Handling Cheaters Gracefully vs Hardline ToS + Questionable legality of bans

Lets be real here, this is an MMORPG

The ability to revoke player access is essential to making a game in the first place, otherwise you would have to keep it running forever.
No one is going to launch a successful suit for this.

This is vastly oversimplifying and just not true. I refer you to past posts. Trying to apply your own version of common sense to the courts is not... sensible.

None of the legal discussion is important. For every company, in all circumstances - it is always a legal and financial liability to come down hard on your customer base. To intentionally end the value of what you sold after selling it. It is always foolish to make enemies of customers rather than profit. SE already acts as a company with the knowledge of these risks.

You aren't going to convince me and I'm not trying to convince them because they already know.

I'm sorry but I am very frustrated now. I have people calling me a gaslighter, a cheater, a liar and all sorts of things which add nothing of value and simply as a way of expressing their dissent take things too far. Such folks owe me an apology and are being quite jerks. I'm going to cut my activity here for tonight before I do the same.

We don't need to agree to anything about the legalities. We all know an addon problem exists
I wish yon haters would stop derailing productive conversation and stop trolling the effort to discuss solutions

I hope that third party programs are never allowed in FF14. Just see WoW, many players there can't even play anymore without third party programs. And in FF14 some players tell that the game play is to easy without realizing that they have a dozen third party cheat programs running already.

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Originally Posted by Loonies

I hope that third party programs are never allowed in FF14. Just see WoW, many players there can't even play anymore without third party programs. And in FF14 some players tell that the game play is to easy without realizing that they have a dozen third party cheat programs running already.

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It depends. Because addons have a negative impact in WoW, this is not a necessarity for other games. An addon can only do things, which are defined and allowed through an API. If the addon API does not allow too much then there is no problem at all.


Cheers

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Originally Posted by StealthPaladin

This is vastly oversimplifying and just not true. I refer you to past posts. Trying to apply your own version of common sense to the courts is not... sensible.

None of the legal discussion is important. For every company, in all circumstances - it is always a legal and financial liability to come down hard on your customer base. To intentionally end the value of what you sold after selling it. It is always foolish to make enemies of customers rather than profit. SE already acts as a company with the knowledge of these risks.

You aren't going to convince me and I'm not trying to convince them because they already know.

I'm sorry but I am very frustrated now. I have people calling me a gaslighter, a cheater, a liar and all sorts of things which add nothing of value and simply as a way of expressing their dissent take things too far. Such folks owe me an apology and are being quite jerks. I'm going to cut my activity here for tonight before I do the same.

We don't need to agree to anything about the legalities. We all know an addon problem exists
I wish yon haters would stop derailing productive conversation and stop trolling the effort to discuss solutions

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There is no productive conversation to come from this thread. You are debating something that isn't up for debate.

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Originally Posted by StealthPaladin

None of the legal discussion is important.
I wish yon haters would stop derailing productive conversation and stop trolling the effort to discuss solutions

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There is nothing else constructive to be had here.

The topic you made literally includes “Questionable legality of bans”.

The other half of it is about a “graceful handling of cheaters”; there shouldn’t be. If you are cheating, and doing so gets you caught, then you deserve whatever punishment is dealt. People who are doing stuff like texture changes aren’t the ones getting caught.

If the devs do notice you doing something fishy but don’t care….that should be enough. They don’t need to do extra work to justify their bans.

I believe SE should take action against any and all violations of the ToS. Not enforcing your own rules only breeds contempt and discontent among those to whom the rules have been applied. Try managing a classroom and you'll see what I mean.

It's clear that the ToS are written to protect SE and give them complete freedom to enforce the ToS in any way they see fit when they see fit to do so. It's sad to me to see that they don't enforce things regularly enough, as evidenced by the number of people saying "They won't do anything; I know X people who do Y thing and haven't had issues." or "SE are too lazy to enforce their own rules except the ones they feel like because the community has thin skin.".

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Originally Posted by Illmaeran

I believe SE should take action against any and all violations of the ToS. Not enforcing your own rules only breeds contempt and discontent among those to whom the rules have been applied. Try managing a classroom and you'll see what I mean.

It's clear that the ToS are written to protect SE and give them complete freedom to enforce the ToS in any way they see fit when they see fit to do so. It's sad to me to see that they don't enforce things regularly enough, as evidenced by the number of people saying "They won't do anything; I know X people who do Y thing and haven't had issues." or "SE are too lazy to enforce their own rules except the ones they feel like because the community has thin skin.".

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SE not lazy to enforce their own rules.. they don't see any profitable reason to rule game platform with iron fist, this is not a classroom this is a company trying to make profit.
Add-on made due necessity if majority of community using it banning all of them not a smart business decision.

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Originally Posted by StealthPaladin

Having mods bannable in the ToS of a service like FFXIV is not actually legal, at least in the US. Of course, doesn't stop Steam and others, but it's rarely challenged in court -- and usually results in a settlement out of court when attempted. There is a huge difference for an MMO tho

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An MMO is nothing like the law you've mentioned. Blizzard have permanently banned cheater and even taken paid cheat makers to court and won which had their products pulled from sale in several markets as well as financial penalties on the creators. Not to mention Japan, where Square Enix are based and a large chunk of the player base is, has laws against modding games.

What a lot of people seem to misunderstand or just ignore is that a portion of MMO players, regardless of the game, doesn't actually see cheating as a bad thing. They're happy to use any and everyone tool under the sun to gain an advantage with no regards for the consequences.

In fact, we even seen this in games like WoW that have an official UI add-on framework. Combat addons like DBM, BigWigs and WeakAuras are so perfected these days that they're ready for new raids very quickly. Beyond that, there's tons of tools for min-maxing to the point in which large chunks of the game is reduced to balancing values in a spreadsheet.

Now I understand there's a lot of frustration around cheating and concerns of ALL plugins going away this time but you ultimately have to blame Square Enix for their inactions and vague statements. They've asked people not to use certain third party tools, including lewd mods, but they've not actually done anything to deal with their idea of bad actors. Not to mention really vague statements about typing the battle log into Excel or using Discord also being third party tools.

This is a key area in which Square Enix are failing the entire player base. Cheating is real and in PvP will just kill the game mode really fast if they remain hands off. However, there's also users that are so reliant on appearance mods or QoL UI plug-ins that they're threatening to quit if they no longer work.

They've backed themselves between a rock and a hard place while also ignoring the macOS and PlayStation player base which doesn't have ANY of these tools, QoL or just outright cheats/hacks. It needs addressing and all portions of the player base will probably have to concede on something.

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Originally Posted by StealthPaladin

You have a version of me in your mind that does not exist. Plus, there are many factual errors in what you have just said. There are also problems of "not even being wrong".



Not sure what the rest of this statement was supposed to be, but there are plenty of cases which set the precedent outlined. Though winning is not even the issue. To say that is somewhat revealing of a lack of understanding.



No. Only terms the court holds valid are valid. For any agreement, but as I pointed out the standard is far stricter for the type of software SE has. There is no point trying to convince anyone -- we are the judge of future attempts to take them to trial. Your argument that "oh it IS legally binding" doesn't matter. A lawyer convincing a judge that they should at least go to trial is all that matters. Not winning or losing, not what the ToS say not any of that.

Those are tools SE's lawyers use to say hey, lets dismiss the case look its in our ToS and our EULA. That doesn't mean the court is going to do it.

Oy... so tiring. ok here. Look a lot of this revolves around developments with what's known as the FAA regarding Supreme Court various rulings on arbitration and class action clauses especially. State courts, especially California but many states -- not cut across any political line, are finding ways to get around FAA and deny such clauses.

You can absolutely find records of such cases by doing citation-based searches. Look for recent cases citing any of these:
Buckeye Check Cashing v. Cardegna
Brewer v. Mo. Title Loans
Smith v. Nobiletti Builders, Inc
Figueroa v. THI of N.M. at Casa Arena Blanca LLC
Glob. Client Sols., LLC v. Ossello
Narayan v. Ritz-Carlton Dev. Co


That's ONE side, state courts treating class action clauses in many different ways. There are at least 5 often used major workarounds that effectively still end up triggering class action or equivalent. For example sometimes they just find that a choice-of-law clause in an arbitration agreement incorporates state law contrary to the FAA. They may use qui tam or a district known to be soft on unconscionability arguments. So many cases which do not go as expected

Then there's how the FTC fits into the FAA: sort of complimentary, sort of unrelated, sort of conflicting. Not well planned. If the FTC gets interested in a situation it gets very complicated. If a company is even edging on maybe violating some FTC rules, lower courts can use it in all kinds of ways. We would have to have a very long conversation to explain why the FTC cares about the client/server product/subscription model and digital assets. It is out there, if you want to find it you can find it.

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And there's the proof of your gas lighting

Not one case is about a videogame company perma banning.

You're using online services that offer a physical products versus an online service that offers digital media of which you rent a licence to play.