Do Japanese Players Cheat?

The short answer is "Yes". For the (very) long answer, I've provided the below rant diatribe blog post.

To accompany the earlier Final Fantasy post, which covered the series besides Final Fantasy XI, I'd like to talk specifically about how the differences in message board posting culture in Japan and North America affects the perception of cheating in an online space, namely FFXI (Final Fantasy XI). I'm including a glossary at the bottom to make the linked article make more sense to people who are not into the FFXI community enough to be familiar with JPButton.com (which would be just about everybody on the planet). JPButton.com is (or was, now that it appears to have shut down) a site aimed at encouraging cooperation between JPs and NAs (as the Japanese and North American players referred to themselves).

The name "JP Button" comes from a running joke that Japanese players have a special extra button added on to their copies of the game which give them special advantages--primarily due to differences in server lag between regions (all game servers are located in Japan, giving lower pings to those who play close by), and because FFXI was released in Japan earlier than outside, meaning that on average the first elite decked-out player a new player would see would be Japanese.

An artist's visualization of the mythical JP Button

So, why would there be any dramatic difference between expecting Japanese players to cheat, and expecting North Americans to cheat? The answer, surprisingly, comes from differences in message board policy, and in the version of the game most popular in each region. FFXI was released for the PlayStation 2 and Windows PCs at the beginning, and an XBox 360 version was added much later for the expansion Treasures of Aht Urhgan. Because PC gaming is much less popular in Japan than it is in the US and Canada, the PS2 was the dominant platform of the JP playerbase, while the PC version thrived in the US. As updates to the game progressed, and players requested new features, a familiar phrase was often heard as a euphemism for deciding not to add something to the game: "PS2 limitations".

Despite the PS2 being the undisputed winner of its console generation in units sold and revenue earned, it's no computational workhorse--even at the time it was first released it was technologically second-rate. As impatience with the lack of improvements to the UI (user interface) increased among PC players due to SE's (Square-Enix's) insistence that the PS2 and PC versions be functionally identical, a group of players created a third-party application called Windower, which--appropriately enough--allowed the game to be put into a windowed state on PCs without crashing (allowing such game-breaking activities as checking your e-mail or running an MP3 player), which was not added as an official feature until well-into Wings of the Goddess (the fourth expansion, released in 2007). While technically against the Terms of Service, it was considered harmless enough, and many players began using it right away. What is key is that Windower was only available for the PC version, which, as said above, was the version-of-choice of NA players, not Japanese.

FFXI also has Chocobos! (Kweh!)

Because FFXI does not use regional servers, any player on (for example) the Gilgamesh server could interact with any other online player on the Gilgamesh server, regardless of their location, but could not easily interact with others in their same region, but on a different server. Not only that, but a built-in auto-translator allowed Japanese and English (and later, German and French) speaking players to communicate with each other using pre-translated words and phrases. This meant that cooperation (and, more often, competition) between JP and NA players was common, especially in the small hours of the morning, when NA players should have been in bed, and JP players were just getting home from work/school. This also meant that anything that became common in one community would become known of in the other (I speak of two communities because while there are European players of FFXI, the overwhelming bulk of the game's population comes from Japan and America). Thus, when Windower became widespread for NAs, the JPs all knew about it, even though most of them could not use it due to playing the PS2 version.

Windower has a plugin architecture, which in theory allowed anyone with knowledge of its interfaces the ability to change features of the game. In practice, details of the interface were tightly controlled by the Windower team, who went about modifying the UI to fit their vision of the game. This added the ability to do such things as change equipment more rapidly (it was common to equip three or four different 16-piece gear sets in order within the span of one second in order to have optimum stats when casting a single spell, and the saying of endgame players on this topic was: "if you're not blinking like a Christmas tree, you're not doing your job"), see game data that was otherwise unavailable (such as the stats of other players), and even to perform basic scripting. And, of course, the JPs knew all about it. Which brings us to message board policy.

Aww, he's cute! You couldn't ban such a cute face, could you?

The Japanese message boards for FFXI were largely anonymous posting boards (such as 2ch), which meant that from one game discussion to the next, there would be no persistent identities involved. Thus, attacking a person known in-game for cheating was virtually impossible (and pointless, as there was no way to verify the accuracy of such claims), as you could never know who you were talking to. That being the case, because those who cheated (the rare JP PC player) had no need to defend their reputations, and those who didn't (the majority of players, playing on the PS2) could not cheat even if they wanted to, the JP community became known as staunchly anti-cheating.

On the other hand, English (language) boards for FFXI were like most other English forums, where users had a handle, and avatar/signature attached to each of their posts. Anyone found cheating could be publicly lambasted, as anyone who was anyone had not only their character's name, but jobs (player classes) and server listed in their signature. Not to mention that anyone who used the in-game Auction House was visible on FFXIAH.com, whether they meant to be or not. Knowing someone's name was the same as being able to track their character forever (unless they took very drastic measures to disguise their identity after jumping to a new server), so anyone caught cheating could not just disappear into the ether, they had to defend themselves and justify their actions in the open. This led, over time, to acceptance of Windower by the majority of NAs, with Windower use being all but required for endgame players. SE's policy of not banning anyone who was not blatantly cheating/admitting to using third-party tools on in-game chat meant that a Fight Club culture of "the first rule of Windower is don't talk about Windower (in-game)" developed, and the two main communities of JP and NA became known as anti-cheating and pro-third-party-tools, respectively.

"Among the Japanese, there are people who were banned, and there are people who have done bad things. We are by no means innocent." - Anonymous poster (via JPButton.com)

So, it really was a common perception for a long time that American players cheated, and Japanese players did not. Enter JPButton.com, which led (and translated) discussions between the NA and JP communities, which started shortly after an incident called the Salvage Bans, where hundreds of top-tier players were banned for having been found using an item duplication glitch. Elmer, the founder of JPButton, would write articles for JP players about the NA playerbase, and for NA players about the JP playerbase, and aimed to open discussion as widely as possible between the two. This led to the (shocking, I know) revelation that some Japanese players did indeed cheat, and many of them used Windower to do so!

With all that said, here's an archived version of the article:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090418040127/http://www.jpbutton.com/?p=1797

Glossary:

Pandemonium - Short for Pandemonium Warden. Notorious endgame boss, which originally took 20+ hours to defeat before some players ended up with medical complications due to fighting nonstop, and was subsequently shortened to despawning after 2 hours.

Third-party tools/programs - Any program which modifies FFXI game data other than the official game client.

TOS - Terms of Service. A document forbidding cheating/harassment/etc., which players must agree to every time they log into FFXI.

NA - North American player/playerbase

JP - Japanese player/playerbase

JP Button terms:
Claim NM - Gain the attention of a rare monster, allowing only you and your friends to fight it.
Get Gil - Gil is the game's currency, this JP Button implies Japanese players could create money from nothing.
Make HQ - HQ means High Quality, this JP Button refers to the crafting system, and implies Japanese players could beat the random nature of crafting and obtain HQ items every time (when normally they only appear at a 5-10% rate).
Be Stronger - Pretty self-explanatory; JP players were (at first) known for being much harder to kill, and for dishing out powerful attacks.
Get Drop - Rare monsters do not always give up their treasure when they are killed, and the rate at which they do is called their "drop rate". This JP Button implies that Japanese players could force the random number generator into giving them rare items, even those with a 1% drop rate on monsters that only appear every 5-7 days (yes, monsters like that really exist in FFXI).