Ffxiv Cheat Plugins

[Ariano Waiker]

Heyy'all, just learned about a site called tomestone.gg which collates all your info from lodestone + fflogs and presents to players what your relative progression level in ffxiv is. (The apparent goal of this is to help raiders organize PFs, but its a bit creepy to me!)

Figured I'd post about it if any one else hasn't heard of it, because it's not opt-in unfortunately, and is scraping everybody by default. As a PSA you can opt out by adding this to your lodestone character profile if its something you care about:

As happens every few months in FFXIV, there has been a new controversy around plugins and addons in the game. The most recent one comes from a small chunk of players using an addon to cheat at the new Fall Guys game mode, but it got me thinking about addon usage in general and how many people are likely to be using addons.

Before I start diving into addons, I just want to say that while I do not use them myself I also don't really care if people use addons if everyone they are playing with are cool with it (which obviously for fall guys they aren't). I mostly dived into these numbers out of just pure curiosity.

Most addons we don't really have good numbers for. Some of them publish download statistics, but it becomes hard to distinguish downloads vs updates. Many of them (ACT ones in particular) we have no info about at all.

There is one very notable exception to that rule though where we do have a way to track it and that is with the class of addons called Auto Markers, a.k.a Alphinaud's Mom, Allagan Mellon, Anime Music, Acoustic Music, Aetherial Manipulation, Applebee's Menu, Anime Men, or simply "the thing" or "it" (e.g. "need it", "have it", etc).

Auto Markers are a class of addons that automatically mark players in a fight with overhead markers in response to mechanics happening. Usually this is done to resolve some sort of priority based move. The classical example being Titan Gaols in UwU where an automarker plugin will quickly mark people with the Gaols as "1" "2" and "3" letting you know where you have to stand to resolve the mechanic.

These plugins are unusually prevalent in Ultimate's to the point of becoming somewhat standard PF strategies for the content, the why of which we will delve in later, but what is also unusual about them is that people will actually mention having them in the party finder using the above euphemisms for them.

What that means is, unlike pretty much every other addon, we can scrape the party finder descriptions and get an estimate of how many people are at least advertising that they are in fact using these addons.

The data collected for this analysis was scrapped from a site that publishes party finders in the game to a public listing. It achieves this by having players install a plugin that scrapes the listings from in game on a regular basis, updating the sites database regularly.

My script simply scraped this site every hour for a little less than a week and collected all the party finders listed. In total I collected information on about 60,000 party finder parties across all types and regions.

There may be some data inaccuracies in the there (such as V&C PFs not being represented at all), but overall for what we are looking at the data seemed to converge very quickly to some reasonable numbers, so I think it's more or less accurate enough.

Finally, in order to detect if a Party Finder was advertising the usage of auto markers or not I simply used a regex looking for the most common euphemisms for it. There may be some minor inaccuracies in this regex (e.g. someone could mean something else when they say "have it"), but I also suspect this under counts the real % of usage as many PFs are for progression parties not yet at the point where they would need the AM and therefore would not mention it.

For The Epic Of Alexander (TEA) and Unending Coils of Bahamut (UCoB), we saw almost no Party Finders mention the use of Auto Markers. This matches what we expect, because as far as I am aware there is no standard/common use auto marker plugins for those instances.

So some people may be a bit shocked by how high of a percentage those above numbers are, especially if you are not tuned into the high level raiding world. So the obvious question to ask is: Why are there so many people using Auto Markers?

Well first off, before we delve into that, I do want to make clear something: These Auto Markers do not in any way trivialize these Ultimates. These fights are still incredibly difficult even with one of these tools (especially in party finder). At most these tools maybe make one out of dozens of mechanics slightly easier.

I have not done TOP or DSR, so I can only speak to UwU, but Titan Gaols in that fight is kind of a garbage mechanic. In theory, the mechanic is interesting, but in practice it has far too much variance and its far too tight and susceptible to the basic jank that covers all of FFXIV (e.g. snapshotting and lag).

I have done Gaols at this point probably over a hundred times without any tools, and I do not hold a grudge to anyone who decided to use an Auto Marker for that mecahnic. Especially in the waking nightmare that is Party Finder.

The reality is, I think numbers these high are much more damning about the content itself rather than the people playing the content. We don't see this much usage of the other "extreme" addons, so I don't think you can just hand wave it as people cheating.

So I want to end on the closing thought that while this isn't true for all plugins, auto markers are an example of a plugin that exists in part because of how the FFXIV development team handles the maintenance of the game.

I can't speak to the mechanics of TOP or DSR, but I can say pretty confidently that Gaols in UwU could probably be adjusted very slightly and eliminate (or at least reduce) the perceived need for Auto Markers, without removing the spirit of the mechanic.

The only recent example I can even think of them adjusting content was when they shifted one fight in the new Savage Tier to have 1% less HP, and they had to write an apology letter when they did that. Something that would, in any other game, be a fairly standard patch note.

For Example, when the first tier of Pandemonium was released, one fight (Phoenix) received heavy criticism for being inaccessible to color blind players (its red on red on red on red), but there is just no expectation that SE will ever change or fix that fight (at least not within a time frame in which its relevant).

This is what pushes many people to both make and use mods. In the Phoenix example above, that problem was "solved" by mod makers creating custom presets for things like GShade to adjust the colors to be more distinguishable (as well as more advanced plugins to literally replace the VFX with).

Auto Markers are just an extension of that, there is a perceived need/frustration in these fights that the player base clearly hits against, but there is an understanding and expectation that it will never be addressed by the development team, thus players take it into their own hands and make mods for it.

When it comes to PvP and the raiding community, the area is much more gray. This is due to the fact that it involves others and also affects the entire raiding scene as a whole. As the raiding scene comprises of a hardcore minority (1.8% of the population has cleared DSR as of Patch 6.11) of the community, any streams that showcase third-party tools are much more liable to be discovered by Square Enix. This has already been proven by the statement they made when a player who belonged to a World First DSR static uploaded a clear VOD using third-party triggers and plugins, detailed in a post here.

Popular streamer and raider Arthars was the first to bring up the video of the aforementioned cheating, and the backlash has been immense, with other raiders such as Xeno and Zepla providing their two cents on the ordeal. You can watch their reactions down below.

Surprised that their Devs weren't out and ahead of this. All they basically have to do is look at Warcraft and they know they will eventually see most of the same issues pop up in their game in some form. They should be well prepared for all of this and have solutions ready to roll out.

The area overlay was cracked down on a long time ago by WOW for trivializing content, because it basically turned the encounter into a fast-paced tutorial. It was 'kind of a big deal' when WOW broke AVREncounters from being able to do this when 3.3.5 went live, which was a result of internal monitoring and leaked videos of how it trivialized the Defile mechanic during Arthas.

That is, indeed, what amounts to cheating in FF. The difference between WoW and FF fights is that there are already enough tells to learn the fight yourself, instead of relying on a third-party tool telling you exactly where to stand, where to look or not, and such.

You must have the latest x64 version of thehibiyasleep OverlayPlugininstalled and working in ACT. You must use the hibiyasleep version ofOverlayPlugin and not the original RainbowMage version, as cactbot dependson several features of that version.

If you already have an existing OverlayPlugin\ folder, you will be prompted to confirm if you want to merge files with existing files. Click the Do this for the next N conflicts checkbox and then the Move and Replace checkbox. If you end up with an OverlayPlugin\OverlayPlugin\ folder then you have done something wrong.

Note: The cactbot\ folder does not have to be located inside of the OverlayPlugin directory, but that is where it comes by default as part of a cactbot release zip file. It can be located anywhere on disk as long as the entire cactbot\ folder is kept together.

If you get an error in the OverlayPlugin console similar to Exception in SendFastRateEvents: Method not found: 'Void RainbowMage.HtmlRenderer.Renderer.ExecuteScript(System.String)'. then you are still using the RainbowMage version of OverlayPlugin and need to upgrade to the latest x64 full version of the hibiyasleep OverlayPlugin instead.

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