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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/FullMetalMilkshake on 2024-12-20 14:50:19+00:00.

This is an update of an old post I made 2 years ago. I’ve completely rewritten it, corrected many details, updated dead links, and updated the story with the latest cheating scandals in FFXIV, enjoy!

An introduction to a terrifyingly big game

MMORPG’s to an outsider can be this terrifying indecipherable thing and to be honest I get it. Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) is a game that has hideously failed, been rebooted, had it’s redemption arc and then got 5 expansions with decade’s worth of stuff to do. Just completing the story can take 250 hours at least. Fortunately for you dear reader, this story will just focus on one small, but important part of the game, The raids!

What on earth is a raid?

What a raid is varies a lot between MMO’s. In FFXIV a raid is composed of eight players and primarily focuses on defeating a single enemy. Think of it as one big multiplayer boss fight that rewards really cool armour, weapons and player titles for beating it!

What is Ultimate Difficulty?

In FFXIV Raids come in three difficulties: Normal, Savage and Ultimate, with ultimate being the hardest of the three. To give you an idea of just how extremely difficult an ultimate raid is, I’ll go into a couple elements of the game:

First is the ‘job’ you play, FFXIV currently has 21 jobs you can play in an ultimate and if you want to clear a raid you will have to play your job perfectly. How hard is perfect? Well, this is a video of a Summoner playing their job on the level an ultimate raider would need to meet. Have no idea what’s going on here? That’s calm, you’re looking at one of the easiest jobs to play! This is one of the harder jobs to play. Now imagine juggling all that mayhem alongside the boss doing stuff like this

Oh, and that’s just one ‘mechanic’ (An action the raid boss takes). Ultimate raids have dozens of them stacked on top of each other. Here is a guide by Icy Veins of only one phase of a six-phase ultimate raid to give you an idea of how bad it gets

What you end up with is something that’s akin to being asked to solve a set of puzzles perfectly over and over, whilst being expected to play your job perfectly alongside 7 other people doing the same for hours and hours for days

Skill, teamwork and consistency are required of everyone. If a single player fails at any one of these, they can handicap the raid or go on to destroy their raid team. An ultimate will take the average raid team months to beat with over a 100 hours of playtime logged using a guide that is the size of a small book. And world first players beat ultimate raids, without any guide to speak of in a matter of days

However, this isn’t just because they are really good players. They have a terrible habit of constantly using mods…

The devs, the community and the strange state of mods

Mods are unofficial add-ons to a game, and they can improve the player experience in many ways, but they are also capable of making a raid much easier to beat

Now the FFXIV community has a very… strange and inconsistent attitude towards mods in the world first race. A good chunk of the playerbase comes from World of Warcraft (WoW) and In a game like WoW a world first race openly requires mods, and it is widely accepted by the playerbase there. In FFXIV however it is heavily looked down upon by the community, officially not permitted at all by the development team and yet, it is not enforced by any anti-cheat to speak of?

This becomes more complicated because not all mods are considered bad by the community. One of the most popular mods: The ACT Damage Parser which compiles very useful player performance metrics is accepted by the community despite it going against the game’s terms of service. You’ll likely be able to see it in most world first clears online and nobody gets punished for it unless they openly bully underperforming players in the chat with ACT performance metrics

One last note is FFXIV unlike WoW is on consoles and all those on console can’t use any mods at all. For the world first race, most players will play on PC anyway but for console players, mods stop there being a level playing field for everyone and some community resentment stems from this

Now you may be asking why it is the developers anti mods stance is not enforced?

The answer is: It’s extremely hard to do so

Square Enix has mentioned the definition of what an external tool is can go as far as using Discord to talk with fellow raiders or using an excel spreadsheet to compile damage metrics off your in-game battle log. Bans off that would make the frontpages of any gaming website and implementing an anti-cheat also takes a great level of development resources

So, what this has all led to is a very messy situation where:

1. All world first raiders openly use mods, but not all are okay…
2. Only some mods are accepted as okay by the wider community
3. The dev team just doesn’t do anything… Unless a raid team really upsets the community

Part 1: The Epic of Alexander (TEA)

The first two ultimate raids released for FFXIV in 2017 and 2018 were rather uneventful when it came to cheating allegations. There is likely a few reasons for this. Back then FFXIV was much smaller game with a much smaller audience. The raid scene was also recovering from an impossibly difficult set of savage difficulty raids that nearly killed off raiding in FFXIV. This combined with no public evidence of cheating meant it wasn’t until the third ultimate fight, The Epic of Alexander (TEA) that a raid team really tested the limits of what FFXIV community considered cheating

What was unique about the world first race to clear TEA, was compared to the previous two, It was fast. Unusually fast. So fast, that the world second clear took two more days to happen. To show why this was such a big deal here is the world first clear times for all ultimate’s up to present day:

The team that achieved this, Thoughts Per Second (TPS) were arguably the best raid team in the game at the time and to this day hold multiple world firsts for savage difficulty raid clears. But unlike their previous world firsts, this one made quite a few players upset because in the clear video it showed TPS using mods. With two in particular upsetting the playerbase

1:  A mod that automatically moved waymarks

What are waymarks? They are a useful visual aid that is often used to enable better player positioning in a raid as shown here. Why this pissed off a quite few people is because it is not practically possible to re-place your waymarks mid-fight. By using a mod to auto-place waymarks gives TPS an edge as they could more easily refer to safe parts of the arena during the fight, reducing failed attempts and making clearing the raid faster

2: A mod that did vocal readouts of the raid bosses moves

Cactbot is a mod that reads out what moves a boss does. Because a player has so much to focus on in a fight, having an external vocal readout can help reduce the load of information a player needs to mentally process. It’s one less thing for your eyes and mind to keep track on a very busy screen and makes the raid easier to beat

And so angry FFXIV nerds did what angry FFXIV nerds do. Make death threats to TPS members!

But it gets worse. Death threats aside one of the more humorous things to come out of this is what I can only describe as virtual conspiracy theory. Many players believed TPS cleared TEA so fast because they had their own private server. This is an utterly laughable idea because, to this day, there is no publicly available private server that can completely emulate a raid fight. This didn’t stop terminally online players bleating on about the …

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1hilers/video_games_ffxiv_the_ultimate_raid_world_first/