Hey everyone,

Thank you so much for being patient as I work with the community to find the best possible situation for the future of the FFXIV World Race. Before I get too much into the details, I do want to clarify that what we are working to create is a healthy scene for the FFXIV World Race community. One that creates a fair playing field among those most passionate about it. We won’t be able to satisfy everyone, but hopefully we can at least try to make a better platform for the overall community. And this is only in consideration of what MogTalk tracks. Obviously, anyone can make their own ranking and list teams as they wish, but the goal for MogTalk’s World Race leaderboard is to allow players to feel they are in a fair race with their peers. It could be best to consider these guidelines on what MogTalk will declare as a clear for the leaderboard we track. By no means do players have to adhere to these if they don’t care to be tracked for the race.

Let me quickly go ahead and go over them:

• All rulings by SquareEnix in terms of bans or achievement removals will be recognized and teams will be as well removed from the MogTalk leaderboard.
• No use of add-ons that specifically changes intentional game design.
• 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.

So, let’s speak about what these changes mean. Our goal is to ask teams to not use any tools that break the game in a way that makes it easier than the developers have intended. This may seem up to interpretation, but for most raiders it should be fairly obvious. These could include unintended visual indicators being placed on the screen, allowing your character to move or make actions they shouldn’t be able to, or use game functions in any automatic way outside of intended game macros. The goal is that everyone is experiencing the fight as designed. If there are questions about it the team and myself will be happy to answer them. If it is determined players were using tools to undermine that, we will remove them from the leaderboard.

My original hope in setting guidelines to disregard all add-ons was to create as fair of a playing field as possible and respect SquareEnix’s decisions. This is also the most simple way to handle it. The biggest concerns heard from the raiding community were categorically two different types of add-ons. One for log analysis and the other for latency bug resolution.

When it comes to log analysis, it has been a central backbone of the FFXIV raiding community for nearly as long as it existed. Players use this information to help improve their gameplay and create a level of replayability that keeps a very large chunk of the playerbase subscribed to the game. It has also served as a validation tool for many competitive community events. This is why an official public log from SquareEnix is recommended to help improve not only the World Race, but help remove the stigma associated with it. So in the cases players are using tools to analyze logs, we will not take action against the players unless SquareEnix themselves do.

The other category is with tools that prevent clipping oGCDs, which in a standard rotation wouldn’t normally be clipped. While to some this is a minor issue, it’s exponentially worse for players in locations where their latency is high and even compounds depending on how high the latency is due to a found bug within the game. When we talk about the FFXIV World Race, it means we have players all around the world engaging with it. If these add-ons were punished, we would exclude a large majority of FFXIV raiders who just want to play the game as intended. There are ways to abuse these add-ons to weave in more oGCDs than intended, but (with some level of irony) log analyzers do also help mitigate this abuse. So these types of tools, while again not expressly allowed, we will not take action unless SquareEnix does. This adds to my requests from the developer team to help the World Race by investigating this latency bug to see if we can find a resolution.

Both of these scenarios are most critical when it comes to ways SquareEnix can help the FFXIV World Race. If they are resolved, then it wouldn’t be as harshly received to request players not to use any add-ons during competitive events.

Outside of these two categories, if it is found that players are using tools to undermine the difficulty of fights as intended – we will remove them from the leaderboard whether SquareEnix takes action or not. It is up to us to make sure we do what we can with what we have to make the FFXIV World Race fair for everyone.

With that being said, I’d like to take some time to go over feedback and questions players had:

How do you plan to enforce the guidelines?

This is one of the major concerns of players. The point of this list of guidelines is to create a foundation on what is fair so teams don’t have to guess. The emphasis is less on absolute detection and more on setting expectations on what’s cheating. Of course we can’t realistically monitor each player’s environment, but when situations come up that identify teams as going outside these guidelines – we will address it according to what has been defined.

Can we have a list of approved add-ons?

It is MogTalk’s stance to not approve add-ons, as no add-ons are approved by SquareEnix. Even though it’s an exhausting process, we will analyze situations on a case by case basis as needed and make determinations if what is being used falls into the two categories provided. However I believe the community that partakes in the race is already informed enough to be able to make safe decisions. Please reach out if you are unsure.

Streaming doesn’t prevent cheating.

Streaming will not detect cheating, but it will give footage to analyze and puts everyone on an even playing field. This goes into player movement, the progression teams have on mechanics, and more. Its value shouldn’t be negated simply because the programs can be hidden on screen.

The stream requirement excludes players

I do agree not everyone wants to stream their progress and they don’t owe anyone their gameplay. There may be some way to create a separate leaderboard for offline teams, but I do not think it’s fair to rank stream and non-stream teams on the same leaderboard because it’s two different types of competition. As we have seen in recent races, streaming and offline teams are neck and neck, even when stream teams are at a disadvantage. If there is a decision to include non-stream teams, they will not be placed on the same leaderboard as streamed teams.

Make everyone use consoles only!

While it may seem like a good solution, it’s not a fair one. It excludes a good amount of the community. And even though it’s harder to do so, it doesn’t prevent completely malicious tools being used.

How can you stop people from viewing datamined content?

We can’t. If someone datamines fights and releases it publicly, there is no reason to punish teams if they see it. Of course we would want no datamining at all during the race, but what we really want to stop are teams getting an advantage by accessing private datamined information. We also can’t detect it, unless there is evidence provided that it happened. If it does, just know we will take action to remove the team.

If something is unclear and needs to be ruled on during the race, how will you do it?

If for some reason there is a debate on what is game breaking or not, we will do a “counsel of peers” with the other teams in the race to help make the right decision.

Does this mean teams can’t use OBS to stream?! It’s a third party program!

While I understand the confusion, no. Obviously teams can use programs that allow them to stream, voice chat, VPN, and other normal PC programs that are not intentionally trying to break the game to cheat.

Conclusion

I’ve attempted to operate a very neutral stance over the years, but that is not fair for the players in the race as not everything has been clear on what the expectations are. We are creating a discord and slowly opening it to raiders and the community. It will be dedicated to the world race, participants, and those interested in being a part of that community to help create better communication. It will act as a central place for all things that involve the FFXIV World Race. We will continue the conversation about guidelines and more as we get closer to the next Savage World Race.

One of the biggest trends that I’ve seen in feedback is that trying to improve on the FFXIV World Race scene is hopeless and there are no good solutions. Well I guess that sucks for me, because I’m going to keep trying. This race was happening before me and it will happen after me. My only goal is to create a platform to help while I’m here. Feel free to ask any questions about this directly.

Thank you for all your feedback and please do not hesitate to give more.

-Frosty