FURIOUS? PvP Hackers MIGHT Make FFXIV Devs TAKE ACTION

Channel:

Cole Evyx

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25,500

Published on May 1, 2022 5:17:10 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukqIm70n93U

Game:

Final Fantasy XIV (2010)

Duration: 12:58

3,670 views

104

RUINED FOR EVERYONE? Hackers in FFXIV PvP are undeniably causing a furious rage in the community. You know, the game mode that Square Enix invested a ton of money reworking significantly? Yeah. This might have staggering consequences for many FFXIV Communities.

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Timestamps:
0:00 This is why we can't have nice things in FFXIV
0:58 Who this impacts
1:53 Why would someone use cheats?
2:36 What bots can do and what they are not doing lol
4:16 There isn't AI or Machine Learning here
5:52 Theoretical TEA bot
7:02 WHY PvP Bots are Concerning!
8:38 The player uproar!
10:31 A painful problem
12:30 Concerned

This is why we can’t have nice things.


This may be one of the biggest threats to a massive part of the final fantasy 14 ecosystem and that is actually upsettingly enough not clickbait.

Square Enix currently has a policy where they don’t want to do things like anti cheat and evaluate stuff on your computer. Those days may be coming to an end shortly which is going to impact a lot of people.

We’re talking about purely cosmetic mods, we’re talking about user interface enhancements such as delveui to make your ui look like world of warcraft’s elvui for God only knows what reason eugh, we’re talking about mouse over click UI enhancements to apply say astrologian cards to team mates, we’re talking about marketboard bots and callout tools for raids, housing item placement tools, eureka trackers and oh so much more.

Before I continue talking I want to address two things about these bots:

First off everytime I hear someone else have a take about this questioning why someone would want a bot to play for them, it’s going to be bragging rights for getting a certain rank, or simply the pleasure of stomping people yes that even means in casual mode. There is a primal dopamine hit in an unfair gank, just look at overgearing low level ganking in open world pvp in other games. Joy from winning even imbalanced is a real thing.

Secondly people are always so surprised at oh my gosh the bot can do this or the bot can do that and say it can do too many things to list. I want to clearly say anything you can see on the screen is accessible to a program, but the most common way is to read in memory -- which then can be parsed into commands. Such as this damage. Of course there are more hoops than that, but basically it’s spat out. This can range from excessively difficult to trivial depending on which library you use.

But essentially like in this text editor here you can write code that can keep track of this and set a bunch of conditions.

Now these conditions can execute key presses, mouse movements, clicks, open other programs, make calls to external websites APIs, close other programs like literally about anything.

So when people are shocked at what the bots can do-- why are you shocked? Can you not press any keys? Can you not read what is presented on the screen?

There is not that much complicated in a script like in the text editor saying if enemy hp less than 35k use machinist limit break.

Now the oddest thing I’ve heard yet people talk about bots in terms of AI or machine learning. No. Not at all. These are at best behavioral trees that can be deeply rooted but based on what I’ve been told the bots do-- they are probably pretty surface level. While yes a montecarlo search tree combined with something like sarsa lambda could be massively fascinating as someone who has done exactly that and knows people personally that were involved with said algorithm the amount of time and simulations required makes any such speculation preposterous. The difference between a game like Go and 14 pvp is astronomical. Don’t be deceived by projects like deepmind’s alphastar for starcraft 2 published in nature in 2019. There was a significant amount of work and a mind blowing number of simulations that went into that.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03298-6

But that cycles back to, a program that reads in memory which is basically anything, that can execute any command, can do pretty much anything.

If someone truly wanted to, they could make a program that would take the logs of top parsing TEA clears or upcoming Dragonsong’s reprise ultimate clears, watch their vods if necessary, feed these into a program that would parse it and then have a program sequentially execute every action down to the pixel perfect movement and camera rotations. Multiply this across 8 computers and bam you suddenly have a perfect TEA farming static of 8 bots

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