SE's most difinitive statement yet on parsers

[Kaethra]

DRM is absolutely relevant in a debate about usage policy governance. What is GameGuard, but an existence of DRM technics?

As for facts, there's a simple one that I've constantly stated, which you're choosing to ignore, and doesn't need advancing on. You've broken TOS.

Sorry, thats not a fact, only -Your- opinion.

I've not been actioned for it. Nor will I be. It seems SE doesn't agree with you.

This is the kind of torturous argumentation that led me to start this thread. While SE has been pretty clear in the past that parsers aren't permitted under the TOS, people keep coming up with ingenious reasoning that this certainly is not what their statements really mean. Now a very official statement is put out that mentions parsers by name, and a few hardy souls hang in there. Again, I'm not saying that parsers are good or bad for the game, as that is a different debate. The fact is that SE has most definitively said they currently violate the TOS.

I'm starting to think there is multiple definitions of Parsers within the community. Would you be more specific which ones you are talking about? When I think of Parsers, I'm thinking of a program that goes through the log files, parses them, and then gives you the results. What I think everyone else is speaking of is a damage meter program that shows it in an overlay or in game (perhaps by sending it to party chat, acting like a WoW addon).

I've used Parsers in EQ1 and EQ2 and they do not interact with the game while its running nor do they alter game files. They only read the log files, which you can do manually by watching combat chat ingame or opening those .txt logs in notepad. Obviously anything that interacts with the game is wrong. But reading files that are in the same location as the screenshots? If that was 'bannable' so would be posting screenshots like in that modeling thread. Which to me is a bit ridiculous and counter productive to the game.

To me a screenshot and a text log file are basically two sides of the same coin. They give us a record of what happened ingame. One is a visual representation, the other is a mathematical one. But of course when I do use parsers in MMOs, I use them properly and don't try to abuse other players with them (never seen parsers used in that way, damage meters maybe, but we can't use damage meters here).