It wouldn’t be a FFXIV world-first race without some debate over streaming or not streaming, but the RWF for the Futures Rewritten Ultimate has gotten even crazier as the winning team appears to have used banned plug-ins during their raid.
To make things worse, the static, GRIND, was a non-streaming team – meaning their progress wasn’t broadcast, only their final completion time.
As a result their time has not been counted on the unofficial World First leaderboards and another team, Kindred, which cleared the raid a day later, is currently at the top of the standings.
Image Credit: Square Enix
FFXIV Futures Unwritten Ultimate World First Race Ends in Controversy
The FFXIV Futures Unwritten Ultimate race started on Nov. 26 and two days later, at around 7:30pm PT on Nov. 28, GRIND reported they’d cleared the raid. With other teams, such as Echo having the boss down to 5% at the same time, it was huge lead, and a surprise – given GRIND don’t stream their attempts to preserve their strategies.
The non-streaming of RWF attempts has been an on-going controversy in FFXIV for almost as long as there has been competitive raiding. The teams who play off stream will record their runs, but not live streaming, leading some to criticize their competitive integrity.
However, on Nov. 29 it was revealed that GRIND had allegedly used prohibited third-party tools during their clear. Unlike other MMOs, such as WoW, FFXIV has a pretty strict policy against plug-ins, mods, and third-party tools, even things such as damage meters. During the Omega Protocol Ultimate, lead producer and game director Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida expressed his disappointment that the ‘winning’ team had used plugins, condemning the act.
MogTalk creator and leaderboard admin ‘Frosty’ announced on Nov. 29 that the plug-in would cause GRIND to be removed from the leaderboard.
The plug-in was allegedly something called “pixel perfect.” In FFXIV, players’ hitboxes for area of effect attacks are actually only a single invisible pixel at the center of their character. The game will register the location of this pixel at the time the attack completes, and decide whether you get hit or not (this is a simplified explanation for the point of brevity). This plug-in makes that pixel visible, effectively making the process of dodging attacks simpler.
Cloud of Darkness (Chaotic) will be the next top-level challenge for FFXIV players. Image Credit: Square Enix
What Next For FFXIV RWF?
There’s been a host of issues with the FFXIV RWF over recent years, from players not streaming their attempts, to plug-in controversy, individual issues surrounding players, and even the suggestion that hardcore raiding is incompatible with FFXIV’s ToS.
These are further compounded by a general malaise in the FFXIV community around the current state of the game and expansion – and the timing of the new FFXIV content releases.
Some were disappointed that both the new pieces of endgame hardcore content, both the Futures Unwritten Ultimate Raid, and the upcoming Cloud of Darkness 24-man Chaotic Raid, are scheduled to clash with holidays (Futures Unwritten released on Thanksgiving week, Could of Darkness will release on Christmas Eve).
Regardless, there’s now a big asterisk on this World First Race, and there will likely be changes to the format going forward.