Final Fantasy 14's Third Party Tools Are A Double-Edged Sword That Prove The Game Is Unbalanced

thegamer.com:

If you’re a Final Fantasy 14 player, you've likely heard about the recent third-party tool discourse. Sure, console players might not fully understand or care as it doesn’t affect them, but the community has become quite divided in the past week. So what’s the beef?

Square Enix recently clamped down on players using third-party tools, dishing out suspensions to those found using them, and bans for any repeat offenders. This might seem like a no-brainer, after all, everyone knows that using hacks and mods to give yourself an unfair advantage over other players is a no-no, yet it’s not quite as straightforward as it seems.

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Arguably, many players feel as though Square Enix has fostered the idea of a grey area when it comes to its stance of “the use of third-party tools is strictly prohibited”, as it often overlooked players who used tools that didn’t affect the gameplay of others, provided that players weren’t shouting from the rooftops about using them. As a result, players have felt quite comfortable using certain tools, such as parsers or UI modifiers to adapt the information being displayed to suit their needs.

Herein lies much of the problem - in the recent affirmation of its policy on third-party tools, Square Enix detailed some examples of which tools were prohibited, including “Modification of the UI to display additional information”. Now while you might be inclined to point out that using any third-party tool is against the Terms of Service, and therefore there should be no debate here, it’s not as if the grey area no longer exists, many players feel it’s just that Square Enix has suddenly moved the goalposts. Notably, there was no mention of shaders in the