DPS Parser - ToS Violation?

[Yoseph]

My Anti Virus intercepts and collects information about the game also.

It is a 3rd party software product as well.

Is that also a ToS violation?

If not, SE needs to define this issue in depth.

[KisaiTenshi]

My Anti Virus intercepts and collects information about the game also.

It is a 3rd party software product as well.

Is that also a ToS violation?

If not, SE needs to define this issue in depth.

The antivirus software does not hook the program, therefor it does not collect information from the game. If you want to get into the legal sense of what they mean, it means you can't extract or manipulate data that the game uses. The Antivirus does not work at that level, it scans files upon "access" and delays the game from opening the file until it says OK, it doesn't change it. Likewise at the network level the antivirus scans the flash applet they use for the authentication mechanism but doesn't change it.

The software the bots are using on the other hand are directly manipulating the software by hooking. The DPS Parser for all we know may be hooking the text output of the game. As far as what harm can it do... not much really, I'd say it's rather weak to ban someone for using such a tool unless that tool was directly changing the behavior of the player (Eg telling other players they aren't welcome because they do low DPS or whatnot.) In another game I played, players were rather fond of modding the game to get a combat power value that the game server transmitted to the client, but wasn't shown. So the mod changed the game to show it... and enabled a bunch of other cheaty hacks as well. The players that could see the combat power would literately not play with players who displayed "inferior" combat values and likewise would pick "Easy" PvP targets based on the combat power score. Just based on this alone I'd say it's a ToS violation if it can provide any realtime data from hooking the game that isn't readily available.