Use of addons is cheating, and it needs to be addressed

you’re just going to have to get over it

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I don’t think anyone would confuse me and Raiimir, ever, for being the same person.

Did you see the video of world’s first raider that got permabanned for using a zoom addon in FFIV?

They didnt get permabanned lol. The players deleted their own accounts because they essentially got blacklisted by the community.

The GM literally also told them to delete their weapons rather than taking them out lol. SE didnt do anything.

On top of that addons exist outside of raiding. Dalamud plugins literally mostly exist as QoL stuff.

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My addon that automatically sells junk to vendors is cheating?! OMG guys! Am I going to be permabanned? :scream:

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Addons are a bit of a complicated topic in FF14. Largely because their refusal to offer a clear stance on the matter creates a lot of mixed messaging.

Ostensibly, addons of any sort are not allowed by FF14s ToS. Period. However, they tend to turn a blind eye to a few particular addons, namely logs and DPS parsers, which operate under a bit of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. So long as you don’t use a DPS meter to harass other players, you’re not going to have anything happen to your account if you’re using one. It muddies the waters further that when directly asked about log parsers/DPS meters, Yoshi-P has said that they’ll never establish a hard line on the matter because the overlay doesn’t interact with the game (only reads publicly available information) and isn’t doing anything you couldn’t do with a pen and paper or Excel. Banning Excel while playing FF14 would obviously be ludicrous so they just kinda stay out of that zone.

But it creates a bit of a communication issue. Clearly a line exists. You WILL be banned for addons that directly change the game such as the zoom hack, and addons like some facets of cactbot (a callout addon similar to DBM) are considered cheating and will have Square Enix revoke your rewards if they find out you used it in an encounter. (The big no-no is a function that predicts the location of AoE attacks before they happen.)

So it’s a bit of a mess honestly. In this regard I actually prefer WoW’s approach because at least the rules are clear. Any LUA addon that uses Blizzard’s API is good to go. And if they don’t like what your addon is doing, Blizzard reserves the right to change their API so that it doesn’t do that anymore. The only clear rule I know about FF14 is that nothing is allowed but some things won’t be enforced and it’s up to you to figure out what those are. If you’re looking to use addons in FF14, the only one I’m willing to say is reasonably safe is a DPS meter.

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So with regards to WoW and how much you could see addons as “cheating…”

I think it helps to distinguish the different types of functions addons can take and talk about those separately. So I’ll give my opinion on all the ones I can think of.

QoL addons: This is where addons like automatically vendoring junk or GPS addons like Tomtom lie. This is solidly not cheating to me. Largely because there’s no competition going on. It just cuts down on some of the bloat of playing the game without touching anything remotely challenging. Anything that shows you information about your group before you start is similar. Having an addon that reminds you to use your phial or shows you if someone in your group is missing Mark of the Wild isn’t what I’d call cheating. I’d also file RP addons under here for the same reason.

Addons which display information: This would be DBM and WeakAuras (with an asterisk. I know both are capable of more than just displaying information. But I’m only talking about that feature here.) There’s really two types of information we can talk about here, public information and non-public information. Public information is information that the game already makes obvious to you. The time remaining on your cooldowns or what buffs are on you is public information. Addons which take this information and display in a different way are solidly not cheating. Even addons which announce what boss mechanics are happening fall under this umbrella. Every boss has a cast bar and usually has a special animation + audio cue for every mechanic, so this information is already public. DBM saying “Static Charge happening now” isn’t telling you anything the game doesn’t tell you. I don’t even call it cheating if the addon then adds an instruction like “stack” or “spread” or “taunt swap” after calling out the mechanic as that is basic information about how to respond to the mechanic that you should already know before doing the fight. The challenge of boss fights isn’t whether you know what the mechanics do or not, it’s in how well you can execute them and DBM won’t push your buttons for you.

For non-public information, I would call something like boss ability timers non-public. The base game doesn’t tell you how long it’ll be before the next time a boss casts a certain ability. So this is a bit closer to cheating for me. However, I will acknowledge that if it is cheating, it’s very minimal cheating. Because while the timers themselves are not public information, they can be derived with public information. Each boss follows a script and that script doesn’t change. You can either look up the timers or figure them out yourself from doing an encounter over and over. Once you know the timers, it’s literally just a stopwatch once the encounter starts. Once I have a fight down, I typically don’t even look at the timers for it anymore since I already know the timing pattern of all my cooldowns. For more significant non-public information like auto-solving puzzle mechanics I can see why Blizzard views this as cheating, but it’s also a non-issue as their most recent API change handles this. I’m perfectly happy to leave it to Blizzard to adjust their API in response to which information they want to hide from addons.

Raid leader functionality: This is the area where my opinion on addons is the most sour. For reference, this would be stuff like marking specific players with a mechanic so that they instantly know where to go relative to each other without conscious input from any player. Organizing a large group and synchronizing everyone’s behavior is part of the challenge of a raid and addons allow you to automate a lot of that burden. For the sake of players who aren’t raid leaders and are simply responding to the information, I don’t think it matters either way. I don’t see a significant difference between doing something because an addon told you to vs. doing something because a raid leader told you to. But if something is intended to be a coordination challenge for the group’s leadership to find a way to overcome, I do think it may cross the line into cheating if you have an addon make these decisions. Even here though, I think there’s a distinction to be made. It all depends on if the information you need to make the decision is known before the fight or not. If you know that when a certain add pops up it’s top priority and you have an addon automatically mark that addon with a skull, not cheating. Everyone already knew the plan before the fight started. Likewise if you have an addon like MRT notes which lets you plan everyone’s cooldowns and tells them that it’s almost time for them to use it, not cheating as it was planned beforehand. Same with addons that let you draw pictures to explain a strategy or propose a dungeon route. But if you don’t know which three players will be marked with Static Charge, even if you have three ground markers for them to go to, I think an addon marking those three players with different markers is a bit different. Though maybe Blizzard also targets mechanics like this with their API change, who knows.

Automation: Pretty clearly cheating. Though there really aren’t many legal ways to do this anyway. Generally speaking if an addon allows you to do something that a macro couldn’t without a button push then I would call it cheating. (Provided it doesn’t fall under the QoL stuff from my first category.) I don’t think this is a big deal though given how difficult it is to do this sort of automation while still using the API framework.

EDIT: And I guess a quick note about logs and DPS meters. Very clearly not cheating. This information is all derived from public information (even if doing so in the middle of a fight is nowhere near practical) but this information won’t help you in any way while you’re fighting. It’s only useful for recording fight information or using it to look back on a fight and figure out what’s going wrong so you can make adjustments. All the power of these addons shows up between fights, not during them.

(TLDR) So in summary, my opinion is that addons which follow Blizzard’s rules of using the API are usually not cheating or if they are cheating in my mind, it’s extremely minor cheating. Even if I call an addon “cheating” though, that’s only my subjective opinion on the matter. Objectively, every single addon which uses Blizzard’s API is following the rules for raiding as set forth by Blizzard. They can change the API (and thus the rules) any time they wish without my permission. But currently the established rules align fairly closely with what I would consider to be ideal fair play. The few spots where what Blizzard allows and what I personally wouldn’t allow conflict are minor enough that I don’t really care enough to make a fuss about it. And truth be told I don’t think such areas create enough of an advantage for players using them that they’d suddenly become awful players if they were disabled. There are no addons which can turn a poor player into an MVP.

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You will never tear my bar, bag, text/stickynote and collection addons from me. And yes even after the dragonflight half-measure ui changes.

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Wow… If I could I would post that KEKW clip. Because this is almost funny.

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don’t you mean derby?

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Godforbid people don’t want to make a sick all over their screens from the low FoV.

…Why would that be a banniable thing? Shouldn’t that be part of the game actually? Zooming out/in with FoV changes and what not?

Uhmmm…what…?

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Since Psych was trying to state I was Raiimir. I’m hoping it was a joke…

But yeah saying I’m Darby is a personal insult.

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Well gg guys, it’s been a good run, but i’mma get permabanned for my funny death message. :laughing:

Your neither, you’re just Gutshredda. I’ve checked (PvP). :ok_hand:

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I think all my PvP has been accidental lol. I stopped being PvP serious back in… Wrath?

Then reword your original post.
If some add-ons are ok, then “add-ons are NOT cheating”.

I use one that calls up a specific mount for certain areas and contexts, and also calls up matching companions to go with. It’s fun, and it removes the need for taking up extra room on my action bar for flying, ground, water, etc…

So, don’t be a drama llama.
If you believe that certain types of add-ons give an unfair advantage, state THAT, and defend your point of view instead of making all-encompassing sweeping statements that are patently provable as being false.

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so your skepticism?

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