Handling Cheaters Gracefully vs Hardline ToS + Questionable legality of bans

[StealthPaladin]

One solution: impose month/season/year bans on PVP & High-end raids for mods that truly cheat. Let them access base content and account, they have no claim at that point. SE is simply preserving value for other customers and minimizing impact on offending customers. Great

Zepla's video brought up the idea of Discord being a tool, said that it was a stretch. Well, no not really. Who wins Frontline if everyone is vanilla but 8 players in Discord? That's why you can't join CC ranked in a group

Discord places overlays in-game. Discord bots help find scheduled parties and duties, simplify housing search and all sorts things. Heck even Radeon's browser overlay with fishing timers loaded -- as much a tool as other invasive 3rd party addons. May seem a stretch from a user perspective but in how it interacts with the game display process and offers a different experience than the game alone, it absolutely counts in current ToS

Since Discord interact also with process and data, it too qualifies as far as the ToS goes. And she's right to call that a stretch, because the ToS is in the wrong

It is already too restrictive

I rarely have any big gripes with the dev team or YoshiP.. outside of some of my dreams they crushed and many hours of work stolen unceremoniously when phasing out the 1.0 job system. Fact is they are now trying too hard to force the community to be nice

Sounds like a reasonable goal, but ends up making things worse. The community was nice with a little bit of edge BEFORE any rules were this strict. At some point the rules should swap and say, hey are you really hurt? is someone bleeding? OK then don't waste a GM's time we need the budget for content.

Content-only mods and snarky words in passing should not be actionable, it is more unethical to come down on a player you sold this product to, than whatever rude or lewd thing they produced at worst. At best an addon could be useful to the team. This should be the key takeaway. No matter how we personally feel, this is important to make this whole multiverse sustainable

Then it becomes easy to set the rule: When it comes to using mods that actually break competition, THOSE actions are making a lasting material difference in OTHER PLAYERS gameplay who ALSO PAID for the product and service.

If the effect is limited to less than 10 minutes of chat or something that happens purely on the accused's own screen -- it should not matter at all and SE really has no right to take a stance that it does. That's immoral to invade the player's agency and to disrespect all the money they've given you in this way.

Now if someone goes beyond that, it isn't too hard to police.

If someone is abusing /shout -- suspend them from /shout.
If someone is abusing Crystalline Conflict, suspend them from Crystalline Conflict.

That would take a little bit of engineering -- but it is the sort of task entry level developers can work on and the kind of resolutions that can be handled fairly with less investigation