For players who claim to have the highest levels of skill in Final Fantasy XIV, it’s extremely fascinating that members of this facet of the MMORPG’s community can’t seem to stop cheating their way to world first raid clears. Schadenfreude aside, the race to beat the newly added Futures Rewritten Ultimate raid has once again been tainted because the team that claimed to beat the encounter first was caught using add-ons to get its win.
One of the members of the raid team known as GRIND managed to tell on himself and his group when he posted a screenshot that had a red pixel on it, leading to assumptions that a party member was using an add-on known as Pixel Perfect, which lets players pinpoint the distance between their character and damage markers. This prompted an investigation by Frosty Mog, operator of the Mog Talk blog and the community world first race tracker, who found that the plugin’s use meant GRIND’s clear was disqualified.
This revelation prompted Frosty to update the rules for the race tracker and participating raid teams: No addons or programs that break terms of service are allowed, including DPS parsing tools; no datamining of raid content is allowed; and all raid teams must have at least one player streaming the run, with VODs persisting after the fact.
“I want the race to live in a world where there is no debate on what is cheating and what isn’t,” Frosty writes. “Square-Enix should be able to support the race if they want to without fear of supporting add-ons. […] This may not be the answer most people wanted, but it’s the answer I feel is right.”
As referenced earlier, this is the third time that FFXIV’s bad apples have spoiled an otherwise fun community activity: Add-ons were used to cheat through the world first clear of Dragonsong Ultimate in 2022, followed by another cheating discovery in the race to clear Omega Protocol Ultimate.
Frosty has stated in follow-up tweets that he and his team are receiving feedback on these changes and indicated that there may be adjustments to these rules, writing simply that there is “more to come.” But as it stands, the community members trying to track world firsts have put a line in the sand.
