Back in February, one of the bigger Final Fantasy XIV mods found itself embroiled in controversy. GShade was used by many to make their experience in the MMO prettier or simply to add some pizazz to their GPose pictures. A while back, some users noticed that the mod was causing their PCs to restart.
GShade developer Marot Satil admitted to adding code that would prevent users from bypassing the mod’s new update and password system. If the mod noticed the bypass attempt, it simply reset your PC entirely. Users were not pleased.
Outside of resetting people’s PCs, the big issue was that the mod could’ve done anything, something the creator acknowledged. “Anti-tampering code is not unusual in proprietary software. This was meant to be a lesson to [NotNite] specifically about taking this approach to the problem; anything could have been in the payload and you’d have been responsible for distributing it to people and triggering it,” they said. The move sparked an exodus from GShade toward the competing mod ReShade. Satil also took down GShade completely.
Users on the FFXIV subreddit noted that GShade was back online a few days ago. The project was then removed due to false reports before coming back online a day later. The problem, according to the community, is the mod was brought back online without any acknowledgement of the malware issue and no apology.
NotNite, the user behind the GShade update workaround that kicked off the controversy, warned folks not to download the mod. “Remember, you probably shouldn’t run anything created by a known malware developer. I’ll try and get my scraper adjusted to the new version endpoints tonight so I can monitor if he does any silent updates,” they said on Reddit.
As an alternative, ReShade lacks the controversial update system and reportedly uses fewer system resources. There are a number of community migration guides for players seeking to switch from GShade to ReShade. ReShade also works on multiple games.
