Quote Originally Posted by Kenky View Post
Sorry, but when a computer decides to hold your hand because you can't compete to a degree you're expected to, then it is indeed cheating. To say it's not is like saying athletes who dope up are legit. (Both seen as artificially granting advantage without really earning said advantage).
I don't disagree with this statement at all. I don't think it negates what Forte was saying in the way you think it does though; Forte's statement was that there are degrees of cheating, and having marker presets is not on the same level of cheating as having the machine actively showing invisible AoEs. I think the former should be a feature, and SE came so close to implementing it and outright killing the tool, but my group never used it and instead our SCH did it manually through the fight as needed. I think the latter is an outright betrayal of the spirit of the mechanics.

The fact that ACT is against ToS gives SE every right to punish people that use it (And they now are, funny that!).
Except they're not. Their stance literally has not changed on ACT: use it if you want but don't advertise that you're using it. This is the general playerbase being punished because a subset of a subset decided to push the envelope and all of us losing a valuable feature.

The difference between ACT and Mods (in some fashion at least) is that ACT takes information from the game and relays it to a 3rd party. The same way that a 3rd party program could (in theory) inject code to rig outcomes. See the issue?

Some mods, while still being against ToS, don't meddle with the coding of the game outside of client-side visuals. That don't affect the server. It's still punishable and plenty of people that have tried to cry victim for being banned because they got caught showing it off don't really have a right to complain.
All the more reason for SE to implement a first party solution and stop letting the third parties do as they will. What happened with Paisley is an inevitability of relying on your playerbase to supplement desired features in the game.

That said, again, they haven't changed their stance on ACT. It's in the exact same grayzone that mods are in: don't ask, don't tell.