Happy Thanksbanning!

Some people hold to the ridiculous notion that any kind of QoL tools (including sites like FFXIAH) are equally as bad as any kind of botting/exploit just because both of them are technically forbidden by the ToS. As in, they're arguing that since the majority of people are using Windower (no matter what kind of addons) everyone should be fine with them botting 24/7, speedhacking everywhere and exploiting the ***out of the game.

This kind of logic would view shoplifting and murder as the same just because both of them are crimes. Because eff nuance and eff the game's mechanics and economy apparently.

SE's terms of services says lots of crazy things. The fact that FFXIAH query's FFXI's auction-house servers for sales history is one thing they wouldn't like ...but SE doesn't exactly do anything to prevent/impede it (AFAIK).

It's always an interesting debate/argument where you draw your arbitrary line.

You can "say" that botting and using windower (at all) are different, you can say they're the same.

They're both breaking TOS, and they both carry the same penalty (there is only one penalty in FFXI, suspension). The only way they differ is the level of enforcement, and on that note, they have had the same level of enforcement for the last 5 years.

It's more like doing 5 over and doing 100 over. Neither one matter if no ones watching. But they both matter if the cop feels like giving you the ticket, even though it's commonly accepted as "totally fine" to do 5 over, you can absolutely get a ticket for it.

356776442th day in vanadiel, 2 bots are still owning Palborough Mines, dude in shell is still cp botting every single job in woh/moh gates and there are loads of smashed name chars on ceizak.

Those cases arent debatable about if botting or no. Neither are they any hidden.

SE has gone through someones stream on XIV and suspended them for talking ***about a person who parsed incredibly bad. If they actually cared about XI, they would easily see this site as a threat. Pretty much what Eiryl said. Thorny woke up on the bad side of the bed today and decided to nit pick a silly argument for todays drama. I find it also funny how all the idiots + his post even though hes probably the biggest cheater this game has ever seen lol.

How people can draw the line wherever they want, when it is all against SE's rules. My main point was stiffing the conversation only hurts the community at large. If SE has turned their auto-ban on or are actually looking at reports, it would be wise for testimonials to prevent others from further cheating and changing their ways so they don't get banned and hurt the already small population this game has. Nobody was supporting exploiters, we're talking about people botting for CP or benign crap that barely affects others. Did we all turn into Starcade and want every dirty filthy cheater smited from FFXI, but that would include windower users lol.

I've personally had two friends that got suspended. In addition to the other reports, I'd say those people have their days numbered or it is a specific add-on thats causing the temps.

You've missed the point. It doesn't matter what SE's stance on the issue is. Obviously all kinds of third-party software is bannable and anybody playing anything except pure vanilla is not innocent and cannot complain if they get hit by a ban.

The point is that QoL stuff does not affect/ruin the game, it just makes an aged game more enjoyable to play. Botting, speedhacking and exploits all negatively affect the game as a whole.

To use your example: going 5 over is commonly accepted because if you crash, you're not as likely to get someone killed. If you go 100 over and crash, everyone is basically guaranteed mincemeat.

Just something mocked up spur of the moment. Where you put YOUR line, anything above green is still a bannable offense. It's all the same basket. (you may not even agree with the order of severity)

"using a parser and/or talking about it" should be on there, but I forgot about it and didn't want to add it after I made it QQ

I don't get why we are debating this, or why Thorny decided to quote me and start this debate, it's silly.

I thought we all knew anything except vanilla XI can be bannable. The fact is, in todays XI you have people suggesting things like JA0 and anchor style addons to beat/solo things like Lilith BC... To now care all of a sudden about CP botting is so dumb lol.

I was just telling the idiots coming in and saying "golly they are banning for cheating... imagine that" after TWO years of doing nothing, adds no substance to the thread. You're just making people not want to post their testimonials on being suspended (which is already hard enough to do.) Why would you wanna see more people banned/suspended, most of them were actually pretty clean until they saw everyone else botting it up with no consequences.

The majority of the posters on this site are not clean lol, just because you use ja0 and maybe anchor only, doesn't make you innocent. Just stop.

Easy, because they actually want to see (more) people getting banned for botting/hacking.

Ja0 and Anchor are also the exactly the kind of hacks people are against. The ones using those are not the same people making things harder for you.

So instead of people getting warned, and then stopping those illicit activities out of fear, you just want them to be stopped by being banned... So dumb. As if the population wasn't low enough already lol. I think SE already gets it, they are sending a message (which is spread through forums just like this) and then they will turn it off for a determined amount of time.

I don't think people are with you on that one, there are people that have posted on this very forum, Buuki that I recall, that they used JA0 as part of a strat for beating Lilith. The line is crossed and then recrossed and then done again.

So like real talk though, people posting those suggestions and acting like they're contributing anything of value to the conversation have never not been sad af ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Possibly even more sad than the widespread reliance on those tools in the first place.

I haven't seen anyone call them out on it, I think most are of the opinion that its something everyone uses so it only comes out during threads like this where all the white knights appear to attack anyone related to cheating. Then after it all dies down everyone goes back to using it, even the white knights.

I personally don't feel any add-ons should be used as a suggestion for clearing content. In reality though, it would be a pain to make specific suggestions every time for non-gearswap/non-addon users when everyone uses them anyways.

You don't need repeat warnings to know the ***you're doing is ruining the game. You've known from the start. SE giving people leeway is exactly the reason why people keep trying again and again to get away with it. And most of the time they do.

Also, what makes you think we even want people like that around? Who gives a damn if the population is low if the alternative is a game infested with bots. I'd rather have a dead server than every camp being 24/7 occupied by botters. Many Apex camps are practically unusable during CP campaigns because dozens of people bot them from start to finish.


That's some quality projection there. Not everyone is like you and your attempts to justify your use of hacks are just sad.

Well it's not like you can convince someone not to cheat if they're already inclined. And there wouldn't really be any benefit even if you could, so why bother engaging? I'd also challenge the assumption that everyone is cheating to such a degree, widespread though it may be.

As I recall, the mere discussion (let alone the outright sharing and promotion) of bots and cheats used to be forbidden on these boards because the leadership didn't want ffxiah to draw the wrong kind of attention from SE⁠—it wasn't always like this.

Strategies don't become unviable just because someone isn't using gearswap. Some of that other crap, sure, but the people using those things don't need to be told how a fight changes when you remove literally all the mechanics—so there's never a need for multiple conversations anyway.

Most likely there is something with bots as that one is specifically what all reports have in common.

Why some are punished and others no, its some routine that doesnt seems clear yet.

cheaters love to exaggerate how widespread even the hardcore cheats are. some of them know better but like to pretend to justify their own cheating and others maybe genuinly have that impression.
the later isn't very uncommon as cheaters prefer to socialize with like minded ppl to discuss/exchange cheats and avoid getting reported.

hardcore cheats are always used only by a small minority. the group of cheaters only starts growing once you take punishment out of the equation. cheaters become more vocal on boards and eventually ingame. regular players get tired to set the record straight and eventually you end up with this weird echo chamber that doesn't even remotely represent reality.

I couldn't agree more. The arbitrary line is why I stopped playing WoW. Got into it with a moderator manager because of a silly joke I made. He said it constitutes "nonconstructive post" and I said "we need to be fair, that constitutes 90% of all posts here"

I get it, if you make rules black/white, there is no room for any extenuating circumstances but when they're enforced by people with limited or no competency, you have people who're not hurting anything getting infracted.

This degree of pettiness isnt surprising at all, but I’m grateful I don’t play on any servers that you do; I have no time or energy to devote to these picayune machinations.

You're missing the point. Instead of stopping one cheat out of fear, you should be stopping all of them. Say this thread gets dissected, and we conclude that botting CP for X hours, Y minutes, and Z seconds under F conditions will get you banned. Now, you're going to bot CP for X hours, Y-1 minutes, under E conditions. You get banned next month, and we have the same thread again.

We conclude speedhacks are banworthy, but anchor isn't. A few months down the road, SE realizes how many of their mechanics and how much of their intended difficulty is circumvented by anchor, and build in a check that sees if your position has changed at all after a tp move occurs. You fail this check enough times and you get autobanned.

You aren't teaching people how to save their accounts, you're teaching people how to risk them and giving them false confidence that it'll all be ok if they follow these specific guidelines. If we had this thread 3 months ago, the people banned right now would be the ones who were following the guidelines from 3 months ago.

As Senkyuutai said a few pages ago, we all know what's cheating and what isn't. JA0wait and gmflag are cheating, but near impossible to detect. Anchor, speed, and position warp tools are cheating, and piss easy to detect. Any sort of automated farming is easy to detect. Superwarps is questionable if you have access to the points already, cheating if you don't, but easy to detect either way. Most other common addons and plugins, windower, ffxiah, are not cheating. Whether SE currently detects these things does not indicate whether they ever will.

As far as me, I never claimed not to use tools. I don't use ones I consider to be high risk, but I also don't *** and moan if I get banned, because I know I deserved it.

here, have a cup full of shut the *** up.


edit- all of you are terrible. stop it.

“Banworthy” is subjective yeah.

Personally anything I can write in notepad as basic *** scripting windower macros identical to in game macros in functionality, I don’t consider cheating since all it does is expand the 5 line limit PS2 set.

So anything above those in game commands yeah that’s cheating etc

Everyone seems to think, due to the name, ja0 lets you use JAs faster.

...it doesn't. It just lets you move while using JAs, which can also be accomplished by blinking gear(which you're likely doing with such tight timing the server can't tell when you'd blink due to gearswap changing your equipment.

You could probably detect it on waltzes and raise acceptance, but false positive rate would be higher than acceptable I'd think.

It does nothing besides allowing you to move during JA/WS/raise/engage. Your attack delay and delay until next action are entirely the same.

It doesn't matter what it's called, it patches the client side function preventing movement, nothing else. The server determines all of your waits.

I'd wager its fair to say that for the past 2-3 years the only banning we saw was limited small waves or individual experiences, mostly (if not all) related to something that *** with the economy blatantly.

We hadn't seen a "Ban Wave" the way we did in years past such as the infamous "Salvage Bans", etc. That was the first time that "innocent" people got caught up in the banwave in such large numbers that it spurned threads on BG that make these modern ban threads look like single-page burnout threads. Want 102 pages on a ban? Head to the BG forum archives....it happened.

So all of a sudden we have seen more open discussion of "tools" that allowed circumvention of game mechanics being discussed in legitimate strategy threads. Adding the settings one uses for React or that it was done with Knockblock/Anchor were commonplace in posted strategies. As such, the now-older and more busy gaming community of FFXI sought out ways to still progress in gameplay through such tools, thinking "well, I'm not harassing other players with this, I'm not affecting anyone else's gameplay, they're not gonna care". Now it appears that maybe SE has a bug in their ear post-duping and is more actively going after such things, even if they don't directly affect other gamers.

I get why we'll see some "but I didn't do anything different!" threads/comments. Hell I'd wager there are players out here who started post-Salvage bans who've never seen a mass wave come through and this truly is shocking for them, and they legitimately did assume "everyone" was doing that. But the fact is that the moment you go past whatever mysterious threshold SE has you're at risk. Is that threshold just going past vanilla? Is it windower itself is ok? Or some addons? Or "some" gearswap functions? We can't know- why would they tell us what level of cheating is allowed?

Fear used to be a great motivator in preventing such things from circulating in such large numbers. Take that fear away and let complacency take over, this happens. But at the end of the day SE will always own the stick and decide how and when to use it.....and in all likelihood its an active moving scale based upon customer complaint levels and overall sub numbers.