Final Fantasy 14 had its latest Ultimate raid released this week, and there's already a controversy. In case you're completely unfamiliar, Ultimate raids are the biggest endgame challenge an Eorzean can tackle—tough fights that can take months to learn and beat for your average joe. World-first raiders dedicated enough to block off an entire week are a lot faster, but even then, Ultimates are still gruelling gauntlets meant to test their mettle. Teams, called 'statics', assemble and pull long shifts to take them on, sacrificing sleep and sanity to be the first to do so.
All this to say, they're a task worthy of a race to world first. The 'victors' this time were GRIND, according to MogTalk's Frosty, who tracks the world's first races. GGs were given to the undisputed champions, and—wait, hold on, what's that pixel in the middle of the screenshot?
The memes are already rolling in from r/ffxiv
While GRIND has since deleted the screenshot, forcing me to instead share some top-tier memes, a single pixel in the celebratory screengrab has served as a smoking gun. It's a telltale sign of the Pixel Perfect Plus plugin, which shows your character's exact hitbox for the purposes of dodging AoE attacks—huge when you're in an Ultimate, where deadly mechanics can render most of the floor into instant death zones. Naughty, naughty.
For context, while MMORPGs like World of Warcraft might permit the use of interface addons, third-party plugins are against Final Fantasy 14's terms of service, no matter how cool they might be. However, they're still commonly used, because Square Enix has taken a 'don't be an idiot' philosophy towards them.
Essentially, the dev team won't take measures to spy on your computer with intrusive anti-cheat software, but they will ban you if you're obviously cheating. Similarly, you can get away with having a damage meter plugin to track your own progress just fine, but if you flame someone in a dungeon for low DPS, you're cruising for a suspension.
In this case, Frosty has already disqualified GRIND from the race: "I had our team research the plugin that was used by the team and its capabilities makes it eligible for disqualification from the MogTalk leaderboard. GRIND did not approve this member to use the plugin and do not agree with the actions he took."
One issue at hand here is that MogTalk's tracking (which I'm not knocking, it's a big fan project and a huge haul on the community's part) allows for world first clears that aren't streamed. This isn't entirely unreasonable, since raiders might want to avoid feeding intel to their direct competition, but it also makes cheating way easier.
The absurd thing is that this isn't even the first time it's happened. Back in 2022, raiders for the Dragonsong's Reprise (Ultimate) were caught red-handed using plugins. It happened again in 2023, causing Square to strip the world first winners for The Omega Protocol (Ultimate) of their achievements and titles.
The fact that these people are, plugin use aside, still probably at the relative top of their class, dedicating dozens of hours over the course of several gruelling days to thwart the ultimate challenge, and are still somehow so terrible at getting away with cheating boggles the mind. This is like an Olympic athlete getting busted because they forgot to take their steroids off the kitchen counter when they took a selfie.
It also makes me nervous that Yoshi-P will someday finally have had enough, because while I would totally, absolutely never use plugins myself, most third-party tool use is incredibly harmless. Speech bubbles, cosmetic tweaks, outfit designers, furniture placement assists, and the like all fall under that umbrella.
That's saying nothing of the plugins that might help disabled gamers play, DPS trackers so raiders can theorycraft, or ping compensators that let players with over 70ms still do their rotations, because Square still hasn't fixed its weird animation locks that just break certain jobs on anything that's not blissful fibre optic. Country-specific infrastructure isn't a skill issue.
If anything, there's too much of an ecosystem in place for Square to really bring down the hammer. What might happen, though, is that the development team will simply stop caring about world first races at all. As Yoshi-P said back in 2022, "if our recognition encourages excessive competition and controversy to the extent that players resort to third-party tools, I regret to say we may have to reconsider making comments [about world first races] in the future." This is, categorically, why we can't have nice things.
