Found some intresting articles on the internet they all fear theat the Addons/mods that Bethseda will allow is a "Can of Worms in regard to security and balance". Gamefront 19 of march 2013.

ESO wiki - 2of august 2013. article about addons that warns for dungeon traps, helps you fast find your quest goal and avoid spawns on the way, how to fasttrack your quest, tell you the outcome of the quests, quickchange your gear, dpsmeters etc. Alot of things I find rather beneficial to the user and thats NOT avalible for the gamer Community. And you wont get invited to raids if you dont have the mods/addons!!! Same probs as WOW!!

And theres alot of articles and forums with hackers and cheaters already loading up programs that will really mess up the game into something unrecognizable Wow-icated trash.

You make a search for yourself and find out....

For me this sounds like an avalance of problems comming.

Will it really be Worth the risk?

Why riskt this game that they developed for 7 years to throw it away on getting messed up by hackers and cheaters.

For the first time I got doubts if I really going to buy this game. Seems the game will get messed up from day 1.

That is why ZOS is only allowing mods to UI aspect of the game. That is also why I am not for a mini map system. Radar is just evil. I do not know they can mod in radar or not. I hope not for those reasons.

Its not just UI comming make the search and look for yourself, the hackers are loading up.

The UI will prolly just be the beginning of it.

In what ways could ZOS handle a problem like this? ~has her paw on the ingame report button now~

Id say that they really should inscrement the addons / mods to be restricted to be appreance only. Not game altering och improving addons/mods. But it would be nice if they told us what type they were thinking of allowing? And are they realizing what they risk by opening the can of Worms?

I'm pretty sure you wont be able to use any addon that alters or affects anything but the UI in any way. The server will flag it as irregular behavior and the rest will be history.

It is notoriously hard to hack MMO's in general, because of the way the client/server relationship works. That's why most have to resort to using botting programs instead. Botting simply emulates actual player activity, whereas hacking makes changes to the game itself. I dont think that's going to be possible.

By simply writing a script, as all MMO's have, that automatically flags, reports, and kicks players that the server deems are engaging in irregular activity.

Remember before flying mounts in WoW, the game was 100% hack free. When they incorporated flying mounts, they had to remove flying as a "flag" for irregular activity. Then you saw a massive wave of level 1 characters farming resource nodes in areas they had no business being in because they were flying around using a hack. They never did find a permanent fix to this problem, as it still exists years later.

Yeah, dude. Those combat logs and damage meters are going to destroy the entire world if we let them.

THIS IS HOW SKYNET GOT STARTED

As u see its not hard to hack the games especially if you open the doro to allow mods/addons from players. I like the general idea tbh, but Ive been around long enough to know how this will prolly end. Ive seen alot of hacks in SWG, Swtor, Conan, and those game didnt even allow mods /addons.

Hah. WoW was not 100% hack free before flying mounts, either. There were all kinds of exploits and hacks being used by gold farmers that were regularly caught and stomped. None of them had anything to do with UI mods though >< UI mods are not, in fact, the source of most of the hacking that's found in MMOs.

It's true that some people don't LIKE the UI mods that people use in games like WoW... that is mostly because they are really really useful, to the point that some folks find them obligatory That's not exactly a flaw IMO. It's like saying that cell phones should be banned because they are so convenient that it's hard to function without em

Convenience mods are not, in fact, cheating unless they do something the devs did not intend them to be able to do. And if somebody finds a way to do that, it'll be fixed, like any other exploit.

OP, please give the links to your sources about ESO specific issues. Sounds like a lot of scaremongering to me.

You make my point for me UI mods are not the problem ><

Well while I'm not buying that allowing LUA scripting of the UI is going to ruin much of anything, the way to handle this would be that mods undergo a submission and approval process before they are allowed to be distributed. If the distribution program is first-party in-house then they could easily regulate it. Granted it would mean having a dedicated staff to filtering submissions but they have the manpower for sure.

They won't do that. Then they're responsible for player-created software functioning as intended and not breaking the game. I bet the legal team would hate it

100% *hack* free? Yeah it pretty much was. Hacks were written and tried, but the server canned the player almost instantaneously because of the script written for flagging. I remember the bots in Tyr's Hand and the Hearthglen, but bots are not hacks.

I am against addons like the plague. In most MMO's now it's mandatory to have some iterations of Deadly Boss Mods, a DPS meter, a cooldown timer, etc. You stop playing the game and let the mods play it for you. You know exactly when everything is going to happen, because raiding in most MMO's is static more so than dynamic, so you can time down to the second when an enemy will use an ability. Addons are one of the biggest reasons people like me hate raiding now. Addons made raiding boring.

Ah yes, good point. I suppose a player-regulated system COULD work, like reporting or down-voting mods that seem cheat-y.

ui mods use a closed api, if the api is not written terribly then there is pretty much 0 chance of any hacks getting into the game that way.

The good thing is that eso uses a selfmade engine and not a stock one because hero engine and the others pretty much have a ton of hacks already working, for eso they will have to write new ones or adapt the old ones.

Now that is not to say that there will never be any hacks in eso, there will but its not because of any ui api...

radar for example is roughly done by creating a tool that intercepts the packages from the server and reads the data associated with other players positions (that needs to be send so that your pc can preload characters etc)... it has nothing to do with the ui modability.

flying I believe is done by injecting wrong z positions into the outgoing packages again nothing to do with the ui.

Those things require much more then a simple scripting language to make them happen ^^

I'm sorry, but if you think that you weren't there WoW's whole first summer was marred by an exploit which worked by crashing the instance server, leading to item duping. Took weeks for Blizz to get it fixed, and it affected any player in the instance.

I wonder how much money I can make by crafting Tinfoil hats and selling them on launch day...

I think the problem here is the OP doesn't understand how hacks/scripts/mods etc work, and misread the original article so now he is in a uproar.

I am absolutely certain that "hackers" are already chomping at the bit to write mods for this game. But not so they can hack the game, but so they can steal your password. It's kind of moot whether TESO allows mods or not, as that won't stop them from offering mods.

In short, don't use them and you have little to worry about.

As to game hacks, they will always be attempted, and some will succeed. Most will have no real affect on the game or you.

I can see how challange and immersion is going right out thru the window if ESO gets same addon/mods mess like WOW had. Ive read about ppl who ran like 50 mods at same time in WOW and let the mods do all jobs in instances. And the they were complaining that all challange were lost in the game.

And with all those mods/addons running it will be a mess finding any instance raid group that doesnt require them.

Well, I hope im wrong on this thou. But I have real doubts any mod/addon fest will work in any MMO.

Will it be a *safe* web site for ESO add-on's? Like Steam workshop or Nexus? How does that work for other MMO's? More I hear about mods for MMO, more I am starting to dislike them.

So don't use them. Find/found a group that doesn't use them. Problem solved.

So tell me how i misread the articles? I can admit Im not too good on programming skills, but I Think those guys in the articles knows what theyr talking about. Or they are uncunning aswell?

There are sites that are known for hosting mods and only clean ones. WoWhead was one that specialized in WoW mods for example. There is one that covers multiple games, but the name escapes me. Starts with a "C", but my brain is failing me at the moment. Plus I am at work and the security filters are paranoid as hell so searching isn't an option.

So I get more troubled and get harder to find Groups since I dont like or can use addons/mods? I dont even like to learn how to use them. If i pay for this game, I expect to have the full game experiance and not have to become PC programmer in order to experiance the game.

Hmm doesnt sounds good to me.

The bit about hackers is what i was referring to. I doubt seriously if they are working on game breaking exploits using the UI mod system since it isn't out yet. Talking [censored] about it, yes. Actually working to crack the game and crash it etc? Doubtful.

My semi-experienced guess is that there the UI will have abilities that are normally not used or displayed using the default UI. The mods will simply tap into that unused info and display it. For example, the game is obviously aware of how much damage you are doing, etc. But it won't show you a graph or display a log etc. So someone will whip up a "mod" that adds a meter of some type to the screen that will get the info from the UI and display it. Once it has the info, not hard to keep a log even if the UI doesn't have that info normally. Remember, all of this info is simply being shown to you, and not being sent back to the game.

The point being, there will be no access to the actual game engine, nor any way to extract info that it doesn't want you to have. Any attempt to do so will go beyond modding and get into cracking, more commonly and erroneously called hacking.