Hey everyone,
We are on the eve of the last 8-player World Race for Endwalker. It’s an exciting and sad time for us all, because it’ll be awhile before we get to do something like this again. I wanted to take a moment to talk about the tracking aspect of the race. More precisely the validity and tracking of offline teams. At the end of The Omega Protocol’s race, the leading team was found to be using software to zoom out their perspective more than the game intended them to. This lead me to at the time believe the best course of action is to personally put a halt on the tracking of offline teams, since I would have zero visibility on their progress and how they achieved it.
Since then, I’ve spoken with many members of teams that stream offline to get their opinion and thoughts. Most of them still are against the idea of streaming as it would expose their strats and disrupt their ability to play, as some of the players are not used to being under a public microscopic lens while playing. I have good faith in the teams and players I spoke with to not be malicious entities and genuinely want the same experience they’ve come to enjoy over the years of racing. I also don’t want to treat them as such.
Streaming is not a perfect solution, but it does help give some level of confidence. Which is part of why we still will require it for the charity event’s prizing. That being said, I don’t see a reason why I should invalidate teams who want to continue racing without streaming from our standard tracking. I’ve made the decision for our team to continue tracking all teams that wish to be tracked and will address similar situations to the last race as required. However, it will be notated which streams were actively streaming their prog versus which weren’t, for anyone that wants that clarification.
Rewards that will be given out during the Charity event will still only apply to teams that signed up and agreed to the terms presented. I hope this clears up some confusion and appreciate you all for understanding the change in stance while we find an ideal solution that fits the FFXIV World Race for as unique as it is.
Here are some useful links for this coming race: