Nyzul Uncharted: nice gear, cheater!Follow

Your dog is thinking about it's next meal, your cat is thinking about what you'd look like in iron shackles kneeling before it.

Exactly.... I couldn't have said it better. :3

The team that was losing should have just punched the guy holding the ball, right Raelix? Punching is totally against the rules and is blatant cheating, but that's acceptable when the rules aren't the way you thibk they should be, right?

I find it acceptable awesome to punch an opposing teammate in the face if they're a robot, or computer simulation, and I would make sure everyone I knew knew about it, preferably catching it on video.

Based on how good the gear is and how you are guaranteed to get exactly what you want when you win (plus a chance at additional drops), the win rate should not be 100%. And as I posted earlier, it's very much NOT a 100% win rate. Only the most blatant hacks (which will get you suspended or worse) will get you close to 100%. Fillmode and lamp dats will get you to 25%-50% or so depending on your group. Higher % if you are the best of the best (not me). And if your group is inept, they too are not enough to punch a ticket to Floor 100.

Adjust your bra straps jtf, your chip is showing.

FFXI was the genesis of my game design policy "Random is never fun."

I personally think the opposite is truer. Monsters Developers have a direct control over, where as players they don't. It take a massive amount of time for them to test something enough to know every single way a player might use abilities. Especially in rpgs where tactics can be applied. I remember when I figured out a built a deck in Phantasy Star online episode 3 C.A.R.D. Revolution. It took me about a month to figure out how to make this deck nearly flawless. Only one rarely use defensive card could counter the deck.(something the player base never really realized) And a handful of weapon/monster cards that actually had the trait innately. When I finally took it to a public area and obliterated my opponent in a tournament in 2 days it was the most over used deck online. Just to give an example of when players do things they don't expect players to do or find interesting ways to use the abilities they are given. Hell look at their happy mistake with ninja(Our happy their frustration). And PvP is such a different animal from PvE. Hell just go into PvP and see how vastly different your abilities and skills are in potency and effectiveness. Hell I remember landing a dark magic spell as white mage no problem in PvP where I have a better chance of breaking 500 damage with banish I if I tried to land that on a monster. Any who, it's much harder to control what players do so adjusting for a PvP situation in an RPG is much more difficult then having direct control over one of the elements, in my opinion.

Any who, I didn't realize Nyzul isle the only place in FFXI where we can have a satisfying experience. Guess cheaters are the only ones that feel satisfied in this game.

Edit: Also I agree this thread should go back to cats and dogsXD

Aristicats had cats that were the good guys!

Edited, Jul 1st 2012 1:42pm by Laxedrane

I should have said instead of "This event is luck based" with the coin reference to "this event is EXCESSIVELIY luck based". Obviously it requires skill. It requires coordination and all that fun stuff. Luck is not the only factor. However, any event that is excessively luck based stops being fun. People are comparing this to chess, basketball, and whatever else. This is PvM. Not PvP. In a PvP game, any PvP game, each team (assuming it is 2) has a 50% chance of winning with the game being virtually ENTIRELY determined by who is more skilled. There is no luck in chess. No luck in basketball. These are head to head skill based contests and usually only have ONE aspect where luck comes into play. Flipping a coin to see who moves/gets the ball 1st. While it has been proven that the player going 1st has a minute (like less than 2%) advantage in some of these games, compare the impact of luck on the winner in a scenario like that vs NI.

Compare the impact of luck in ANY event to date to the new NI.

When you loose because a monster just kicks your ass, you regroup, restrategize, change jobs, gear up more, do SOMETHING to say "this is what i learned and next time we can overcome (insert reason you lost). When an 'ideal' group of players with absurd gear (FAAAAR exceeding anything most people will EVER get), use 3rd party voice chat to communicate more efficiently than possible in the game, and otherwise a superior setup in every way the game allows and then some (voice chat) and still just 'rolls the dice' the event is no longer fun. I did plenty of plane jane runs. Once you reach a certain point, you realize, there is no significant adjustments to be made and you just cleared floor 70 because you got 2-3 jumps and a kill all floor with 3-4 HNMs and WS restricted, you realize no amount of 'skill' will fix it. You dont leave the run saying "well do better next time guys!" you leave and say "I hope SE doesnt @#%^ us again next time".

When luck REGULARLY and REPEATEDLY kills an otherwise successful run, theres no fun in that. It makes you want to punch a bag of babys. I enjoy a challenge as much (arguably moreso based on my personality) as the next guy. There is no growth, or skill to be learned.Games like baseket ball dont have random meteors that crash into the game occasionally killing a team mate and ref just says "well guess you gotta keep going -1 player vs the other full team opponents". There are no completely random "@#%^ yous" in any world renowned competitive sport. EVERY sanctioned sport with large followings has rules to REDUCE the impact of luck to make it a true skill based competition between players. But they are playing PEOPLE. Not code.

How much fun would an HNM be that was basically a pushover, but had a 50% chance to use a move that was ZONE wide deathga. Cant be stunned. Cant be PDed. Cant do anything. It WILL kill you if it uses it period. There is nothing you can do to mitigate, or prevent it. ANd it just 'decides' if its going to use it. That is getting trolled. Thats not fun. Thats not a learning experience and for @#%^s sake it doesnt make the monster HARD or CHALLENGING or DIFFICULT. It makes it a CHEAP POS.Luck=/= difficulty or challenge. Please stop saying it. Also, please stop making these broad generalizations that all cheaters are bad evil @#%^s. I can rattle off a list of 'evil cheaters' that are the nicest, most helpful damn people in the world. I can also list off a bunch of @#%^ing pricks that play on PS2. Protip: Gross generalizations about a group of people based on limited sample/information and/or biased is friggin ignorant.


Dear god this person gets it!

Edited, Jul 1st 2012 2:06pm by Banalaty

You just described Mario Party.

I agree with everything you said.

Edited, Jul 1st 2012 9:04am by detlef

This is one of those arguments where really no one's opinion will be changed, and I argue that the entire discussion itself is a pointless one.

There are people that cheat and people that don't. The ones that do will continue to do so even if they are ridiculed in the process by their fellow players, because they like the advantage that it gives them in completing what they're using those cheats for (flee hacks, claim bots, etc). They feel that the current system is unfair for one reason or another, and they aren't opposed to using "illegal" methods to get their way. Only one of two things can happen that will stop these kinds of players from using those cheats. 1) They lose interest in the event, be it because new gear has come out that makes those previously sought out items obsolete, or they've obtained all the items from there, and they don't have any drive to continue, or 2) Direct intervention by Square Enix that either makes it impossible for these tools to be used or disciplinary action is taken on those individuals (though even that sometimes isn't enough).

Then there are those players that are adamant against using cheats. Be it morality or just because they prefer the event as it's laid out before them, they won't cheat, nor do they condone the actions of those that do.

There really isn't a gray area with this situation, there will be people will use it and berate those that won't for being cowards and there will be those who won't use it and berate those that will for being spoiled. It's better to just accept that there are going to be those that have those differing opinions, no matter what.

SE decides that. If you think SE simply doesn't know about this, then report it. SE will decide whether its worth acting on or not.

Personally, I agree with those who have made the distinction in this thread already about cheats that directly impact other players vs cheats that don't. To me, price fixing practices on the AH -- which don't violate the ToS or require the use of 3rd party tools -- are a far worse "cheat" than players using various tools in an instanced environment like Nyzul.

At best, you can argue that players who cheat to get those rewards devalue the accomplishment of players that got the same rewards without using those cheats. If there was some kind of sanctioned system for buying and selling these rewards for real money, I would have a different stance on this issue.

If there was no gray area then we wouldn't be having this discussion. Come on Vlor, you're smarter than that.

Yeah, I'd like a kraken club. Should I dupe hack to get one because the odds of one dropping in a BCNM are low? It's what everyone is doing when they hack in Nyzul.

Go play in the test server if you want all of the best gear in the game. Simple solution.

Also, you have a choice to play FFXI or not. If you don't like the rules in the game, you can find another game that fits your taste. If you don't like the current rules, make a petition and send it to SE. Or vote will your wallet and cancel your account.

[sarcasm] And hurray to all the people that cheat that make such data so easily converted and replaced so this can happen: http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10&mid=1341105959300012125 [/sarcasm]

See what "Or you could not give a @#%^ since it has no direct effect on you." can get you? A direct quote from there... sigh...

Cheating and dat hacking will just make SE crack down harder on legit players. Harder anti-piracy laws. Restrictions on content downloads and lots of big brother programs on your computer that will KEEP you from cheating. Is that what you want? Cheating effects us ALL and I'm tired of people saying it doesn't...

Edited, Jul 2nd 2012 2:03am by Prrsha

If you die, your dog will likely lie beside you, ever faithful, possibly until it dies as well.
However, your cat will just eat you. /truestory.jpg

You can sell off a Kraken Club when you're done using it. You can't sell off Nyzul gear. If you and a bunch of other people duped some piece of R/Ex gear, it wouldn't impact me. If I was a K Club owner, and you and a bunch of other people duped K Club, I would probably get upset because the value of my K Club would plummet as a result.

Easy fix. Get SE to ban everyone with windower. Then the 3 people that dont use it can live in happy hippie land with no cheaters and still bitch about ps2 limitations because ps2s are all thats left. You can have the imaginary tight knit community because only cheaters are pricks and those that remain after The Windower Rapture would be wonderful people to share your time with.

Like it or not SE condones cheaters. They have turned a blind eye to windower and its affiliated programs for a decade. Trying to get into some semantic debate of over who's cheating MOAR is ridiculous. The ONLY hacks SE has ever taken any attention to are ones that involve either rmt or duping. Inaction against cheaters by big daddy se says more about their stance than the tos. Just like fighting Breaks the rules in hockey. There's a penalty and everything! Its even applied. Whooptie doo. Guess you better go tell all them fighters in hockey they are bad people or cheating. Let me know how that goes. About as well as getting windower banned. Its technically wrong, but no one gives a sh*t. I guess I'm just a morally corrupt sinner going to hell because I dont disapprove of all the cheaters in hockey.

Edit: Also what poltergeist27 said 100%.

Edited, Jul 2nd 2012 10:38am by Banalaty

The worst that can happen is nothing? You dont know SE very well do ya?

I've been reading and expressing my opinion in this thread pretty much from the beginning and I find one thing truly fascinating. Not once did anyone not in a light blue name say that windower is cheating and that people should stop using windower. All of us said specificly the plug-ins being used to make the event "fair" are cheats. The only people who blanketed everything windower does as cheating and morally wrong and should be apart of our stance were the cheaters themselves. It was a logically stupid rebuttal and failed against me at the very least since I don't use windower but it served the task to inflame people into thinking that is our point of view. It isn't, so if you all want to continue thrashing about being angry about something we didn't say then knock yourselves out.

Btw this is also where the grey area is, what is cheating, and what isn't. Not weather or not it's morally right to use cheats in nyzul.

Any who, to say "well square hasn't done anything yet, thusly they obviously condone windower" is the most childish thing I ever heard. This is a massive case of "The cat is away the mice will play." For years square had been banning and suspending for people doing sh*t like this, So they aren't investing the resources to properly police the game and your going to assume that means they condone cheating? Is your goal to make this so common, so wide spread that when square does turn it's eyes back it's going to want to aggressively go after windower?

I have to admit I've been stupid here. Been so utterly side-tracked. A lot of the points being made here have already been answered but I was so caught up on "Is cheating morally right" they just faded in the back ground.

"Go do nyzul legitmently and see how many tries it takes to clear it. See you next year." This was already rebutted before this statement was made. Someone with the resources got a group together who did this legitmently. He said after a month or so of practice his group can get to and clear floor 100 about 1/5. So the notion that this event cannot be won, or would be way to random to win consistently is false. I think a 20% chance to get several best in slot gear is pretty good rate of return.

Another point made was that "We told square this event was to random and they did nothing." This is also false. Within a few weeks after release they listened to the player base. They made it so you can cap what floor you want to go to. They added a key item that allowed you to pick what item you wanted and get that Key item at a 100% rate. They also reduced the cost of temp items. At this point the people were already using cheats and it just got more widespread after that. Why would square adjust an event after that when so many people are getting gear? Hence mine and several others original point of, the more you cheat the less likely square will adjust the event.

Maybe to reduce cheating and flee hacks, maybe we can have it where if you can make it to floor 60 it would offer you a chance to start at floor 20. And if you make it to floor 80 you can start at floor 40.

At least the two sides of this argument seem to share on particular viewpoint: that SE is a bunch of complete idiots. The Neo Nyzul cheat users think SE is a bunch of idiots for the way they designed this event, and the anti-cheaters think SE is a bunch of idiots who will never notice and can't possibly make intelligent decisions without every single player boycotting this portion of the game.

Instead of posting something pointless and unrelated, care to post the quote of the 20% win rate with no .dats swaps or fillmode, or an actual response to my post?

The gray area is exactly what is in question here. What's black and white is vanilla FFXI. Once you download and play with windower, you are technically a cheater. But using windower and windower plus clipper/apradar/dat mods/fillmode as the two ends of the spectrum, you can see everything in between is the gray area.

If you asked a dozen people on this thread how much cheating they are comfortable with, you may very well get a dozen answers. For some console players, once you install windower you are the devil. Some people might use the basic tools of windower (tpparty and distance) but no more. Another person might use scripts to make longer macro lines. Another more advanced player might use spellcast. Maybe you use lightluggage to help lot things while you're in dynamis. Or blinkmenot so that when someone swaps gear, you don't lose target and let them die. Maybe you love the convenience of gearcollector, which can automatically move gear into your inventory. Maybe you use dat swaps and fillmode in Nyzul, where it's essentially undetectable. And maybe you are the type of person who uses clipper and all bells and whistles and you feel justified doing that.

There simply isn't one answer. I don't think you can dispute that all the things I described are cheating. Some might affect other players in a subtle way, others simply offer convenience to the user. But not everybody will agree what is right and what is justified, so there you have your gray area.

The new nyzule is a game design disaster, and that's at the heart of why people cheat to win. I think if there's one thing everyone in the thread agrees upon it's that S-E screwed up the implementation of this royally. The differences in opinion come from what each individual feels is the justified recourse to that screw up. IE take matters into ones own hands to make the event winnable, or wait for s-e to make the next move and hope they actually DO make a move (which may or may not happen). Since the devs shyed away from abyssea the grindy nature of the new content has led to a changed mindset towards certain actions that reminice of several years ago. Look back to abyssea where drops were frequent and gear could be had without needing to win the lottery to get it. Look at the state of the game before abyssea entered the scene where HNM shells ravagely botted kings, dynamis shells made a select few people VERY happy and the rest got (mostly) generic armor, and getting help to do events was a bigger difficulty hurdle than actually winning the event (looking at you mercenary captain rank, the most prime offender among countless others). Then look at the state of the game now as it has evolved in the eight or so months since abyssea's last update.

See any differences? Similarities? Behavioural patterns that may or may have been more prevalent in any specific era? The truth is that during abyssea we saw the LOWEST levels of cheating, hacking, RMT, and otherwise shady behavior in the history of FFXI, simply because it wasn't necessary. Douchebaggery and elitism was at an all time low, and (most) people felt pretty content with their gear. Now what have you? I intend to try playing a little again, but I can see they've added unnecessary hurdles everywhere to make you sink more time into doing menial tasks. Just looking at AH.com and wiki/otherwiki I can see that most of the stuff people would want to wear costs several millions of gil each, from Walk of echoes accessory armors to the voidwatch 5 to 1 pulse panoplia attire. The cursed abjurations appear to not only be uncommon drops, the synthesis mats for those items have no reliable source. Orlmolu ingot.... the only way I could level my goldsmithing past 102, is used in every recipe. It has ONE source, Vanasarvick, and AH.com indicates servers that have gone 8-10 days with none in stock (last seen on some of the walk of echoes items spans nearly a month here and there...), Alchemy requires an eye of verthandi for every synth post 103 or thereabouts. Smithing/goldsmithing abuses thokcha ingots and palladian brass on recipies that are garbage resell and total loss of 500-800k a pop (every one of the Ugol attire armor pieces fits this category), and throws in a cloth and ingot that come from the provenance watcher fights. Meanwhile you have neo nyzule that rewards 5% win rate to the most elite of all players if they don't cheat.... relics or GTFO, and voidwatch with it's all too common 1/200-300+ body armor drops and random ass everything else reward system. Character progression is excruciatingly riddled with large time sinks no matter how you slice it.

I can sum up the heart of the problem in one phrase. THIS SH*T DOESN'T EXIST!! When camping the auction house in hopes some random item you want has been listed for the first time in a week (and hoping someone else doesn't gobble it up first or the price isn't hiked several hundred (or more) K, is stacked alongside the events that you can spam and rarely see the reward you want then yes the natural recourse is that people are going to bend the rules. It sucks to look at an objective and after analyzing it realize that the sum of your efforts will probably be thwarted by the random, number god regardless how well you perform, but ever since we went back to "more time...less reward, rare drops mean CHARACTER STATUS" we have seen more shady behavior.

Also I noticed my name was brought up earlier in the thread. My personal stance on the debate (and the whole FFXI itself honestly) is that it's just a game and whenever i log in I find something to do that looks fun, or log out and find something else to do if I can't. Between my college classes, full time job, and a certain someone I've found that I'd like to spend more time with( =^..^= <3<3 <3 ), I find it hard to enjoy FFXI's grindy content which leaves me feeling "meh" on the whole matter. I've used windower for years but never cared for the plugins or spellcast, never really needed them. There is a VAST gray area between true vanilla ffxi (pure white) and the guys that used the NASA bot to claim kings, PoS and flee hacked to save time, used radar tools to see invisible mobs, price fixed the auction house, MPK'd for claims and stole linkshell banks/scammed others for fun, and used every other dirty tool in the book. I wouldn't feel comfortable fillmoding my way through nyzule, or care enough to mess with the dats ( flee hacking is absolutely out, and that one IS detectable). But then again mesh models are hideous and I actually like looking at my character, so I wouldn't use them even if S-E had added that feature naturally anyway. The heart of the problem is still the fact that S-E screwed up, and in its current state Neo Nyzule isle is a broken event. You're damned if you do cheat, and damned if you don't. No matter what you do you lose. S-E holds all the cards, and the player can never win no matter what. That itself is the real problem in my book. By forcing players to either cheat or fail the event is moot to me, and unless S-E makes it realistically winnable floor 100 clears are an attestation to their shoddy design more than anything else.

/lightbulb >.> <.< >.>

That post gave me a thought for a funny webcomic. Comparing FFXI to restaraunts that use Articial Fillers
to make their products look meatier. The strip could be between a black mage and another mage (ends up being a time mage) in a kitchen. Time mage is making galkan sausages over a campfire (filled with logs) next to a sink with a clock on the front of it (time sink), and the conversation has something to do with adding artificial fillers and preservatives to FFXI's MSG's. Throw in a witty retort from the black mage or maybe a bacon mage reference or two and you'd have something lolworthy

/idea off

...yeeeah. I won't be doing that myself as my atristic talents are terrible (trust me, I can screw up drawing stick figures), but if anyone actually wants to take the idea and turn it into something worth posting feel free. I'd laugh if I ever saw that >.> cause it totally fits the game right about now.




War Games.... awesome reference. Somehow that line always reminds me of The Westing Game

Edited, Jul 2nd 2012 7:34pm by Melphina