TOS clarification

[Starcade]

Square Enix allows a lot of things. It's still not legit. Even if you stop using FFXIAH, you've already used it. Once a cheater, always a cheater.

Several points:

1) We had a discussion about this of the situation regarding the Souleater-KC DRKs running over Absolute Virtue. There's a difference between illegitimacy and illegality (and I think you wish to charge me with the latter, not the former). The Souleater-KC zerg situation was not illegal, but it was declared illegitimate.

2) This is not the first time I've had this discussion with people, as there are people who believe the Wiki is also illegal.

I'd suggest contacting the Special Task Force -- especially because your last statement is completely correct.

[Byrth]

You're misunderstanding the Members agreement section 3.1c/d. Anything is illegal if and when SE says it is, regardless of what it is. Doing nothing may be equally damning. The only effective account penalty is banning, so that's really all that matters.

I've never heard of SE banning anyone for Windower usage, Wiki usage, FFXIAH usage, Parsing, Spellcast, or any of the other things that you seem to disapprove of. Therefore they're effectively not against the TOS.

It would be nice if we could get a developer or GM response to my questions though.

[Swords]

1. Section 2.4 basically states you agree to not do anything other than use the game as it was intended. You agree to not try to alter, decode, resell, give away, or distribute or use any non-liscensed 3rd party software involved with the game, which also includes you account which you do not own, you merely pay for the service to play the game. However, decoding game mechanics through trial and error does not violate this because you are not data-mining or hacking game code to discover how it works.

2. Desipte the fact that there are some programs that do modify the game without giving the player an unfair advantage, it still is considered against the ToS. While they might not let you cheat they still violate 2.4 because they either alter, data-mine, or somehow interact with POL and FFXI through unofficial 3rd party software.

3. Unless it's being sold or distributed through an official SE liscensed seller, it is against the ToS. Additionally if you buy or download these patches that are not distributed through a liscensed SE seller you open yourself up to loads of potential hacks, keyloggers, trojans, and who the hell knows what else. If your really desperate for faster updates, get a faster internet service thats all I can say.

4. Yup, your not supposed to release or document any communications between you or SE. I know it's common for people to post pictures of their conversations with GM's and stuff, but your not supposed too. They do it to both watch their backs and help protect customers privacy, which is why they resolve incidents in jail half the time rather than in public with lots of people around.

5. True, it does seem to undermine the entire policy, it's extremely rare that they would ban you just for nothing though. Alot of times the people you hear cry wolf when they get banned are hardly innocent, and most of the time feign ignorance that they did anything wrong. The policy was probably put in place to deal with these kind's of people.

6. Yup, pretty much just another catch all policy. You get all those sue-happy people nowadays looking for any excuse or loophole to get some free cash, you don't want to take chances.

7. No, 7.1 referrs to banning your account for using it for anything that would lawfully be considered illegal. An example would be file sharing illegaly downloaded mp3's, hacked DVD's, or sharing account info through Private messages or your SE mail account.

[Kyte]

Given that Wiki is a community site, it is pretty silly to even suggest that it is against the ToS.

[Cream_Soda]

2) This is not the first time I've had this discussion with people, as there are people who believe the Wiki is also illegal.

And those people are morons

[Byrth]

I'm going to make a statement here that I believe to be correct:
* There have been 0 cases of SE banning exclusively for windower (and windower-endorsed plugin) usage. Every single case where someone claims to have been banned for windower usage eventually is revealed to be false. Either they've RMTed, botted, or used third party tools beyond the scope of windower. Windower has been committed to improving FFXI gameplay experience without unbalancing it and maintains very tight control over its source code for that reason.

Follow the logic here:
1) Because of section 3.1c/d of the member's agreement, the only way we can determine the effective TOS is by watching it in practice.
2) Banning (temp or perma) is the only real penalty associated with violating the TOS.
3) To date, no one has been banned specifically for windower usage.
4) If 1, 2, and 3 are correct, then it naturally follows that Windower usage isn't against the effective TOS.

The reason SE doesn't release a windower with all the functions that the unofficial windower has is that the PS2 and Xbox players would be unable to take advantage. The reason that they don't enforce the TOS with regards to the windower is this:
Stats on windower usage- http://www.jpbutton.com/?page_id=3113
NA community's reaction when asked about it- http://www.jpbutton.com/?p=573
JP community's opinion towards windower (tl;dr: you get the same spread of reactions as NAs, perhaps more towards the rule-following boyscout side)- http://jpbutton.bluegartr.com/?p=1797

Subnote:
I've heard of one case where someone got their final account strike (after several previous offenses related to botting) when their computer messed up and they started shooting out Unicode characters in the shout channel, which you can't make without using a third party program. They were sort of indirectly indicted and banned for generic third party program use because of this, but they were hanging on by a thread anyway.

[Starcade]

Given that Wiki is a community site, it is pretty silly to even suggest that it is against the ToS.

It has been done, though, in the same manner as the earlier person tries to use against me.

[noodles355]

The first rule of windower is you do not talk about windower.

[noodles355]

Was this thread just moved/merged/renamed without any notice?

[Byrth]

Nope, only two new posts are yours.