In May 2022, shortly after the world race for FFXIV’s Dragonsong Ultimate had completed. Yoshi-P set out a statement that shook up the world of addons & third party tools users. Alongside this statement, actions have taken place to purge people displaying these tools for public use.
The Addon Apocalpyse is now upon us…
In this video, we’ll look at how Addons have caused controversy in FFXIV over the last two years, all the way up to the current May 2022 third party tools drama.
Twitter ► https://twitter.com/dynamictaru
Tank Academy Playlist ► https://t.co/iUsS9AAanB
#FFXIV #ThirdPartyTools #Addons
00:00 Introduction
00:48 Yoshi-P Speaks Out (2021)
01:11 Addons In 2022
01:55 Yoshi-P Ban Hammer
02:11 Addons Are Now Very Popular
02:49 Types Of Addons
04:53 Examples Of Addon Controversy
8:32 Addons Are Too Public
8:50 Concluding Addon Controversy
09:31 World Of Warcraft Addons
09:57 WTF IS GOING ON?!
10:05 WoW & FFXIV
10:30 Closing Thoughts
source
my feeling is that the developers likely want to keep the "don't ask, don't tell" policy going forward. they're stuck between a rock and a hard place–not wanting to alienate players who expect and benefit from the quality of life and accessibility improvements of addons, while also promising feature parity between console and PC despite being unable to deliver as quickly as independent developers.
they can't come out and say something like "it's fine to use addons as long as you don't advertise them in any way" but in practice that's always been their stance and even the recent enforcements suggest that's still the case. the most promising thing to come out of this announcement was that future HUD improvements will take cues from popular addons. the best move they could make would be to render addons more irrelevant by incorporating their QoL into the game proper.
Well one of the biggest issues SE has with 3rd party tools that sets it apart from something like wow is nearly half the playerbase plays on console and has no access to any of these tools. So wven had SE wanted to, they could never really embrace addons in the way wow does (no would i want them too, addons have hurt WoW raiding more overtime than help it inmho.)
The problem with showcasing add-ons is that you're streaming a copyrighted idea where you're showcasing false information about it. ACT outside the others, new players may think that's how the game is. The same goes for using mods and Gshade. While Gshade isn't technically against ToS it can be if you're not careful enough about staying this doesn't reflect FFXIV.
On the other hand, squeenix needs to either be one way or the other with a plan moving forward. A lot of these are just basic QoL that should be or have been in the game. Square Enix also needs to have rules set for GMs that instead of immediately banning, suspending or ripping people from raiding, do thorough research on if this harms the community or the representation of the game. If there's mass reporting, there needs to be more search for intent on both the accusations and the accusers.
Add ons that deal with things that you can already do in game, QoL add ons, I think are fine. Like being able to change jobs from the Classes window or an enhanced marker on your map for clear direction facing or price checking, etc these are all things that solely enhance QoL. Add ons that are used client side to alter or enhance how the game appears to that person also shouldn't be an issue, as those are solely to have the game appear how one person wants it to appear, same with modding character appearance or weaponskill graphics, for example. It's when the Add on enters in to the realm of playing the game for you or giving the player blatant advantage over others, like PVP hacks. They're HACKS not add ons. Those hacks are the problem. I don't care if someone wants to mod the appearance till the cows come home, and all the characters are running around nude, whatever blows your hair back. But hacks, no thanks.
i've said this before on other videos and i'll say it again here. i don't believe square will make a definitive list of "approved" addons. that would create a game of whack-a-mole that will never end. someone will always try to circumvent the rules if they made clear lines in the sand. they have to do it this way because to make an approved list they would have to maintain it regularly and that would be resources no company would want or could invest.
"The same end, again and again."
people "hunting" streamers and mass reporting them.. wow, what is next, going to twitter # gposers and start looking for the slightest sign of graphical mods?
I mean, it would be a logical step for the anti-addon crowd, but it's very clear, that the addon isnt their problem, only some players using them, to clear some special kind of content (that they probably even never play).
I dont think there is a big diference between graphical mods and UI mods tbh.
You can argue about Cactbot and the like, but even then I say, this can be a good accesibility tool (I wish I had sometimes).
Yoshi and his team should take a really good look at this and start to implement some qol into the game.. if you think about how long this debates have been going on..
Adons? Oh noooo the are coming for our booba mods >_<
Remember that discord is a 3rd party tool.
NSFW addon makers get what they fukin deserve. Its rule 32. But if some idiot decides to show it in public and it is akin to pornography in some cases, you deserve what you get. There's plenty of other games and spaces you can make that shit in rather than games that have a significant amount of kids playing them. The only people mad at this stuff getting banned are the ones who just want to be degenerate in a space they have no business being degenerate because again, there's plenty of spaces for that stuff already. They attacked asmon for exposing it…as though they were entitled to do that shit in the first place.
i think its better with 0 addons allowed
As a healer i just wish square could update the freaking party list, the names are bigger than the actual thing i need to track, HP.. it feels worse than a 1990's video game in this department.
I quit wow when addons became part of the game, SE should steer clear. It creates cancer in the player base but beyond that it makes people better raiders artificially which has loads of problems. Players clear raids more easily so it means that they then want new content faster, and they expect more difficulty. It becomes an arms race. Then developers have to make raids more difficult with obscure mechanics where people with add ons have more challenge but if you don't have add ons its too difficult. In wow, I enjoyed my time raiding but as soon as I joined a more hard-core guild I didn't like how a script was basically telling everyone what actions to take. At that point they may as well just automate the script and let it play the game for you. Everyone in the raid can just go take a 30 minute break while raiding the game can just look at everyone's gear and simulate the outcome…
One thing people dont mention when talking about the tick for collectibles is that it took them a solid 5 years to implement it, and even back in 2020 they insisted that it is impossible to implement. If that is a sign of things to come it will be years and years before they start baking anything usable into the UI.
Similar to other games, addons will change the game significantly. If the addon tells you what to do, the game will have to be adjusted to account for these addons, making it tough on those who do no use them as the difficulty really amps up. I think some are fine but i am torn on the ones that tell you what to do in raids. With DBM on WoW, i am watching Netflix while raiding since it makes it so much easier.
I could see this coming since the beginning of Endwalker, given the increased prevalence of FF Logs amongst "normal" content becoming further trivialised, the diminishing importance of tank and healer roles when DPS can run into packs without consequence, the "you pull you tank" ideology that further exacerbates the issue of diminished roles, and the way how people are brazenly using 3rd party mods more than ever to get an edge on everyone and how the culmination of everything and the overt penchant for "optimisation" is causing a rift in the community, and especially at the expense of general enjoyment.
Now it would be easy to try shirk the blame to "WoW refugees" who apparently know no better and will immediately look for mods, as that's the norm in WoW. However, XIV's mod community existed long before the Summer of last year, and a lot of the negative attitudes and exacerbation of the problem I've seen has come from long-time XIV players who've been using these mods for years.
Personally I like that mods can exist from quality of life features to all the graphical enhancements being made, but it's frustrating that there are players and mod devs who are taking things further than they should, as the last thing anyone could ever want is for a complete lockdown of anything third-party in the game, or worse, for SE to introduce something like Easy Anticheat and screw everyone over through rootkits and tanked performance.
One solution SE could opt for is that they provide a moderated mod hub with both console and PC support a-la Skyrim, but I feel that's not the way they'd want to go as their design ethos has always been that everything they release as CBU3 should be complete, polished, and presented as its own package without need for external fixes. It also might be more resources and time required than necessary, but it would make their stance very clear while democratising how players choose to enjoy the game.
But yeah, this could just be a case of SE culling a few streamers to send a message to the community, "killing one to save a thousand" if you will. I just hope people develop some common sense and not ruin a good thing for us all.
I totally get Yoshi-P's attitude towards add-ons, seeing what WoW has become, but I really only think add-ons that make dungeon and raid mechanics trivial are the only ones that should be earning bans and suspensions. Mr P, I'm a good boy, please don't ban me for using upgraded texture packs and sharpening filters so the game isn't blurry af.
I don't know why people are confuse, any addons that edit the game its self, you should not use. Discord does not edit the game, it is used for communication outside of it. I remember browsing FFXIV streams when the big WoW exodus happened, and seeing a few refugees playing FFXIV with some weird UI mods that looked like the example given in this video. I had no idea what I was looking at, at the time xD This was always going to happen though. SE were trying to be nice about it, or lazy, for w/e reason. But now the game has grown, and world first clears are getting a lot of attention, they can't ignore it. What pisses me off though, is how people cheat in PVP but SE sleep, when people "cheat" in PVE, SE wakes O_O lol
add ons are basically cheating. if you cant do it with manual clicks then you aren't playing the game.
The reality is that WoW having so many addons is also part of the reason why Blizzard is able to make content that is MUCH more difficult and much more mechanically complex/involved compared to FF. There are some complex and difficult mechanics that Blizzard puts in that would be insanely difficult, possibly near impossible without the help of addons tbh. FF content gets cleared within a day or less, the most recent tier in WoW took 3 weeks for the best players in the world to finish even WITH the help of many addons/weakaura's that are usually custom coded for those guilds for progression, which just goes to show the huge difference in difficulty between the two games. If they hope to increase the difficulty and complexity of FF content as the game progresses, theyre going to be faced with the fact that theyre going to have to allow some addons.
We will never get a list. And any UI improvements will be lackluster and too late. I will keep using them and never stream the game again.
Get rid of add on ppl on console seem to do just fine. Game won't die just cuz ppl from w.o.w don't know how to play the game it's obvious world racers suck without it.
i have a very clear line about what i PERSONALY consider "ok"
Any addon that does NOT display information, not already available to the player, at this specific moment without extry interaction with the game, is fine
anything that displays information the player is NOT meant to have acces to at this specific point in time without further interaction is not fine
bigger cooldown? fine, cooldown is already there, making it bigger is fair play
buff durations of partymembers on the Partylist? not fine, the buff duration isnt visible on your party member unless you select them, that is the design, and how the game is designed with,
having the duration of Debuffs that resolve bossmechanics on 5 people with different timers visible at all times would allow someone to for example tell a person EXACTLY when to move, instead of abstract stuff like "debuff 1 move"they stated they dont want such mechanics to be resolved by a single person calling it out(there are mechanics where a single person can call it out, but also those wher eit ISNT doable)
They've made it clear in the past that they don't want anything that gives people an unfair advantage, or opens them to legal problems due to their rating classification (lewd mods open SE to a host of legal challenges).
UI mods that either change aesthetics or re-arrange information to be easier to read are harmless and from the sounds of it SE recognizes the option of choices for the player HUD is a goal worth looking at. There are also mods for housing that make all the floating and clipping items easier; players only looked at making mods for this after doing it manually at a snails pace for years.
UI mods that give you an advantage such as seeing meteor aoe radius before it drops; are entirely unfair, and in that regard I agree with SE's stance.
Things get a bit hazier when it comes to things like ACT text to speech calling out mechanics. Boss timers are a valuable tool (what TTS is based off of) and honestly before automating a timeline, people were tracking timings manually as they memorize the fight. "X happens at xmins xsec" isn't something that's controllable, some peoples brains just function that way. I don't think it's been as prevalent an issue before because typically speaking the programs that automate the timeline progression of a fight, usually take quite a while to release things to the point where it's been cleared plenty of times before the fights timeline is fully compiled. They got faster at it. So even if SE disable any option for combat tracking in the game from outside sources (unlikely as they've recognized logs as a valuable tool, and are largely indifferent to them provided you don't use them for negative purposes). Is it an unfair advantage? I can see arguments for yes and no. It drastically increases the learning speed of a fight, while at the same time it doesn't provide anything you can't learn to read in a fight.
I would say, finally they did it after 10 years.
I am going to come at this topic from the viewpoint of a developer.
1. I don't want to govern how people enjoy and engage with the game as long they continue to not harm other players experience or gameplay.
2. Players that are directly manipulating the games executable in anyway to give any player(s) a clear advantage or adjust the results of winning in their favor over other players, I considering this a big violation.
3. Players using modifications to enhance their experience for their personal enjoyment that does not directly affect other players experience should be considered [Safe for SE to turn a blind eye].
4. I'd never list any 3rd party software explicitly as "SAFE" because they must be always licensed and certified by the developer. A 3rd party (especially open source) could later down the road during the tools development suddenly add a violating feature or malware. I'd be a nightmare to check each and every version for any tools lifetime without certification that this wont ever happen to ensure customer safety. Otherwise this makes SE liable for damages caused by an unsafe software listed as SAFE. This costs a TON of overhead, maintenance, and cost to put this process on a support cycle. (eg.. GShade may be fine now, but another developer may suddenly take over the project and add a DPS meter to it.)
5. 3rd Party tools must be more clearly defined within the TOS rather than vague description and open ended for interpretation. This specifically should be designed to benefit software security rather than customer understanding. As it stands now for example, right now virtually anything is a 3rd party to XIV even the browser you have open is considered 3rd party and you would be in violation of TOS if you are using a browser ordering on doordash while playing XIV because the definition is too blanketed to cover all scenario. While this may be a good corporate policy for SE for maximum protection which gives them freedom to do whatever they please, its a poor user policy for customers and it has the potential to foster distrust of the gaming experience.
6. Bans and Suspensions should have a better case management system. Right now Bans/Suspensions are too harsh especially for first time offenders and there should be a better customer appeals support channel to overturn errors (since this is a qualitative measure, there is a higher rate of error that needs to be taken account for).
7. YoshiP must make the UX/UI team more widely available to take in direct feedback/suggestions through official channels (would help to implement and idea/demand ticketing system), opening a line of communication for this specific team to get our thoughts would help community sentiments greatly knowing that all our suggestions and not just being funneled simply through a public forum which is only monitored by moderators acting as middle men to get information across, this would be the worst way to open up comms.
8. Those who use DPS meters, and certain UI addons that display more personal combat data that give the player a larger advantage over competitive content should be warned/soft suspension, and should be encouraged to submit a idea/feedback ticket to the UX/UI team to implement /community vote on what they would like to see on the game natively that they are getting from a 3rd party tool.
9. IMO Ideally The best possible scenario would be, for those using GShade, chat text bubbles, XIVLauncher, 4k textures/ textool, discord (XIV Bots) and so forth should be more driven to keep the modding community more "cheater free" and the XIV community officials should be involved in the modding community to encourage safe mods that don't ruin the game for others that they need to alert the dev team to step in. A community that is safely governing themselves within the game and the games surrounding communities with the support of officials, is the best way for the DEV team to focus on what is important, rather than having to take away their attention from development because they are suddenly forced to play mommy and daddy because of a few bad people decides to ruin it for everyone.
The stance that YoshiP is taking right now is what I would also have taken also within the first few years of being a live service, BUT I would have not let this issue fester for as long as it has, every good software provider does regular audits of their TOS to bring things up to current.. I believe this issue could be better resolved with a much more detailed and comprehensive description within the TOS while remaining stern about "All 3rd party software is not allowed" and also providing a roadmap to address pain points.
yeah don't be stupid and show off addons it's what you get for being stupid
Not really. Just don't stream easy.
I agree with all your points except the last bit where you think SE should pull out a list of safe addons and them being ambiguous on what "3rd party tools" are.
YoshiP is correct when he said that by definition, anything that helps you do something for a particular program is a 3rd party tool i.e. A calculator, discord, an excel sheet etc….
But… he made it very clear.
Don't show, don't tell.
It is that simple.
The current outrage are just people who do not understand these basic concepts or they just want a show.
I'm respecting the Devs decision on this. I feel this is more of setting up a deterrent in the long run saying: "We're very serious about cheating in our game" which was needed long ago, but glad they're finally Doing and not just Saying stop. We may even see more features that were previously Plugins or Third Party Tools being added into the game like more customizable HUD, maybe a ingame Parse/DPS meter(altho heavily restricted to high end content only). All in all this is the best option outta three choices via Anti-Cheat(which we don't want at all), Ban Hammers to create a Deterrent(Which is currently going on), or Continue to Allow People to Cheat/Give Off the Image That You MUST HAVE These Addons/etc. to Clear any High End Content. I support this current route we're on 100%, even if the Devs gotta play "The Villian" as Graha even said: "Become what you must."
As a console player I simply dread the idea of the game going the wow route for add-ons. I'm not against pc players using them, hell, I'm in favor of things like chat bubbles, ui enhancements, etc. But I do not want others like cactbot and act to become necessary
Also Ignorance (willful or not) does not exclude you from following the rules (TOS/EULA) or not doing your due diligence by READING (gasp what gamers don't do these days) the TOS/ELUA fully because you have to scroll down to the bottom in order for and click ok in order for you to continue onto the next part when you first start playing. There is no excuse that you "didn't know" for breaking TOS/EULA.
Discord is not a 3rd party program it is a voice chat program