I did my best to research for this video and show off what I found without actually showing what I found. I was not willing to actually install any of these mods and test them out for myself because I like the game too much to tempt a ban. I’m really nervous people are going to be upset by this video but that is not the point of it, the point is to show what is going on behind the scenes and start a conversation.
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Where's the line?
Well, that is very much up for personal interpretation, buy I would say you've crossed the line when you use a mod or tool that automates, subverts, or circumvents any game mechanic. So botting to farm hunts or fates is cheating. Using DPS meters is cheating. Using a mod to skip the Praetorium cutscenes is cheating. Using skins that look like sought after glams is cheating.
So just about everything, except maybe shaders and chat bubbles, is cheating in some way. And even if a mod or tool isn't used for cheating it is still a bad idea to use it, as was amply demonstrated by the recent GShade fiasco. If that idiot had decided to brick every computer that had GShade installed instead of just rebooting them, then those people would have had only themselves to blame.
There's no answer to that. We can only go by what we've been given: no mods/add-ons allowed. Where they are sneaked into the system, well, who's there to know? How many people are genuine with their success and how many cheaters do we have? Can SE actually really crack down on this, without violating numerous laws from numerous countries? At this rate, we have to ask, whats you achievement – and what runs in the background that we dont see?
I dont know if that kind of suspicion is healthy for any game…
The whole debate is a whole grey area with how much the dev team and the players engaged with it are just walking on eggshells, both not willing to go and lose something very valuable to them(for players, their account or their entire PC because a tool needs kernel access for some reason, and for the devs a hefty portion of players that weren't even ceating with their third-party things, that's a big loss in terms of potential money, especially with the appeal in glamour the game has which is why those players even have mods to begin with). You really don't want to engage with modding or plugins unless you can take responsibility for it, even if it's not for cheating. Besides, sometimes the devs put a feature in the game that was requested by the players and was a plugin before it(most recent was the partylist buff/debuff timer addition 2 months ago when 6.3 released, lots of people were banned for having the plugin version of it because it was essentially cheating back then), though it can take years for those to be added.
And honestly? I really wish SE allowed mods and plugins, so that they can take direct action to the things that are really are actual cheating when compared to their philosophy, but it's understandable they're not, given the things people do with them(the 18+ stuff isn't good for the brand and/or some of the players for example, so… down they would go.).
Basically, it just sucks all around for everyone.
We need something akin to valorant anti-cheat where our every single breath, every single file manipulation on our machine is being directly reported to Yoshi. In case if someone is being flagged for any suspicious activity – two "Lalafell Lifter" chairs with attached "GE90" high-bypass turbofan aircraft engines, loaded with four "ASM-1" missiles are being immediately deployed to perpetrator's location, annihilating them in turn. It is about time we rid this game from modding, degenerate scum.
I was not expecting a reference to "the Wiggle that killed Tarkov".