Rotation bots have killed off the end game in FF

[Wrecktangle]

A lot of it just comes down to the work and time involved to be "competitive" in something.

I like watching SC2 tournaments, for example, but the amount of time and work it would take for me to get "good" at the game would simply be better spent on literally anything else in my life that would be more productive. I might play it just casually on and off when I feel like it, sure. But that's about it.

You could still be competitive at SC2 by simply playing it. You don't need to compete in tournaments to be competing.

Playing a sport, or participating in something where competition exists, doesn't automatically mean the person is competitive or is actively competing against someone else. It's possible to enjoy the game, the sport, the "thing" for what it brings you or does for you personally rather than for the competition itself. i.e. It's possible to enjoy playing basketball with your friends just because you enjoy playing basketball, enjoy the physical activity, etc... without being actively competitive (you're not playing with the explicit purpose of winning or doing better than someone else, winning is not the goal). A certain level of competition is inherent in that activity though, simply because the activity is by nature about winning or losing through skill and ability, but that's not why they do it or what they enjoy about it. The competition isn't the point, playing the game is the point.

Crazy anecdote time. I was playing a pickleball match with an older woman who was livid with me because I missed 2 serves (was practicing trying to hit as close to the back line as possible). I explained to her that I still had fun even though we lost and apologized I was practicing my serve. She told me it wasn't the time for practice (it was a rec game, it's LITERALLY the time to practice), but I was blown away by how split people were on this topic. The match was still competitive despite me playing not necessarily to win, but rather get as many hits in as possible, not end the game as quickly as possible. It was a pretty clean 50/50 split between the community present (~40 people) on who was "in the right".

Really surprised me, so to tie that to your statement I'm not confident it's as simple as you're implying. By not actively competing you may be inhibiting and upsetting your peers, or even your opponents if they're lesser skilled and feel like you weren't taking them seriously.

Why do we still try to learn and play it? Personal enjoyment (or because it is your job, if you are a pro). As a hobbyist, I will never be able to compete against anyone, much less a professional that made the Piano the center of his life. "Competing in your sphere" is an absurd concept to me. What would be the point to compete against other hobbyists?

No I don't do any sports, even as a kid I thought that expending all that energy just to run after some dumb ball was a retarded thing to do.
On top of that, I have 80% disability, so not much motivation to do anything with my body anyway, since all other kids were orders of magnitude better than I was. :'D

I figured my Special Olympics analogy would hit a bit harder home with you given your statement. By your statements it sounds like you do not support it and think it either primitive or retarded (your words, not mine).

The only competition, if you can call it that, I found fun was with my Co-SPriest. We were very close in skill, and it was fun to see who came out on top in the parses. We didn't compete in a hostile manner though, we frequently exchanged tips on what we were doing and even passed on gear for the other, so we could keep a level playing field. It was never about winning for us.

You literally competed in your sphere and improved as a result. That's what competition is all about.

[Katchii]

Crazy anecdote time. I was playing a pickleball match with an older woman who was livid with me because I missed 2 serves (was practicing trying to hit as close to the back line as possible). I explained to her that I still had fun even though we lost and apologized I was practicing my serve. She told me it wasn't the time for practice (it was a rec game, it's LITERALLY the time to practice), but I was blown away by how split people were on this topic. The match was still competitive despite me playing not necessarily to win, but rather get as many hits in as possible, not end the game as quickly as possible. It was a pretty clean 50/50 split between the community present (~40 people) on who was "in the right".

Really surprised me, so to tie that to your statement I'm not confident it's as simple as you're implying. By not actively competing you may be inhibiting and upsetting your peers, or even your opponents if they're lesser skilled and feel like you weren't taking them seriously.

I think you may be conflating the ideas that because you're not playing to compete automatically means you're allowed to not do your best and practice. You were practicing during a game, of course people who were there to compete would be upset with you because you admitted that you weren't taking the game seriously. Taking it seriously doesn't mean competitive, it means doing your best.

If someone were to come into a raid (one that's on farm or something, not progression) and start practicing their rotation or new talents or whatever on a boss and ended up doing horrible perhaps even causing the raid to wipe, I imagine the result would be similar. The person would be told do that before the raid, on a training dummy or on mobs in the world.

You're right in that it's not simple, though. My experience isn't entirely different than yours, rec games are just games where people who don't compete in serious competitions play and stay active, that doesn't mean they're not competitive. But as long as the people playing are doing their best and are at at least an acceptable level of skill, it goes fine. But it's never been the place for actual practice, in my experience, you can try a new thing once or twice to see if it works but not end up "throwing" the game because you're not doing your best.

[Ghost of Cow]

You could still be competitive at SC2 by simply playing it. You don't need to compete in tournaments to be competing.

Well, we may be using different shades of the word "competitive", then.

If you mean just, "Playing the game and doing what you can to the best of your ability - i.e. playing to win", then sure, I'll always do that.

To me, winning some games in Platinum rank doesn't make me a "competitive player", though. Just a casual with a little game knowledge.

[Grinning Serpent]

You could still be competitive at SC2 by simply playing it. You don't need to compete in tournaments to be competing.

I mean, you kind of do. Just laddering isn't really competing, it's just polishing your e-peen so you can wave it at people and make them tell you that yes you're a big strong lad. Or hitting some kind of minimum threshold to be able to enter automated tournaments or the like.

There's a wide gulf between just playing a bo1 on a ladder and playing bo3's or bo5's or bo7's in an organized tournament environment, even moreso if it's a tournament structured like GSL.

To use another game as an example, ladder games are like going to your local nerd store for Friday Night Magic. You'll probably find some competent players there, and you'll find a lot of (sometimes literally) "babby's first game" players there. It's not "competitive" except in the strictest sense of the word.

[Logwyn]

This is guaranteed to happen when you dumb down rotations enough that a macro can run them.

I would still offer up that you can never make a rotation complex enough that a computer could not run better than a person.

[Necromantic]

That's entirely missing the point of Wreck's argument.

In any given sport, there are major and minor leagues, youth leagues, intramural etc...; in chess there are a ton of different brackets, in things like wrestling/boxing there are weight classes; and in plenty of sports or activities, you are just trying to better yourself. The notion that you can't compete if you are somewhere in the middle or even the end is ridiculous. It's like asking why do people run the marathon if they aren't going to come in at the front.

In this game people compete for world first, data center first, server first, or even just amongst their friend group, or hell just to see if they can do the next tier faster than the one before. Gatekeeping the desire to compete is silly.

It was just a very poor choice in analogies. My point to him still stands.

And as far as those different leagues/brackets, how many people honestly care about anything but the top? How many people do you know who buy season tickets to youth league baseball? Pokemon... when people develop strategies and use for baselines, they refer to the masters bracket.

[loras]

I would still offer up that you can never make a rotation complex enough that a computer could not run better than a person.

This.
Which is precisely why pointless inward-oriented rotations should be culled from the game; leave bot stuff to the bots.

[Gorsameth]

I would still offer up that you can never make a rotation complex enough that a computer could not run better than a person.

Sure but its a matter of degrees.

A decision tree based on buffs, procs and cooldowns is a lot harder to implement as a bot then a simple fixed repeating rotation of a certain set of buttons.

Heck the dumbest I have probably ever seen (outside of 1 button spam) was WotLK beta Enhancement shamans when the near optimal way to play was a simple /random macro with the varies cd abilities and it would just fire off whatever was off cooldown. (this also lead to the change in how these macro commands work to prevent it in the future).

[Granyala]

I figured my Special Olympics analogy would hit a bit harder home with you given your statement. By your statements it sounds like you do not support it and think it either primitive or retarded (your words, not mine).

You literally competed in your sphere and improved as a result. That's what competition is all about.

Aye, I still think that most sports are retarded. That's the activity not the people doing it, of course. This is just a personal preference.
Special Olympics is not really a fitting analogy, because these people are inherently not on equal footing with healthy people. No matter how hard they train or how motivated they are, they will never be able to compete with a healthy human being. In some respects, you can see them as another species. Naturally they need to compete amongst their own.

It would be like comparing a raider in greens that cannot get more gear no matter how many bosses he kills vs. a raider in mythic gear.

That is not the case for most players. In video games, most people are on equal footing, yet most refuse to invest the time it takes to get to the top, yet somehow still think that they are "competitive raiders" and behave as such. Welcome to the "wannabe-tryhard" group.

Did I really "compete" with my buddy-SP, when it was never really about winning for me?
I'd classify it more as "learning from each other" than some hostile "Imma going to stomp you to show you my superiority" competitive behavior.

As another poster already suggested: we might have differing definitions about what competition really is.

[Necromantic]

I figured my Special Olympics analogy would hit a bit harder home with you given your statement. By your statements it sounds like you do not support it and think it either primitive or retarded (your words, not mine).

No, it was just not a good analogy to make in this case. You cannot compare competitive sports tiers to something that was designed for people with mental or physical handicaps. That's very unfair and disingenuous. To be honest, I'm pretty confident you already know that.

[Wrecktangle]

Special Olympics is not really a fitting analogy, because these people are inherently not on equal footing with healthy people. No matter how hard they train or how motivated they are, they will never be able to compete with a healthy human being. In some respects, you can see them as another species. Naturally they need to compete amongst their own.

You're still missing the entire point. You're looking at competition as only the elite of the elite. That's not how the real world or really ANYTHING is. Why else are their junior leagues? High School / College sports? Why are men often separated from women? Why are there weight classes?

There are so many inherent variables that's why competition is done within your sphere. Saying that you can't compete or be competitive because you're not elite is a MIND boggling and reductive stance.

It would be like comparing a raider in greens that cannot get more gear no matter how many bosses he kills vs. a raider in mythic gear.

This is the opposite of what I am saying. This is competition outside your sphere. I am a nationally ranked USTA 4.5 player. I don't play professional players because it wouldn't be competitive. I could barely keep one warm at the US Open if I tried 100%. You're saying that I am not competing because I'm not a top pro.

That is not the case for most players. In video games, most people are on equal footing, yet most refuse to invest the time it takes to get to the top, yet somehow still think that they are "competitive raiders" and behave as such. Welcome to the "wannabe-tryhard" group.

Did I really "compete" with my buddy-SP, when it was never really about winning for me?
I'd classify it more as "learning from each other" than some hostile "Imma going to stomp you to show you my superiority" competitive behavior.

As another poster already suggested: we might have differing definitions about what competition really is.

Yes you did. You are saying competition has to be hostile and that's grossly misinformed and flat out inaccurate.

What EXACTLY do you think competition is?

[StillMcfuu]

I would still offer up that you can never make a rotation complex enough that a computer could not run better than a person.

Yes and no,
In the raw standard of always standing behind an enemy and pressing buttons, an AI will be better. Once you throw movement, reaction to other players, avoiding mechanics etc all into the same pot, AI doesn't react as efficiently as it used too. We are getting there though.

Still FFXIV issue is its brain dead easy and there isn't much in the way of proccs, snapshotting, or other dynamic changes to the rotation. You are behind the enemy it's 123, you are on the side it's 145, aoe is 678, and so on.

In that way, the botting problem is more a game design issue. If pressing a button and letting a scripted rotation play out is preferable to just doing that rotation on bosses that take too long to kill, that's game design. Although idk what people expect, that kind of pedantic repetitive gameplay is traditional of Asian market MMOs.

[Granyala]

You're still missing the entire point. You're looking at competition as only the elite of the elite. That's not how the real world or really ANYTHING is. Why else are their junior leagues? High School / College sports? Why are men often separated from women? Why are there weight classes?

There are so many inherent variables that's why competition is done within your sphere. Saying that you can't compete or be competitive because you're not elite is a MIND boggling and reductive stance.

You're saying that I am not competing because I'm not a top pro.

What EXACTLY do you think competition is?

I am aware that the real world creates a lot of "spheres" as you call it, in order to make the competition as fair as possible, because IRL there are a lot of differences you cannot overcome any other way. Examples you already gave: age, weight, gender, newbie competitions, intermediate competitions, pro vs non pro etc.

These make sense. E.g.: a hobbyist doesn't have the freedom to practice as much as a person that made the hobby his life-long profession. He will never be able to compete against them.

Are all these competitions actually meaningful?
Is it actually meaningful if John Doe thinks he is ultra competitive when he plays the soccer team of an opposing farm and has to win at all costs in order to look good to his peers?
Personally: I think not on any grand scale. no. Nobody except Jon Doe and maybe his teammates would actually care.


These aspects do not apply to video games though, and that is the competition we're actually talking about. One could argue for age based separation, because hand/eye coordination and reaction times in twitch shooters but that's not relevant to MMORPGs that are quite slow paced. You also don't need to practice 6h a day for a decade + study the subject to get to a professional level, like you would for a musical instrument.

So really, "competing in your shpere", as a concept, is meaningless in most videogames in general.
You (general you) are NOT a competitive gamer if you battle yourself with other casual guilds for Rank 48941 on some anonymous guild/player ranking website. You are a gamer that cares about his performance and tries to improve yourself, hence why you use the measuring stick, which is commendable but don't get any illusions of Grandeur and most certainly you do not get the right to lord your "performance" over others and look down upon them.

In the end, what is competition to me? Beating the other guys at all costs within the ruleset of the game/sport and coming out on top. It's an inherently hostile act, a fight to the death (figuratively spoken) where the player ensures all the advantages he possibly can to solidify his victory/increase the gap.
IRL: in your shpere of possibility. In video games: world first material.

To say that I was competitive against my Co-Shadow, when I passed on tools of the trade so he could increase his performance and even beat me at times, is absurd. As a competitive player, I'd never have allowed that because winning would by my #1 priority.
Though to be honest: I have no idea what to call our behavior back then. Fun sparring matches, perhaps?

If you want to discuss this further, lets take it to PN please. We've derailed the thread enough as it is.

In order to circle back to the actual topic of this thread: this "Beating the other guys at all costs" mindset that competitive behavior breeds is also the reason why many people, both in games and in real life, try to break out of their sphere by using unfair advantages, if they sense that they can't cut it the natural way.
Doping in Sports is pretty much equal to using automation in videogames.

[The Casualty]

What an unhealthy, relativistic, and toxic mindset to have that needlessly gatekeeps people.

Have you never competed for anything non-video game related in your life? It seems like you put it on a purist pedestal. JFC, that combined with the whole disabled people are essentially another species in the schemes of competition, which is a sick take on it's own.

I've had some state/regional records in my young adult days related to sports - mostly powerlifting, and the camaraderie associated with trying to beat others while you all strive to do your best is nothing like you describe competition to be. Shit, even football, where the point is to hit the other guy as hard as you can, the animosity falls away when you aren't in the immediate situation of trying to hurt the opposition.

What you are describing is poor sportsmanship and a very unhealthy view of competition.

[shise]

They asked for it.

Last time I checked it, the rotations were absurdly complex. What is the need for that? it´s not about complexity, it is about direct feedback from a class.
Sometimes, the easiest, most basic feels good and then it is fun.

[Lordofbelbol]

I don't want to make a long post about the evils of inaccurate 3rd party parsing software, and how they mislead the community. But in the past year (more than ever) I have witnessed a steep incline in the performance of players who were really bad at the game. Select free companies and groups are all top ranked in their rotations.

So what am I talking about here? end game raiders in FF are using these advanced rotation bot programs which allow the players to execute perfect rotations without pressing a single button. Because raids like ultimates and savage are so scripted in FF, cheaters are able to beat a boss with a perceived perfect rotation without ever having to press a button. Those who are not doing this are left at a big disadvantage. Community has become fragmented and people have been left behind. And those left behind are quitting the game in large numbers. It is a ghost town.

A streamer of FF was brave enough to comment on this issue, and show an example of the cheating happening in real time. Very brave of him considering how Square Enix bans anyone who speaks poorly of their game regardless of the intentions.



Video:



This botting at the top level is not new. Here are some people launching allegations against each other over rotationbots when they were commonplace in 2020.

https://twitter.com/inhamez/status/1304434786706968578

I want to keep this post about rotationbots; because they hurt the most (imo). But players have been exploiting for ages. Here is a clip of the leader of group with a world first clear actually testing out exploits in 2020

https://twitter.com/ayafromfflogs/st...C14deXnvchAAAA




The player in the video has no actions on his bars. Most of the top raiders in FF have coding backgrounds and it shows. The game is basically helpless and naked against these type of softwares. Now if you talk about this on any of the popular discords you will be immediately told that the game is fine and to immediately shut up. These discord servers are also the ones that literally make it their job to always show the game in a positive light, and to go far and beyond for attracting customers to it. But what they forget is that the experience is what keeps a game alive, not lies and bull.

They need to find a fix. Maybe people can come up with solutions in this thread. We need to talk about this. Sweep this under a rug and it becomes a cancer later. Maybe add random number generator type of actions to keep bots from being the best thing you can do for your dps. Or this game will have the same exact fate FFXI did because of bots; a slow painful death where the only people left playing are the hackers with coding backgrounds.

If every raid tier has drama with hacks, exploits and people doing world first prog behind the scenes with shady tactics, then maybe it is time that Square Enix takes action? It is sad because right now the end game is about who is best at using 3rd party software. And I do not mean ban streamers by taking action rofl. In recent live letter Yoshida said he will not talk about this anymore. But he has to talk about this, he should be talking about this. It is his job to foster a fair competitive end game environment. If the problem is there then why is he not going to talk about it anymore? how will we ever get a solution?

And these problems are not marginal or outliers, not in FF. Almost half the people I knew are delving in it. Very scary and discouraging. There is a reason why it's been a hot topic in the community. And square enix stating that they do not wish to talk about it anymore time after time actually has become an advertisement for "We can't stop hacking. Go ahead and do it"

I fully support integration of ant-cheating softwares that run at the deepest level; similar to Valorant.

Why? because square enix already has so much data on me. I trust them and don't mind an "Invasive" anti-cheat. What I do see again and again is square enix announcing people losing their account access to 3rd party software use. No one knows what is put in these invasive 3rd party softwares, many of the .dlls are not open source and the devs refuse to make them so. They are invasive because FFlogs even has a built in advertisement thing that has been sending me relevant advertisement which is downright creepy. They are not any less invasive. I am sure the actual cheating software are worse.

Edit: And there are people who are asking me why it should bother me. It bothers me because I care about a fair competition and that is what I like about the end game. If I am required to hack without being told so; to be a part of the top teams, then I am just not going to play the game anymore. And not playing the game makes me sad and makes square enix less money. We are both losing from this transaction. The bar keeps going up and up, and like I said; it'd only leave the top coders and hackers in the end game. And I can definitely feel that content is dying way faster than ever before. Can't find people because the big gap between hackers and non-hackers was very discouraging to the end game community these last few months.

If that is not a long post then idk what is xD

[Saradain]

FFXIV endgame most definitely is not dead, nor is the game a ghost town. Considering the OP started the thread with referring to another one of his threads with a line that looks...very funny, I can't take the premise of this one seriously either. And also OP not discussing his own topic in the thread (didn't post anything after his first post here), I must wonder what the purpose is here, making controversial statements with nothing to back them up and then vanishing.

In fact, I count "just" 9 controversial statements in his paragraphs in the first and only post he even bothered to type. With nothing to back them up.

Sorry, the game definitely is not dead, nor are the endgame raiders fragmented. You speak like everyone would be using the said rotation bots. And not using them does not matter one bit, unless you are going for world firsts, or participating in a very much minority part of the raiders doing speedruns where absolute perfection matters.

And if you use rotation bots to play the game for you, that's where SE's whatever special forces team they have come in. And oh, you probably have a very weird idea of playing the game by not playing it yourself, letting a bot to do the work...Feels like doing serious playthroughs in a game by using cheat codes.

Good luck getting Square Enix to use any kind of anti-cheats that probe your PC akin to Blizzard's Warden. Against japanese laws or something. And if such thing would be implemented, my god, regardless of if you like/hate people using graphical mods (not talking about gshade), outright banning every single player having a clothing mod is not going to help if you think the game is being deserted!

[Lordofbelbol]

And I'm glad people who do this kind of thing rightfully get reported.

Anybody who goes into a PUG and harasses people for not meeting some personal standard of theirs should be banned. That's exactly what's wrong with the community.

It's a pug to parse, the whole idea of that pug is every does high dps?? ppl who aren't Bis are not performing optimal shouldn't join those raids that it.
anyways can you leave 2009 ? it feels like i am having a discussion with someone at that year lawl

[Daedius]

Sorry man but this viewpoint is lame. You can't expect human beings not to compete at anything where comparison exists. We compete over who takes the best pictures of food they didn't make, we're going to compete over who does the most damage in a video game - and if you can't see how much damage you do, we'll compete over how fast you finish it, and if we can't do that for some reason we'll compete over who does it with the least amount of people. It's literally human nature. Competition is fun. Much like football, you can play for fun on a weekend with your mates and never engage in the competition if you want to, but ultimately fighting against people's desire to compete is like trying to deny gravity.

My participation medal is shinier than yours!

[God Save The King]

Are you suggesting that the solution is to do nothing, then? Runescape almost 20 years ago at least considered the concept of random events to break up their easily-bottable game. Running a script that plays a character in WoW's mythic raiding to a rank 1 parse would be nigh impossible. Your comment reads like an excusing Square Enix to say that anti-cheat is too 'invasive' and encounter design is too hard so people should just accept it when 9/10 people they play with aren't actually playing their characters. At that point it isn't actually a video-game, it's Bandersnatch with transmog.

If you have access to the game's data (which you will through a client) you can script it. Go onto basically any WoWhead guide for dps and you'll see the best dps priority list. Build a bot that reads the game's state, makes the right decision, and broadcasts the keypress. But you'll be basically instantly banned as that kind of bot is fairly trivial for warden to detect. FFXIV doesn't have an intrusive client side bot detection software, so they rely on server-side detection which is a lot harder.

I mean heck, I routinely build Weakauras that tell me the next button to press in my priority list so I don't have to actually think to dps, I just blast. I always get 99s and a few 100s as dps. I could build a bot to just do that for me pretty easily, but I'd be banned right away so no point. I'm surprised I don't see more mythic raiders doing WAs like I do, but I guess there's some value to just knowing your rotation so well that you can essentially ignore it and entirely focus on mechanics.