Stop Worrying About People Emulating Final Fantasy XIV's Servers

It’s that time again, the time when Yoshi-P takes to the Final Fantasy XIV blog to remind us all that Square Enix doesn’t allow the use of third-party mods and that you will be dealt with if discovered to have them. For the most part, the message is the same as before – although, Yoshi-P would appreciate it if everyone read the post in full. In fact, he explicitly asked people to "refrain from sharing excerpts of [the] text out of context". While we’re going to share some of the highlights here (Because it would be silly to just repost what he wrote) we suggest you also read the post.

To reiterate, "the use of third-party tools is strictly prohibited". Anyone found to be using them will have their accounts suspended at the bare minimum. Of course, continuing to use them after that could just get you banned outright. If you're wondering if there is a neat little definition of "third-party tools" that will allow you a loophole, there's not. Square Enix has determined it to not be worth the time and effort to look at every mod on the internet since it's easier to just ban all of them instead.

That said, they also can't check every PC in the world either, so it will still come down to players reporting each other. Perhaps not using your mods to irritate or torment other players is a good way to avoid that. (Just a thought.)

The post also addresses hacks and malicious software. Obviously, these are worse as the first attempts to manipulate the game serverside so that players can do things they definitely shouldn't be able to. The latter, well, that ends up being a problem for the player, doesn't it? Downloading mods can have risks, and viruses are one of those.

There is a bit of good news. If you're one of those people using third-party programs to improve your HUD because the current setup doesn't provide you with enough information, they’re going to be looking at the most used tools and try to enhance the HUD based on that information. Of course, most of this applies to high-end duties. Speaking of which, the post also notes that if they begin to feel acknowledging world-first winners in high-end duties contributes to the kind of competition that makes players feel obligated to use third-party tools, they're going to stop.

Finally, the post addresses the topic of datamining, leaks, and possible server emulation. With the last update, there was a bit of information that made it out into the wild beforehand. Images of the Dragonsong's Reprise boss were snatched up by dataminers as a result of not being masked properly and someone leaked a screenshot from a phase players hadn't reached yet. They suspect this latter was someone on the inside and are currently hunting them down.

These two incidents have some players worried that teams are using server emulators to figure out the battle and complete it. According to the post, this is near impossible as XIV requires a lot of different programs and many "specialized servers" to operate. Unless some ultimate players just happen to have a lot of money sitting around to spend on this it's probably a moot point. And, even if they did, they still wouldn’t be able to emulate new content before it’s released.