On "Infringing upon Others" and "Negatively impacting design"

[Moonlite]

Not being facetious with this. What action do you want SE to take against outside websites? I do think your point is valid but what action do you want from SE?

Companies have websites taken down all the time. This is a strange statement.


I think this is all just people being mad. But if a few websites went down, the new ones would probably be more discreet. And wasn't that really the whole point. SE cost, design, or choice isn't going to enforce anticheating. Just be discreet.

[TaleraRistain]

Companies have websites taken down all the time. This is a strange statement.


I think this is all just people being mad. But if a few websites went down, the new ones would probably be more discreet. And wasn't that really the whole point. SE cost, design, or choice isn't going to enforce anticheating. Just be discreet.

Under what grounds would they be able to have it taken down? Companies do often have a legal standing to issue a cease and desist. I gather part of the reason they were able to do in this case is that the owner's real life information was left somewhere in their github repository. If SE doesn't have real life information on the administrators of the FFLogs or Tomestone website or something like ACT, how are they going to take action against them? Are they going to go to the host service and demand the information? Well, you need to do that through legal channels.

[Moonlite]

Under what grounds would they be able to have it taken down? Companies do often have a legal standing to issue a cease and desist. I gather part of the reason they were able to do in this case is that the owner's real life information was left somewhere in their github repository. If SE doesn't have real life information on the administrators of the FFLogs or Tomestone website or something like ACT, how are they going to take action against them? Are they going to go to the host service and demand the information? Well, you need to do that through legal channels.

Are they not hosting intellectual property of SE? Just because they can scrape lodestone and other things doesn't mean they are allowed to host the info.


Not sure about Tomestone. But isn't logs a decently sized internet presence? They aren't arresting anyone they are sending an email. Sketchier translation sites get tracked down all the time. For something that has been around as long as Archon, I am going to go on a limb and say SE could find an email to send a C&D. Mentioning dubious sites. I have seen some go up in smoke with no contact from the company. They did go to the service provider and have them take down sites.


And even if it was completely without merit. I am not a lawyer. It seems like C&D letters don't need any merit to be sent out. Just to be enforced by law.

[Amarande]

Also I'd be quite curious to know how you'd proceed? Do I show up on their discords that are probably choke full of diehard fans of the websites, and expose my concerns? Or do I ask to talk with a manager? I'm sorry but this sounds a little masochistic.

Just a little masochistic. I've tried similar attempts to detoxify raiding culture, and more or less all I end up with is a collection of Discord bans, blocks, and people who go on and on about how "you just spread negativity" sooo ... sadly, something on these lines.

"people who do savage probably cheat". While there is genuine congratulations when people clear, there are also a lot of people who look down on anyone who clears harder content as cheaters and diminish their effort in getting a clear.

The trouble is twofold:

* That if you go by a strict interpretation of the TOS, a painfully large amount of the raiding playerbase DOES cheat. (And you need less than 10% of the PUG base to do this in order for it to be odds-on that you will have at least one such person in your PF.)

* This has an insidious effect on content development. I am not sure this is reversible, or if we're watching the raiding ship start to sail over the horizon as we speak as performance has become too pervasively inflated by the use of third party aids (which then require content to be tuned much more tightly to not receive mass ill feedback and/or risk a sudden implosion in player participation due to frustration if the aids are yanked especially in what seems to be the hardest tier the game has had since the horror stories of Heavensward, which actually did cause a mass towel-throwing).

but I didn't get the feeling privacy was in any way a concern of theirs (FFLogs').

Unlike the other big website-based tools that only indirectly interact with the game (e.g. the hunt trackers, the Teamcraft materials tracking aid, etc.), that fund themselves through donations, the problem here is that WC/FF Logs & Tomestone are an actual business, all the way up to including paywalled data access features.

There is going to be no way to get its operator to cooperate in a way in any way positive to the community as they have a vested interest otherwise (when you post eg an S-rank to Faloop that is merely an organized community notepad you are contributing to; when somebody uploads a run you were in to FF Logs, that is literally a product the site is to some or another degree selling).

SE does need to have it shut down, probably through leveraging the commercial nature of the site, the necessity of third party addon usage as a data source, and the ill-effects it has on the part of the playerbase that would like to just do content and not deal with boxscores or rat races (I should hope this is a majority, still).