Modders did it to themselves

[Kaurhz]

There really isn't a disparity. Everything that gets talked about in-game has potential for repercussion if reported. Mare is the only thing that has gone this rampant, so you can't compare it to anything else. You could say parsing since it's been around so long and so many people have it, but you don't see thousands of adventurer plates linking their fflogs account, do you? There is no disparity. Don't talk about it in-game, it's that simple. In-game chat logs, streams, and the never ending modded twitter screenshots are the only way to verify someone breaking ToS about third party tools. The way they enforce it is also consistent.

Eh, there really is.. I mean you can say the ToS effectively operates on a 'don't tell' rule, but when your approach is so hands off, then you only really permit for it to go in one direction and that isn't good.. Especially from a developer perspective, since you are allowing people to run rampant with the nonsense that they do, as long as they 'don't speak' about it, with no real moderation beyond that point. It's the entire reason why we had things go as far out of hand as to unironically have a plugin with the express purpose of stalking.

As for comparing it to Parsing, they may not be linked in an adventurer plate, but they are certainly doing it via Lodestone, and then people aren't exactly being subtle with 'Allagan Melon' either.

and to be honest, they've arguably gone at it with legal concerns of the plugin itself, versus actually enforcing the ToS itself (e.g., it have read/write access to data files, and inheriting some of the features from the also C&D'd stalker plugin). If enforcing the ToS were their concern then you would have seen a lot of people with an action on their account in addition to action taken on the plugin itself.

So, now that I think about it (After seeing a post on another thread), even in this case their concern was probably less about ensuring people adhere to Terms of Service, and more about a wider concern they have, so really, from a ToS perspective they've actually done very little versus take the big toy away. In time someone else will make new big toy, and then it's just back to business as usual.