SE's most difinitive statement yet on parsers

[Amberyl]

It's similar to how, say, PSO2 says "No American players" in their TOS, but you can relatively freely and safely play in American server communities and pretty freely speak English as long as you aren't disrupting or abusive to the JP players. It's a quick corporate way to remove troublesome folks with minimal due process.

Not true at all. The only reason they don't enforce the ban as strictly now, is because PSO2 is a FTP game and the majority of western players connect via VPN, so can't be easily ip blocked. It was heavily enforced during earlier stages of the game, when the western portal was still on the cards, and the out-of-TOS population was smaller. It's also the reason you can't buy Arks Cash with western credit cards.

Not a relevant comparison at all.

[Krr]

Not true at all. The only reason they don't enforce the ban as strictly now, is because PSO2 is a FTP game and the majority of western players connect via VPN, so can't be easily ip blocked. It was heavily enforced during earlier stages of the game, when the western portal was still on the cards, and the out-of-TOS population was smaller. It's also the reason you can't buy Arks Cash with western credit cards.

Not a relevant comparison at all.

Fact check: The majority of western players only connect via VPN due to a routing error on Yahoo.jp's part after a subnet mask configuration change, which was two months ago. Before that, it was trivial and safe for at least a year to connect with a western IP that could be seen with the naked eye. Sega has also officially announced, several times, that they have no intent to do an IP block, even though they easily did so on contract with the company running the SEA version with most of that region. And, basically every SEA player has noted that most VPNs are totally unviable to use now due to the blocking scheme, which just results in them having shoddy connections that are unplayable.

It is also extremely trivial, if somewhat slow, forforeign players to acquire arks cash now. If Sega didn't want them doing it, the services they use - which are in most cases blatantly fraudulent - would no longer be accepted. Period.

Whatever Sega did during the beta stages of the game is irrelevant to how that clause of the ToS is treated now, which is identical to how Square has treated the ToS with regards to parsing: something they can't enforce or don't want to invest in the tools to enforce due to the risk it poses to their business. Likewise, in both situations the 'threat' (NA players, parsers) has been proven to have minimal impact on the community as long as the particularly inappropriate ones are removed.

The comparison is relevant. Things that happened two years or more ago are not.

(PS. Only an American could say something as conceited as 'No American players.' The TOS states no gaijin. There are more countries in the world outside of Japan than just America.)

Only someone who's on shaky ground with their statements grasps at semantics. Dig? The statement remains relevant whether or not the ToS clause bans all foreigners or just the NA. They're 'enforcing' a specific clause in a way that doesn't reflect the clause by the letter.

[Amberyl]

Fact check

I love posts that start like this, as they almost always contain utter rubbish.

The majority of western players only connect via VPN due to a routing error on Yahoo.jp's part after a subnet mask configuration change, which was two months ago.

Absolutely not true, lol. I don't know what ship or block you hang on, but the vast majority of western players VPN due to distance-related latency messing with the way their friends appear on screen, (regardless of whether they're all local to each other or not,) and that hasn't changed since the game launched to begin with. That's a networking artefact, caused by the mechanics of the client-server code, not some transitory routing issue.