The FFXIV community is having an interesting week thanks to the developer of the GShade application. The Final Fantasy XIV community is no stranger to drama. Last week there was a huge spat between the Japanese community and the developers, Square Enix due to the use of plugins which lead to the Japanese Ultimate Raid team losing their world-first status.
Developer Deceit Leads To Loss Of Most Popular Plugin
On paper, FFXIV doesn’t allow plugins or modifications at all and the director Naoki Yoshida has gone on record saying, “It is extremely disappointing for me personally to see this commotion surrounding third-party tools once again” in relation to the recent Ultimate Raid drama within the community. Now the current drama in the community isn’t a developer and player issue like the one we mentioned prior. It’s more so a case of player vs. player and not the fun kind.
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What is GShade?
The FFXIV community has a subset of players that like to roleplay (RP) within Eorzea. These players often use a mode within the game called group pose which allows for very intricate posing and image editing within the game. Eventually, players wanted more and viola out comes GShade which is essentially an Instagram filter for your game that allows you to create and share image presets with other users.
Since I can remember GShade has been a part of the game. People love to pose their characters and take really amazing pictures of them and post them all online. Some people even have dedicated Twitter accounts for their characters with specific GShade filters made by them.
The Deceit
The GShade client has a check every time you boot it that checks if you are running the current version of the application. Now, this isn’t something out of the ordinary, every application we use on a day-to-day basis operates like this. But for an application that’s an add-on, it really isn’t that big of a deal to have an out-of-date version, right? Well, the developer thought the opposite of that and decided if there was a version discrepancy between your GShade application and the newest one you shouldn’t be able to use the program at all which would force you to update to the latest one.
Now some people in the community thought this was stupid and made a GShade alternative that just didn’t have the update check in it. Remember these shaders and everything aren’t owned by GShade at all, they’re open-source and published by players. The GShade dev’s response to someone making an alternative was to update GShade to reboot the user’s PC if the GShade client detected the other client on the PC. This caused a ton of backlash from the community and the developer now has lost access to using GitHub for intentionally putting malware into the GShade client.
The news for this is still unfolding but as of now, the GShade website is currently locked down. The GPosing and RP community have by and large discarded the developer and their application by porting and moving their shader templates to the alternative that started this whole thing. So as a whole the outcome of this was a positive one albeit a bit messy, but that’s what we can expect from the very passionate and talented Final Fantasy XIV community.
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