that's a lot of words to justify your point by using literally your own static as your only reference point.
I mean, aren't we all just using our own experiences to justify our opinions? I wrote a bunch of words to attempt to clearly explain the situation I observed and my thoughts on the outcome because I thought we were having a discussion in this thread and additional details would help.
Is there a need to be snippy in how we respond to each other, or is that just something you did for the fun of it? You could have just as easily said something like "I don't think your static's reactions match the general community's reactions." If you are actually interested in a conversation on the matter, then I'm happy to continue, but if you just want to score e-points then I'll drop the topic.
Caedwyr on
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
edited May 2022
It's just self evident that despite the long history of plugins in FFXIV, fights are NOT designed around them and we haven't hit this supposed dystopian future where addons are mandatory and fights are too easy without them.
We just got out of an Ultimate world prog that HAD THE WORLD FIRST TEAMS USING PLUGINS and it was still over a hundred hours of progression for them.
The snippy response is because I'm tired of people treating it as just a de facto truth that things like cactbot trivialise fights. Cactbot itself does nothing a human raid leader can't do aside from a few rare exceptions, which we've already discussed. It just eliminates the 1 in 20 pulls where someone just brain farts a mechanic they've done right a hundred times. Is that making fights easier? I don't think eliminating filler wipes makes a fight easier.
They balance encounters around the current collective competence of the playerbase that engages in the content, and an internal expectation for how long they feel the 'average' group should take to clear said content. As long as that average is made faster by the existence of callout plugins (which they are, or else people would have no reason to use them) then yes, they absolutely balance around cactbot.
I think it's interesting how sensitive this topic appears to be for some people both here and on Reddit. A lot of folks trying very hard to dismiss add-ons as no big deal...
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
They balance encounters around the current collective competence of the playerbase that engages in the content, and an internal expectation for how long they feel the 'average' group should take to clear said content. As long as that average is made faster by the existence of callout plugins (which they are, or else people would have no reason to use them) then yes, they absolutely balance around cactbot.
The point is people act like it cuts the prog time in half, when maybe it saves you five pulls out of every hundred. It doesn't move the needle. Addons in FFXIV just aren't as capable as they are in WoW. They're largely incapable of logic-based mechanic solving, for example.
As I said, about the only thing Cactbot does for 99% of mechanics is provide capable RL callouts for those groups that lack them.
Triggernometry is much more capable, but still nowhere near the level of something like BigWigs or WeakAuras doing actual assignments on the fly for complicated logic-based mechanics, like Fatescribe or Denathrius. And on top of that, Triggernometry is far more niche, far less well known, and far less widely used.
I'm not saying Square should embrace addons. But their approach doesn't need to change from what it has always been, and if it did, the negatives outweigh the positives.
Honestly to me this just feels like another social media firestorm where everyone gets all resentful and angry over absolutely nothing. Every year or two Square gives a warning and a couple of streamers get a minor slap on the wrist. Nobody gets banned, no one loses their account, there's no permanent consequences, it's a big ol' nothing. The rules haven't changed in years and years, nothing about this is new, everyone's always known that you might get a warning if you stream with mods on, and that's basically the only group of people who even need to slightly worry about this, no one else has ever been affected by the rule, big whoopty. Before this there was that dude who was flaming a raid member on stream based on his parses and he ate a temporary suspension and as far as I recall everyone was like, "Duh you can't use 3rd party stuff, especially not on stream, idiot." The only difference now is that it's some folks from one of the chans doing it so therefore we have to be angry about it because we hate those guys and how dare they get a win (even though it's still just the same old rules as before and the folks reported really were using 3rd party stuff for an advantage).
whooooo caaaaaaaares. Just enjoy playing the game. The energy expended over all this is both exhausting and pointless. It's just a video game.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
If I could go back in time and change WoW so that mods were illegal, I would.
The inconsistency of enforcement sucks, but I also have a hard time sympathizing because rules breaking is rules breaking.
This is honestly like speed traps on the highway. There's not a cop out there all the time. Not every speeder gets caught. But sometimes there is a cop out there, and sometimes a speeder does get caught. Sometimes it's the end of the month and they need to hit a quota and there's speed traps everywhere. But whether or not the cops are out setting speed traps, that doesn't change the rules. It's inconsistent that there isn't always a cop sitting at the same corner 100% of the time catching every speeder that goes by. But that doesn't make it any less illegal to speed.
Same thing here. Don't wanna get banned? Don't break the rules. Don't use mods. Simple as that.
Yeah. Maybe I'm a hardass on this, but it's really not that difficult. "Don't do the crime if you can't face the time." That's a saying I heard somewhere and it's appropriate to this whole situation.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Those who either don't use Cactbot or don't do hard content, or both, have collectively decided that installing Cactbot is a replacement for learning the mechanics. It's just not. Cactbot doesn't reduce what you have to learn, or what you have to execute. It makes it a little easier to keep the whole fight in your head for those whose brains struggle with mental timelines, and it makes it a little easier to have callouts for the group that can be tailored to how you like mechanics to be called for you.
if it's on a sliding scale, the community "against" Cactbot seems to think Cactbot makes shit 30% easier, when maybe it's a few percent at most. The "if it doesn't help why do you use it" gotcha misses the nuance of the actual significance of how much it helps. It helps enough that I want to use it, but it doesn't help so much that it meaningfully affects difficulty of content. We still cleared all of Savage by the start of week 2 long before it was updated for those fights, but you can bet I turned it on for farm to make my life easier. We're progressing ahead of Cactbot's update pace in DSR, but you can bet I've got it turned on to make my life easier reclearing the phases we have learned to cut down on the filler wipes.
They balance encounters around the current collective competence of the playerbase that engages in the content, and an internal expectation for how long they feel the 'average' group should take to clear said content. As long as that average is made faster by the existence of callout plugins (which they are, or else people would have no reason to use them) then yes, they absolutely balance around cactbot.
The point is people act like it cuts the prog time in half, when maybe it saves you five pulls out of every hundred. It doesn't move the needle. Addons in FFXIV just aren't as capable as they are in WoW. They're largely incapable of logic-based mechanic solving, for example.
As I said, about the only thing Cactbot does for 99% of mechanics is provide capable RL callouts for those groups that lack them.
Triggernometry is much more capable, but still nowhere near the level of something like BigWigs or WeakAuras doing actual assignments on the fly for complicated logic-based mechanics, like Fatescribe or Denathrius. And on top of that, Triggernometry is far more niche, far less well known, and far less widely used.
I'm not saying Square should embrace addons. But their approach doesn't need to change from what it has always been, and if it did, the negatives outweigh the positives.
They balance encounters around the current collective competence of the playerbase that engages in the content, and an internal expectation for how long they feel the 'average' group should take to clear said content. As long as that average is made faster by the existence of callout plugins (which they are, or else people would have no reason to use them) then yes, they absolutely balance around cactbot.
The point is people act like it cuts the prog time in half, when maybe it saves you five pulls out of every hundred. It doesn't move the needle. Addons in FFXIV just aren't as capable as they are in WoW. They're largely incapable of logic-based mechanic solving, for example.
As I said, about the only thing Cactbot does for 99% of mechanics is provide capable RL callouts for those groups that lack them.
Triggernometry is much more capable, but still nowhere near the level of something like BigWigs or WeakAuras doing actual assignments on the fly for complicated logic-based mechanics, like Fatescribe or Denathrius. And on top of that, Triggernometry is far more niche, far less well known, and far less widely used.
I'm not saying Square should embrace addons. But their approach doesn't need to change from what it has always been, and if it did, the negatives outweigh the positives.
Triggernometry doesn’t do anything that cactbot can’t. They both use the same mechanicisms and pull from the same resource. Cactbot CAN do logic-based solutions, and does, in the case of UWU titan jails for instance. The only difference between cactbot and the greater triggernometry is that cactbot is just a collection of triggers made by a single developer, whereas triggernometry is the open-ended tool that allows for more open-source repositories to be posted and thus will have more than one contributor.
It’s also extremely disingenuous to equate cactbot to ‘just having a call out person.’ It’s the difference between bringing a graphing calculator to a math final, versus just using a pencil and paper to write all of the equations out by hand. Sure it’s possible to pass using either, but to claim that having to calculator doesn’t make things easier and faster is just quite simply wrong.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
If I could go back in time and change WoW so that mods were illegal, I would.
The inconsistency of enforcement sucks, but I also have a hard time sympathizing because rules breaking is rules breaking.
This is honestly like speed traps on the highway. There's not a cop out there all the time. Not every speeder gets caught. But sometimes there is a cop out there, and sometimes a speeder does get caught. Sometimes it's the end of the month and they need to hit a quota and there's speed traps everywhere. But whether or not the cops are out setting speed traps, that doesn't change the rules. It's inconsistent that there isn't always a cop sitting at the same corner 100% of the time catching every speeder that goes by. But that doesn't make it any less illegal to speed.
Same thing here. Don't wanna get banned? Don't break the rules. Don't use mods. Simple as that.
Yeah. Maybe I'm a hardass on this, but it's really not that difficult. "Don't do the crime if you can't face the time." That's a saying I heard somewhere and it's appropriate to this whole situation.
I'd rather play dark souls with a guitar hero controller than WoW without mods.
FFXIV is better but only because the base UI is better and the combat system design is much simpler.
If I could go back in time and change WoW so that mods were illegal, I would.
The inconsistency of enforcement sucks, but I also have a hard time sympathizing because rules breaking is rules breaking.
This is honestly like speed traps on the highway. There's not a cop out there all the time. Not every speeder gets caught. But sometimes there is a cop out there, and sometimes a speeder does get caught. Sometimes it's the end of the month and they need to hit a quota and there's speed traps everywhere. But whether or not the cops are out setting speed traps, that doesn't change the rules. It's inconsistent that there isn't always a cop sitting at the same corner 100% of the time catching every speeder that goes by. But that doesn't make it any less illegal to speed.
Same thing here. Don't wanna get banned? Don't break the rules. Don't use mods. Simple as that.
Yeah. Maybe I'm a hardass on this, but it's really not that difficult. "Don't do the crime if you can't face the time." That's a saying I heard somewhere and it's appropriate to this whole situation.
I'd rather play dark souls with a guitar hero controller than WoW without mods.
FFXIV is better but only because the base UI is better and the combat system design is much simpler.
Because WoW allows mods, the devs have basically stopped developing the built-in UI for the past 14 years, because modders do it for them. They don't need to make it better, because mods are an (unfortunate) assumption.
But if mods had been illegal from the beginning, UI overhauls would have happened a lot sooner than Dragonflight.
there is one serious thing i would like to say about addons, though i rarely like bringing it up because people get really confrontational about it and act like i'm creating some great Moralization with which i am telling you that you are Objectively Morally Wrong to disagree with me and woah buddy chill
addons typically only get debated about when we conceptualize some situation with two equally ideal and perfect players, and one gets an edge because they use an addon and the other doesn't. but like, that's not really the case in reality. everyone is different, everyone parses information slightly differently. some people have trouble interpreting certain visuals, some people certain audio. what addons enable people to do is tailor the notifications a game is sending them to the manner which is most useful to them. there are custom plugins for fights like P3S where the colours of the arena and the tells are brutal for certain colourblindness combinations - and yes, colourblind people know about the colourblind options in the menu, please stop pointing those out - and that's a perfect example of this sort of thing. we treat information callouts in these arguments as something that everyone is equal at and that's objectively untrue.
when we fixate on the highest-end high-end raiders i think we lose sight of the ability for addons to be an equalizer for gameplay, to enable people to enjoy and experience the game in ways they would not otherwise be able to. when people call things a "crutch", they forget the reason people use crutches - to support themselves when their dang foot can't hit the ground right now. you tell me "this guy's performance went up when he had the addon", my reaction is "that's great! i'm glad that it helped him have a better time with the video game he's playing."
If I could go back in time and change WoW so that mods were illegal, I would.
The inconsistency of enforcement sucks, but I also have a hard time sympathizing because rules breaking is rules breaking.
This is honestly like speed traps on the highway. There's not a cop out there all the time. Not every speeder gets caught. But sometimes there is a cop out there, and sometimes a speeder does get caught. Sometimes it's the end of the month and they need to hit a quota and there's speed traps everywhere. But whether or not the cops are out setting speed traps, that doesn't change the rules. It's inconsistent that there isn't always a cop sitting at the same corner 100% of the time catching every speeder that goes by. But that doesn't make it any less illegal to speed.
Same thing here. Don't wanna get banned? Don't break the rules. Don't use mods. Simple as that.
Yeah. Maybe I'm a hardass on this, but it's really not that difficult. "Don't do the crime if you can't face the time." That's a saying I heard somewhere and it's appropriate to this whole situation.
I'd rather play dark souls with a guitar hero controller than WoW without mods.
FFXIV is better but only because the base UI is better and the combat system design is much simpler.
Because WoW allows mods, the devs have basically stopped developing the built-in UI for the past 14 years, because modders do it for them. They don't need to make it better, because mods are an (unfortunate) assumption.
But if mods had been illegal from the beginning, UI overhauls would have happened a lot sooner than Dragonflight.
Uhh, no? They’ve been regularly integrating/redesigning mod functionality into the base UI since Burning Crusade.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
If I could go back in time and change WoW so that mods were illegal, I would.
The inconsistency of enforcement sucks, but I also have a hard time sympathizing because rules breaking is rules breaking.
This is honestly like speed traps on the highway. There's not a cop out there all the time. Not every speeder gets caught. But sometimes there is a cop out there, and sometimes a speeder does get caught. Sometimes it's the end of the month and they need to hit a quota and there's speed traps everywhere. But whether or not the cops are out setting speed traps, that doesn't change the rules. It's inconsistent that there isn't always a cop sitting at the same corner 100% of the time catching every speeder that goes by. But that doesn't make it any less illegal to speed.
Same thing here. Don't wanna get banned? Don't break the rules. Don't use mods. Simple as that.
Yeah. Maybe I'm a hardass on this, but it's really not that difficult. "Don't do the crime if you can't face the time." That's a saying I heard somewhere and it's appropriate to this whole situation.
I'd rather play dark souls with a guitar hero controller than WoW without mods.
FFXIV is better but only because the base UI is better and the combat system design is much simpler.
Because WoW allows mods, the devs have basically stopped developing the built-in UI for the past 14 years, because modders do it for them. They don't need to make it better, because mods are an (unfortunate) assumption.
But if mods had been illegal from the beginning, UI overhauls would have happened a lot sooner than Dragonflight.
I was using mods in 2005 so I don't really agree with this. With a game as large and varied as WoW there's no way the devs can cover what players want.
there is one serious thing i would like to say about addons, though i rarely like bringing it up because people get really confrontational about it and act like i'm creating some great Moralization with which i am telling you that you are Objectively Morally Wrong to disagree with me and woah buddy chill
addons typically only get debated about when we conceptualize some situation with two equally ideal and perfect players, and one gets an edge because they use an addon and the other doesn't. but like, that's not really the case in reality. everyone is different, everyone parses information slightly differently. some people have trouble interpreting certain visuals, some people certain audio. what addons enable people to do is tailor the notifications a game is sending them to the manner which is most useful to them. there are custom plugins for fights like P3S where the colours of the arena and the tells are brutal for certain colourblindness combinations - and yes, colourblind people know about the colourblind options in the menu, please stop pointing those out - and that's a perfect example of this sort of thing. we treat information callouts in these arguments as something that everyone is equal at and that's objectively untrue.
when we fixate on the highest-end high-end raiders i think we lose sight of the ability for addons to be an equalizer for gameplay, to enable people to enjoy and experience the game in ways they would not otherwise be able to. when people call things a "crutch", they forget the reason people use crutches - to support themselves when their dang foot can't hit the ground right now. you tell me "this guy's performance went up when he had the addon", my reaction is "that's great! i'm glad that it helped him have a better time with the video game he's playing."
My opinion on FFXIV add-ons is if it's PVE, do whatever you like. Yes, that includes raids. Add-ons create really great accessibility options for people who don't parse information in the same way as others. I don't think that should mean those people should be excluded from the content. If Cactbot or something similar allows people to access the raids when they otherwise wouldn't have been able to, I think that's an unqualified positive.
For PVP, it gets trickier. Mods in PVP should probably be more strictly enforced just because of the ranking issues. This comes up with 'world first' teams too. I don't have a great answer for that, since that aspect of the game doesn't interest me as much.
I think it would have been healthier for WoW's PvE design over time if they hadn't allowed helper addons to become basically standard so I prefer if they're not allowed, but also I don't really care that much. And if they strictly enforced anti-raid-cheating hacks they'd probably have to be strict about cosmetic and posing modding too which would suck for me.
The problems with mods being permitted:
1) eventually they become required
2) the devs have less pressure on them to fix problems in the game if a mod already addresses it
One of the things I really liked about FF14 when I arrived from WoW was that the game was the game. No extra stuff required. The fact I could change the UI without a mod amazed me. And that's kind of sad, in an MMO that should be standard.
I would think "allowed helper mods become mandatory and influence the developer's design choices" was a slippery slope fallacy if I hadn't seen it actually happen in WoW over the years.
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MaratastikJust call me Mara, please!Registered Userregular
The only type of addon that confers any type of advantage that isn't blantant cheating are call out triggers like cactbot. And the most common complaint I keep seeing is that people who use these triggers will complain that the fights are too easy and that square needs to make them harder, thus necessitating the need for everyone to use mods.
If I were SE I would simply tell people complaining the game is too easy because of all the mods they use to simply stop using the mods. Like who is dumb enough to use mods to make the game easier and then complain that the game is too easy? Like...there's a real easy solution to that that doesn't require any action from SE.
That's the reason I'll never use cactbot or other triggers myself. I feel they detract from a challenge that I enjoy. I feel that most other players who also enjoy challenging content would also refuse to use certain tools if they felt it trivialized things for them. At the same time I'm not gonna get my panties all twisted because someone else has a desire to use tools like that. Even if they're totally doing it to trivialize difficulty. Ok. Doesn't affect me. Go nuts. If that's how you enjoy playing the game why the fuck should I care?
If Square tunes their fights based on stats on how many completed, how many wipes etc, and adjusts difficulty accordingly (this is an assumption on my part) then that's why you should care. Because the better and more widespread the helper mods get, the harder the fights get for people playing unmodded. Which includes all the console players who can't use mods even if they wanted to.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
If I were SE I would simply tell people complaining the game is too easy because of all the mods they use to simply stop using the mods. Like who is dumb enough to use mods to make the game easier and then complain that the game is too easy? Like...there's a real easy solution to that that doesn't require any action from SE.
man, strawmen are way easier to win debates against
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
If Square tunes their fights based on stats on how many completed, how many wipes etc, and adjusts difficulty accordingly (this is an assumption on my part) then that's why you should care. Because the better and more widespread the helper mods get, the harder the fights get for people playing unmodded. Which includes all the console players who can't use mods even if they wanted to.
my point is that if they tuned fights difficulties to account for using cactbot, fights will get like...5% more difficult than if they weren't.
If Square tunes their fights based on stats on how many completed, how many wipes etc, and adjusts difficulty accordingly (this is an assumption on my part) then that's why you should care. Because the better and more widespread the helper mods get, the harder the fights get for people playing unmodded. Which includes all the console players who can't use mods even if they wanted to.
my point is that if they tuned fights difficulties to account for using cactbot, fights will get like...5% more difficult than if they weren't.
But that's now. Who knows what gets developed later on. Also, isn't even 5% pretty significant when doing content you find difficult?
The only type of addon that confers any type of advantage that isn't blantant cheating are call out triggers like cactbot.
I dunno, I think there's some that are in the gray area. For example, modifying your UI to make the cooldown numbers on your buttons bigger. That might not feel like a real advantage, but if it makes it easier to tell at a glance how much time is left on, like, Drill or Arcane Circle, then that is definitely an advantage, but a very small one. Also, modifying your cast bar to indicate when you can move without canceling your spell. That's definitely an advantage, but you can kinda simulate the effect by having an emote on your bar, and moving when it's not grayed out. I personally think that cactbot triggers are a bigger advantage than either of those, but they still are definitely advantages over people who don't use any mods.
Basically, the kinds of UI mods that I think Yoshi-P was referring to when he said that they were planning to eventually improve their UI options.
If I were SE I would simply tell people complaining the game is too easy because of all the mods they use to simply stop using the mods. Like who is dumb enough to use mods to make the game easier and then complain that the game is too easy? Like...there's a real easy solution to that that doesn't require any action from SE.
man, strawmen are way easier to win debates against
Are you capable of responding without snark? People are just talking out their positions, it's not some grand debate.
If I were SE I would simply tell people complaining the game is too easy because of all the mods they use to simply stop using the mods. Like who is dumb enough to use mods to make the game easier and then complain that the game is too easy? Like...there's a real easy solution to that that doesn't require any action from SE.
man, strawmen are way easier to win debates against
Are you capable of responding without snark? People are just talking out their positions, it's not some grand debate.
making up fake players who use addons while complaining fights are too easy isn't talking out positions in good faith
WoW Classic is the prime example of fight designs that are obsoleted by mods. Players playing WoW Classic in 2022 have massive advantages over those early raids because of the addons that are available now that weren't available in 2004. It's not a hypothetical fake player. It is literally all players playing WoW Classic.
But anyway, real players or fake players, it doesn't matter for XIV because it's against the rules.
WoW Classic is the prime example of fight designs that are obsoleted by mods. Players playing WoW Classic in 2022 have massive advantages over those early raids because of the addons that are available now that weren't available in 2004. It's not a hypothetical fake player. It is literally all players playing WoW Classic.
But anyway, real players or fake players, it doesn't matter for XIV because it's against the rules.
Addons are definitely not the thing that trivialized WoW Classic fights.
Welp, I haven't really posted at all about it, but felt like sharing that my Oceanic re-roll hit a major milestone. All DoW/M classes at 80 before I lost the road to 80 buff.
It's been a real trip down memory lane I tells ya. Anyways at some point I might post some re-play story thoughts...
If I could go back in time and change WoW so that mods were illegal, I would.
The inconsistency of enforcement sucks, but I also have a hard time sympathizing because rules breaking is rules breaking.
This is honestly like speed traps on the highway. There's not a cop out there all the time. Not every speeder gets caught. But sometimes there is a cop out there, and sometimes a speeder does get caught. Sometimes it's the end of the month and they need to hit a quota and there's speed traps everywhere. But whether or not the cops are out setting speed traps, that doesn't change the rules. It's inconsistent that there isn't always a cop sitting at the same corner 100% of the time catching every speeder that goes by. But that doesn't make it any less illegal to speed.
Same thing here. Don't wanna get banned? Don't break the rules. Don't use mods. Simple as that.
Yeah. Maybe I'm a hardass on this, but it's really not that difficult. "Don't do the crime if you can't face the time." That's a saying I heard somewhere and it's appropriate to this whole situation.
If I could go back in time and change WoW so that mods were illegal, I would.
The inconsistency of enforcement sucks, but I also have a hard time sympathizing because rules breaking is rules breaking.
This is honestly like speed traps on the highway. There's not a cop out there all the time. Not every speeder gets caught. But sometimes there is a cop out there, and sometimes a speeder does get caught. Sometimes it's the end of the month and they need to hit a quota and there's speed traps everywhere. But whether or not the cops are out setting speed traps, that doesn't change the rules. It's inconsistent that there isn't always a cop sitting at the same corner 100% of the time catching every speeder that goes by. But that doesn't make it any less illegal to speed.
Same thing here. Don't wanna get banned? Don't break the rules. Don't use mods. Simple as that.
Yeah. Maybe I'm a hardass on this, but it's really not that difficult. "Don't do the crime if you can't face the time." That's a saying I heard somewhere and it's appropriate to this whole situation.
I'd rather play dark souls with a guitar hero controller than WoW without mods.
FFXIV is better but only because the base UI is better and the combat system design is much simpler.
Because WoW allows mods, the devs have basically stopped developing the built-in UI for the past 14 years, because modders do it for them. They don't need to make it better, because mods are an (unfortunate) assumption.
But if mods had been illegal from the beginning, UI overhauls would have happened a lot sooner than Dragonflight.
WoW Classic is the prime example of fight designs that are obsoleted by mods. Players playing WoW Classic in 2022 have massive advantages over those early raids because of the addons that are available now that weren't available in 2004. It's not a hypothetical fake player. It is literally all players playing WoW Classic.
But anyway, real players or fake players, it doesn't matter for XIV because it's against the rules.
this is also straight up wrong. people just know how to learn fights and optimise gear and their rotations etc now. way way way more than in OG vanilla wow. also addons existed in vanilla that helped a lot in even Molten Core, just by giving players some more consistent info that is now a staple in the game
if you're gonna stand up for all this cop talk at least try to be correct about your examples?
Given that we literally have cops crushing the necks of 12 year old girls in the news today can we maybe cool it on accusing people's opinions on mods for a video game as "cop talk"?
Welp, I haven't really posted at all about it, but felt like sharing that my Oceanic re-roll hit a major milestone. All DoW/M classes at 80 before I lost the road to 80 buff.
It's been a real trip down memory lane I tells ya. Anyways at some point I might post some re-play story thoughts...
Please do! Also curious what jobs had a logical path to 80, skills-wise. I am pretty much done with leveling jobs, but I'm curious about this.
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I mean, aren't we all just using our own experiences to justify our opinions? I wrote a bunch of words to attempt to clearly explain the situation I observed and my thoughts on the outcome because I thought we were having a discussion in this thread and additional details would help.
Is there a need to be snippy in how we respond to each other, or is that just something you did for the fun of it? You could have just as easily said something like "I don't think your static's reactions match the general community's reactions." If you are actually interested in a conversation on the matter, then I'm happy to continue, but if you just want to score e-points then I'll drop the topic.
We just got out of an Ultimate world prog that HAD THE WORLD FIRST TEAMS USING PLUGINS and it was still over a hundred hours of progression for them.
The snippy response is because I'm tired of people treating it as just a de facto truth that things like cactbot trivialise fights. Cactbot itself does nothing a human raid leader can't do aside from a few rare exceptions, which we've already discussed. It just eliminates the 1 in 20 pulls where someone just brain farts a mechanic they've done right a hundred times. Is that making fights easier? I don't think eliminating filler wipes makes a fight easier.
The point is people act like it cuts the prog time in half, when maybe it saves you five pulls out of every hundred. It doesn't move the needle. Addons in FFXIV just aren't as capable as they are in WoW. They're largely incapable of logic-based mechanic solving, for example.
As I said, about the only thing Cactbot does for 99% of mechanics is provide capable RL callouts for those groups that lack them.
Triggernometry is much more capable, but still nowhere near the level of something like BigWigs or WeakAuras doing actual assignments on the fly for complicated logic-based mechanics, like Fatescribe or Denathrius. And on top of that, Triggernometry is far more niche, far less well known, and far less widely used.
I'm not saying Square should embrace addons. But their approach doesn't need to change from what it has always been, and if it did, the negatives outweigh the positives.
whooooo caaaaaaaares. Just enjoy playing the game. The energy expended over all this is both exhausting and pointless. It's just a video game.
WoW allows them, and I think WoW is worse for it.
XIV does not allow it, and it is better for it.
If I could go back in time and change WoW so that mods were illegal, I would.
The inconsistency of enforcement sucks, but I also have a hard time sympathizing because rules breaking is rules breaking.
This is honestly like speed traps on the highway. There's not a cop out there all the time. Not every speeder gets caught. But sometimes there is a cop out there, and sometimes a speeder does get caught. Sometimes it's the end of the month and they need to hit a quota and there's speed traps everywhere. But whether or not the cops are out setting speed traps, that doesn't change the rules. It's inconsistent that there isn't always a cop sitting at the same corner 100% of the time catching every speeder that goes by. But that doesn't make it any less illegal to speed.
Same thing here. Don't wanna get banned? Don't break the rules. Don't use mods. Simple as that.
Yeah. Maybe I'm a hardass on this, but it's really not that difficult. "Don't do the crime if you can't face the time." That's a saying I heard somewhere and it's appropriate to this whole situation.
if it's on a sliding scale, the community "against" Cactbot seems to think Cactbot makes shit 30% easier, when maybe it's a few percent at most. The "if it doesn't help why do you use it" gotcha misses the nuance of the actual significance of how much it helps. It helps enough that I want to use it, but it doesn't help so much that it meaningfully affects difficulty of content. We still cleared all of Savage by the start of week 2 long before it was updated for those fights, but you can bet I turned it on for farm to make my life easier. We're progressing ahead of Cactbot's update pace in DSR, but you can bet I've got it turned on to make my life easier reclearing the phases we have learned to cut down on the filler wipes.
Triggernometry doesn’t do anything that cactbot can’t. They both use the same mechanicisms and pull from the same resource. Cactbot CAN do logic-based solutions, and does, in the case of UWU titan jails for instance. The only difference between cactbot and the greater triggernometry is that cactbot is just a collection of triggers made by a single developer, whereas triggernometry is the open-ended tool that allows for more open-source repositories to be posted and thus will have more than one contributor.
It’s also extremely disingenuous to equate cactbot to ‘just having a call out person.’ It’s the difference between bringing a graphing calculator to a math final, versus just using a pencil and paper to write all of the equations out by hand. Sure it’s possible to pass using either, but to claim that having to calculator doesn’t make things easier and faster is just quite simply wrong.
I'd rather play dark souls with a guitar hero controller than WoW without mods.
FFXIV is better but only because the base UI is better and the combat system design is much simpler.
Because WoW allows mods, the devs have basically stopped developing the built-in UI for the past 14 years, because modders do it for them. They don't need to make it better, because mods are an (unfortunate) assumption.
But if mods had been illegal from the beginning, UI overhauls would have happened a lot sooner than Dragonflight.
addons typically only get debated about when we conceptualize some situation with two equally ideal and perfect players, and one gets an edge because they use an addon and the other doesn't. but like, that's not really the case in reality. everyone is different, everyone parses information slightly differently. some people have trouble interpreting certain visuals, some people certain audio. what addons enable people to do is tailor the notifications a game is sending them to the manner which is most useful to them. there are custom plugins for fights like P3S where the colours of the arena and the tells are brutal for certain colourblindness combinations - and yes, colourblind people know about the colourblind options in the menu, please stop pointing those out - and that's a perfect example of this sort of thing. we treat information callouts in these arguments as something that everyone is equal at and that's objectively untrue.
when we fixate on the highest-end high-end raiders i think we lose sight of the ability for addons to be an equalizer for gameplay, to enable people to enjoy and experience the game in ways they would not otherwise be able to. when people call things a "crutch", they forget the reason people use crutches - to support themselves when their dang foot can't hit the ground right now. you tell me "this guy's performance went up when he had the addon", my reaction is "that's great! i'm glad that it helped him have a better time with the video game he's playing."
Uhh, no? They’ve been regularly integrating/redesigning mod functionality into the base UI since Burning Crusade.
I was using mods in 2005 so I don't really agree with this. With a game as large and varied as WoW there's no way the devs can cover what players want.
i can't agree with this hard enough
For PVP, it gets trickier. Mods in PVP should probably be more strictly enforced just because of the ranking issues. This comes up with 'world first' teams too. I don't have a great answer for that, since that aspect of the game doesn't interest me as much.
1) eventually they become required
2) the devs have less pressure on them to fix problems in the game if a mod already addresses it
One of the things I really liked about FF14 when I arrived from WoW was that the game was the game. No extra stuff required. The fact I could change the UI without a mod amazed me. And that's kind of sad, in an MMO that should be standard.
If I were SE I would simply tell people complaining the game is too easy because of all the mods they use to simply stop using the mods. Like who is dumb enough to use mods to make the game easier and then complain that the game is too easy? Like...there's a real easy solution to that that doesn't require any action from SE.
That's the reason I'll never use cactbot or other triggers myself. I feel they detract from a challenge that I enjoy. I feel that most other players who also enjoy challenging content would also refuse to use certain tools if they felt it trivialized things for them. At the same time I'm not gonna get my panties all twisted because someone else has a desire to use tools like that. Even if they're totally doing it to trivialize difficulty. Ok. Doesn't affect me. Go nuts. If that's how you enjoy playing the game why the fuck should I care?
man, strawmen are way easier to win debates against
my point is that if they tuned fights difficulties to account for using cactbot, fights will get like...5% more difficult than if they weren't.
But that's now. Who knows what gets developed later on. Also, isn't even 5% pretty significant when doing content you find difficult?
I dunno, I think there's some that are in the gray area. For example, modifying your UI to make the cooldown numbers on your buttons bigger. That might not feel like a real advantage, but if it makes it easier to tell at a glance how much time is left on, like, Drill or Arcane Circle, then that is definitely an advantage, but a very small one. Also, modifying your cast bar to indicate when you can move without canceling your spell. That's definitely an advantage, but you can kinda simulate the effect by having an emote on your bar, and moving when it's not grayed out. I personally think that cactbot triggers are a bigger advantage than either of those, but they still are definitely advantages over people who don't use any mods.
Basically, the kinds of UI mods that I think Yoshi-P was referring to when he said that they were planning to eventually improve their UI options.
Are you capable of responding without snark? People are just talking out their positions, it's not some grand debate.
making up fake players who use addons while complaining fights are too easy isn't talking out positions in good faith
But anyway, real players or fake players, it doesn't matter for XIV because it's against the rules.
Addons are definitely not the thing that trivialized WoW Classic fights.
It's been a real trip down memory lane I tells ya. Anyways at some point I might post some re-play story thoughts...
this is a bunch of cop talk lmfao
this is just straight up 100% incorrect
this is also straight up wrong. people just know how to learn fights and optimise gear and their rotations etc now. way way way more than in OG vanilla wow. also addons existed in vanilla that helped a lot in even Molten Core, just by giving players some more consistent info that is now a staple in the game
if you're gonna stand up for all this cop talk at least try to be correct about your examples?
Please do! Also curious what jobs had a logical path to 80, skills-wise. I am pretty much done with leveling jobs, but I'm curious about this.