How Should Devs Deal With The Love/Hate Relationship Of Mods In Games?

Earlier today, I saw a post on Reddit complaining about people using a plugin in Final Fantasy XIV that allows players to autoplay dungeons. According to the post, it was obvious because the individual in question was doing a terrible job at dungeoneering. The poster also noted the fact that the person in question didn’t speak beyond the general courtesy at the end and would only move with the poster moved, meaning the person being complained about likely put them on follow because XIV dungeons aren’t always fun when doing them for the 100th time.

All that set aside, however, the post did spawn an interesting conversation about mods in the game in general, and it got me to thinking about mods in games as a whole. Games with mods have been a thing for a long time, and with the exception of pure cheating, a lot of the time, they’re created to address issues with the game. improve existing features, or add something fun.

I’ve never personally been the biggest user of mods in games, not for any moral reasons, but because I’m simply too lazy to spend the time getting them working. I like to just turn on a game and play without having to fiddle with settings or worry that a DLL file might get eaten.

That said, my general feeling about them is that I simply don’t care if someone is using mods in games, so long as it doesn’t impact my or other players’ experiences. Mostly, that means I’m against cheats that give players an edge in competitive games. However, using something that negatively impacts someone in a dungeon isn’t cool either. And, well, if you’re shooting for a world first in a raid series, you definitely shouldn’t be using mods. After all, you’re supposed to be showing off how good you are as a player. One can hardly make that claim if the computer is doing the work for them.

That said, players are people, and some people are going to cheat, and the devs are always going to have to deal with that. What I’m more interested in is all the other mods, the ones that make the boring tasks a bit less boring, address accessibility issues, or help improve the game in some other way, like allowing players to really make characters look how they want. For XIV, at least, a sizeable portion of the PC player base is using these kinds of mods, and if the devs were to go on a full-on ban spree, they’d lose a lot of sub money. (And since XIV is kinda doing some heavy lifting for Square right now, they don’t want that.)

So, what are they to do? What are any devs in this situation to do?

I think the devs are kind of doing it already, although perhaps not fast enough for everyone’s liking. Perhaps we can blame it on the spaghetti code. The answer is to look at the mods, see what people are downloading and why, and figure out how this can be adapted to the game. Admittedly, not everything can. But if we’re talking about ways to address things that only get more tedious as the game goes on – crafting being one – or the need to address button bloat and the fact that many players have conditions that make dealing with a slew of abilities difficult, these are things that some mods address and the game would benefit from having.

To be fair to the devs, they’ve taken a swing at addressing the button bloat issue by allowing the players to turn on certain combos, but it’s a bit like they’re just sticking their toe in the pool. One thing that is right about it is that it’s an optional feature. Not everyone needs or wants it, so not everyone should be stuck with it. I’m all for being hardcore if you want to be hardcore. It’s your sub, you do you.

That said, it’s also a good idea to look at what other games are doing. And of course, all devs are learning by doing. HoYoverse is a good example. While I have a lot of love for Genshin Impact (that’s where my dragon boys live), there are things about it that are just so tedious but required if you want to level characters and gear properly. When Honkai: Star Rail came along, they dealt with that tedium by giving us the option to auto-play repeatable boss fights. We still have to be around to hit the button, but otherwise, we can do other things and get the items needed for leveling.

I would say I don’t know what something like this would look like in XIV, except for the fact that we do have duty supports and trusts now. So, perhaps a system could be implemented for content like that, which is effectively solo. Although maybe special drops like minions might need to be removed from auto-play dungeons, so as not to overfill the market board. (Not that they drop a lot, anyway.) The gear isn’t tradeable except to your grand company, so that would be less of an issue. That said, such a feature could encourage players to take their auto-play to the duty supports and leave other players out of it. It likely wouldn’t eliminate the problem completely, but it could help.

As for other content, like crafting, it’s not the most exciting or engaging of content in just about any game. If it’s drawn out (even using macros) like it is in XIV, it becomes the kind of content you do while watching TV. On the other end of things, games like Genshin and Star Rail have shortened the entire process to selecting how many of the items you want to craft and clicking go. The most difficult part is gathering the materials, which can easily be done as part of your normal adventuring. (Actually, that was my favorite thing about gathering in Aion, too. Well, that and the fact that gathering helped level your primary class.)

At the end of the day, I look at it like this. In games like XIV, that have been around for a decade or more, there’s a ton of content, an almost daunting amount. New players coming in are going to want to do all that content, and they can’t do that if some things are slowing them down with tedium. Worse, that tedium might keep them from sticking around.