential loopholes that could have empowered cheating.

The issue is that WildStar was able to do that because Carbine had a ton of time before the game was released, so the sort of necessary changes could be made. And keep in mind, WildStar was also coming from a place where it had been designed with add-ons in mind from the start, meaning there were a lot of potential issues they'd already designed around.

Would I love it if Square-Enix had an add-on system for FFXIV, so I could make some UI changes? Absolutely; if they released an add-on system, I expect that roughly 45 minutes after I got my hands on it I'd have the loot window modified to add a 'Pass All' or 'Greed All' button, just as a start. And I have a laundry list of other quality-of-life changes I'd make going on from there; I have strong opinions about UX, and there are a number of places where this game's UX choices baffle me.

But should they release that sort of system? Honestly, at this point in the game's lifecycle, I firmly believe that would be an immense mistake. Without the option to easily rework the necessary chunks of the game, any official add-on API would either have to be extremely limited (and thus disappointing to many people) or run the risk of introducing the same sort of massive but not-immediately-obvious loopholes we spent time with Bitwise finding and plugging in WildStar.