The FFXIV World Race and it’s Future

Hey everyone,

Thank you so much for another incredible FFXIV World Race. During the last savage tier we saw a 20 second difference between teams killing the final boss on stream. This Ultimate fight had a kill difference of less than a single pull, and many instances of neck and neck attempts on stream as well. It was exciting for myself, as well as the entire community that surrounds the event. We were also able to raise more than $20,000 for children’s hospitals. For the stream production side, we worked with Echo to deliver an experience we haven’t seen before in the scene. I hope in the future we can continue to experiment and find ways to make the FFXIV World Race more entertaining for the community.

This is going to be fairly long, as I want to cover multiple aspects. First I think it’s important to quickly go into a little more detail about the removal of GRIND from the MogTalk leaderboard. When originally ranking the team I was sent an unlisted VOD of their clear from the leader. Scanning through the video, everything looked completely legitimate and had no initial reason to dismiss the team’s claim. Later after seeing the reaction the community had about one of the screenshots containing a red dot, our team investigated further. At first it seemed rather harmless and possibly not worth disqualification. But the more our team looked into it, the more suspicious it was. I then reached out personally to the account that posted it and the team leader. It then was confirmed that even while it was agreed upon in the group not to use any third party programs, one of their members did download a program which caused the red dot to appear under their character. At a base level, again it seems rather harmless – but the program used to make that happen had an arsenal of game breaking tools. So I decided to make the call to disqualify them. I do truly believe they are a group of extremely skilled players, but it seemed to be the fair decision given the situation.

After the event I had some time to reflect on everything. For nearly a decade I’ve been involved in tracking the clears of new difficult content for Final Fantasy XIV. Before me however, the race still existed. I didn’t create the concept of players wanting to be the first in the world to clear boss fights. The news of players clearing it first would show up on Reddit, Twitter, and other social media outlets. When I started tracking it, my goal was just to collect information from those outlets and rank them to provide a clear standing of teams. It wasn’t much more in-depth than that. I didn’t do an analysis of what was a fair clear or not, just listed what was reported and backed by what the community accepted as a legitimate clear. I never considered myself the person who determined what was cheating or not. I wanted that to fall on the community, as it was their race.

Of course as the years went on, the raiding scene has evolved and the opinion on what is cheating has changed within that community. I remember people reporting to me that teams were using tools to emulate having an ultrawide screen monitor. While it definitely gives an advantage, it was hard to declare that as cheating because people with money to buy those monitors were getting the same thing. Many situations started to come up where I needed to make a ruling on what I thought was cheating. Again, I would try to not be involved in that determination and let the community’s stance on it hold. However that is getting much harder to navigate on what exactly the community (that is involved in the world race) wants. We had situations where players were banned from the game for using quality of life plugins, which later were features added to the game. There was the infamous situation with The Omega Protocol where a zoomhack was used, again some would argue wasn’t too drastically different than what today’s ultrawide monitors can do. Unfortunately, once the box is opened though, it leaves doubt in the community’s minds about legitimacy of clears. If that program was used, what else could be there that isn’t being shown? This is the core of the issue.

There are also programs that members in the raid community see as vital to their experience in this game. Ones that log data from fights to help analyze your gameplay. Ones that remove issues that come from latency and being able to weave in off global abilities. Most would say these are harmless and a core function of raiding in FFXIV today. While I personally don’t use any add-ons in the game nor do I advise people to use them, I understand why they are used. However, in the end, they still break the terms of service of the game.

In the past SquareEnix would officially congratulate teams for clearing the fights, but because of the controversy and the community’s acceptance of breaking the terms of service – it doesn’t make sense for them to support it. Yoshida, the producer and director of FFXIV, expressed his disappointment in making challenging content if players are going to find ways to break the game to beat it.

While certain aspects of the race are growing and becoming better, we are losing others. I feel like now is a time we come together as a community and make a new way forward with the FFXIV World Race. The events we have put on are always amazing (in my of course bias opinion). We have raised over 200k for charity since starting it. It’s exciting to see who is in the lead and decipher the mechanics live. It brings the community together and keeps everyone excited. This is what I want to foster. While I don’t want to disregard the efforts of offline teams and the legitimate reasons for why they are offline, it’s hurting more than helping us move forward to something better. I want this to be an event everyone is proud of. So effective for future races, the request will be to teams to do something that seems outrageous to most raiders. These rules won’t apply to previous races and I have no intention of disregarding those rankings. But for all future races:

  • No add-ons can be used and no terms of service with FFXIV can be broken
  • No datamining attempts should be made by members of the team or someone who is trying to support the team.
  • All teams must have one player at minimum streaming live and VODs should persist.

 

I want the race to live in a world where there is no debate on what is cheating and what isn’t. SquareEnix should be able to support the race if they want to without fear of supporting add-ons. Some teams are already doing this and I feel this is the right call. I don’t have the ability to install an anti-cheat on player’s machines or any advanced way of monitoring it, so trust will be involved here. If there is a case where someone has evidence of using an add-on during the race I will have to take action (more details to follow on that). I have no intention of monitoring players’ add-on activity outside of the event, as my request is for the world race not to use them. It will put everyone on a level playing field without question of what is okay or not.

I also can’t control datamining. It’s something that people will do, and players will be exposed to. My ask here is that teams do not personally datamine themselves and look to gain an advantage by doing so. If you see information that has been datamined, there isn’t much we can do about it. But don’t actively try to datamine yourself.

Streaming is also a tough decision, as I know it loses the aspect of figuring out the puzzles without being affected by other teams and the strategies they come up with. But it also helps build other aspects to the race that I believe are more important. It can also be a resource grab on player’s devices when racing, so I will only ask that a minimum of one player streams. It doesn’t prevent players from cheating or breaking the rules, but at least gives something to analyze in the case it’s needed.

Again, going with these rules disables a lot of add-ons which some people believe removes latency disadvantages, UI changes that are important to players, and more fairly argued reasons for the add-ons. But the FFXIV World Race is evolving and if I have to make a decision, I feel the right way to approach this is to model SquareEnix’s rulings on add-ons.

On another note, in the past Yoshida asked for the community to help and give suggestions for what they could do from an official capacity to support the race. I would like to go into what my years of tracking the race would suggest. I will note I’m not a programmer nor do I fully understand what the backend looks like. I can just give suggestions from my personal perspective.

  • Allow a public log. Currently the log used to analyze data is not meant to be public. And there are various reasons for that, but I believe a ruleset could be put in place to resolve those issues. If privacy is a concern, obscure players’ names in that log or only have the current players’ information in it. If active information during a fight is a concern, don’t have the public log show data until after a wipe or the fight is over. Having this log will allow community tools to function without the stigma that comes with add-ons.
  • Create a leaderboard similar to Deep Dungeon or crafting rankings. It doesn’t need a team system involved, just the players’ names. If you wanted a team system, hopefully the programming would be somewhat like the PvP teams that were introduced. But having an official leaderboard will reduce the strain of tracking the race. It would be recommended to have someone of course validate the clears personally before posting the results as well as make alterations when needed.
  • Continue to strive for data protection in new patches. For at least savage and ultimate fights, the longer that data can avoid being in the patch data, the less time people have to datamine. It can never be completely avoided, but whatever efforts can be done to avoid releasing it would help alleviate some of the problems we see with it.
  • Hire a representative that would oversee competitive aspects of the game. This will add a human factor and level of moderation that could restore confidence in rankings. They could help foster and grow this type of event (by overseeing the leaderboard legitimacy if introduced, etc), and help improve other competitive aspects – such as PvP.

 

These may not all be possible, but I think they are at least reasonable to ask. SquareEnix doesn’t have to officiate the race, but actions they make can help support it.The FFXIV World Race is special to me and a lot of people in the community. I want to see it grow. Our problems are not over by introducing these rules, but at least it will help give some expectations teams can have going into the race and feel there is at least an attempt to create a level playing field.

This may not be the answer most people wanted, but it’s the answer I feel is right. Again, these rules only apply to the race and fight – I have no intention of reaching outside of that scope. Please continue sharing your opinion and discussing this further, as I will always be here to hear it.

-Frosty