Why people still USE ACT knowing their breaking TOS ??

[Seddrinth]

Years of case studies of parse tools show they are very often used poorly and for shaming and it's the "Don't ask, Don't tell" mentality that stops the majority of that behaviour for fear of reprisal.

If we had an official tool, the shaming behaviour would increase exponentially. I still remember the huge discussion about it in Rift, when Trion caved and put in an official parser, it immediately started being used for bad.

"Don't ask, Don't tell" and unsupported is how it should stay.

I played Rift for many years. There are no official parsers. Every parser is a 3rd party add on.

[Seddrinth]

Rift. The parser was begged for, week one of implementation there were threads and threads of "dunking" and class exclusion.

And calling someone out is unnecessary, you can easily see who is not doing their job without a parser, you can quietly and calmly offer them advice and coaching without going "XYZ HAS A TERRIBLE PARSE EVERYONE KICK THEM"

It's a dead horse topic, Yoshi P said no, it's not going to happen. Let it go.

I've played Rift since launch. You are full of it. There are no official parsers in game. Every parser is 3rd party program.

[ElciaDeiLinus]

The ability to preemptively understand if a given party or player is even capable, and thus worth investing the time in, is an important factor in avoiding potential frustration.

Which can be done with opt in, nothing's going to ever force you to not have requirements for your premades- whether that be opting in, using guides, having optimized gear, etc...

Making it globally opt-in would significantly limit its usefulness as part of the pug vetting process in high-end content. There's a decent chance it would lead to people sequestering themselves and refusing to allow anyone who hadn't opted in into their parties.

I have complete faith that when it comes to dumping on casuals, the parsing community will always find a way.

If parse toxicity is being kept infrequent in this game while in every other game it's one of the top causes of it- maybe SE's handling of it shouldn't change?

In that time I can only recall three cases of actual direct parse toxicity, and I personally reported all 3 cases.

"I am an X player, so I know that X players are never toxic and Y players never experience toxicity". What's toxic? Last discussion on the forums about a streamer who got banned made it clear most of the community considers not chain pulling an instance as a tank to be toxic, but telling your followers on stream to target and harass a specific player you refer to as a r#$%@# as perfectly fine.

Now, someone doing something like that isn't proof that it's a widespread problem- but when there's a thread full of people defending that and saying that's not toxic behaviour then the whole 'there's no toxicity towards casuals' line becomes very questionable.

A lot of people in the high-end community are tired of being unfairly demonized by a subset of the community that is frankly obsessively fixated on something that barely affects them in day-to-day gameplay.

It literally would not affect them at all if the people who are tired of being 'unfairly demonized' weren't so obsessively fixated on forcing them to take part of something that as you say, should barely affect them at all. Also- where's this unfair demonization anyway? Casuals generally just want to play the game, they rarely join forums or reddits- and these forums in particular are drenched in complaints about casual players. These forums are an echo chamber of elitists complaining about how much casuals are trying to silence them- with no casuals in sight actually doing that. It's easy to find youtube vids and reddit threads talking about how horrible these casuals who are nowhere to be found are for trying to shut everyone up- and despite this baffling mentality that you're being beset by this frankly disorganized casual playerbase, it really seems like casuals have no actual representation.

[Gothicshark]

It's mainly a thing to cover Square. So if you choose to download anything like that and there's technical issues or viruses, Square will simply tell you it's against their terms to even use them so your help will be next to nothing. I doubt they'll actually ban someone using them.

It's deeper than that, their choice to not allow addons was due to the toxic environment found in games like WOW that had them. So the designed the game in a way as to not need end game addons. They then banned the use of aftermarket mods, both for the legal and to avoid toxic game elements.

As to banning the use, they will if you tell them you use them. As SE is really on the ball when it comes to enforcing rule breaks when they know about it, and can prove it.

[Gothicshark]

Some people I know who use it (definitely not me because I would never break the rules...) ignore the TOS because it's a pointless rule and it's impossible to enforce.

The stated intention behind the rule was to prevent harassment.

You realize you are basically outing yourself as to using ACT, also it is not a pointless rule, and it does prevent toxicity to a degree, that and they actually enforce Bans of Toxic behavior if reported. Since chat logs are kept by SE long enough for them to check submitted reports. If the source of someone toxic behavior is ACT or similar, and the person uses such info to be toxic in Party or Alliance chat (seen it) then a quick report of that behavior is looked into by SE (I have submitted such reports) they usually check into a report within a couple of hours, and as fast as 30minutes. So do not think Toxic players have a free run here like in WOW which stopped caring in 2005. The problem is people not reporting Toxicity, not that SE doesn't enforce the rules.

[JanVanding]

I've played Rift since launch. You are full of it. There are no official parsers in game. Every parser is 3rd party program.

They did have an ingame tool but it was incredibly basic, I'm sure you remember the threads and threads of arguments and subsequent nerfing of certain class set ups over Dummy parse numbers yes?

They also offered preference support to parse modders and allowed them to be advertised which is as good as an official endorsement.

But you already knew that.

As to the others, especially the one deciding to use a forum rules breaking insult.

TOS states very clearly that the data belongs to Square Enix, even your Client side files and screen shots that you share belong to them. They "rent" you a license which they can withdraw at any time and without warning, when that license expires, you're no longer allowed access to that data, but ain't nobody going to chase you up for files sat on your hard drive you can't really do much with without server access.

You sharing screenshots & videos, no problem, it's copyright stamped so it's still shown to be property of Square Enix.

You sharing ingame data that is property of Square Enix on a 3rd party site which they don't want you doing, generating hits and thus revenue for someone else off Squares property? Problem. That's where the GDPR issue also comes in.

It's not your data, it's not my data, it's Squares data

To quote Willy Wonka

It's all there

Black and white

Crystal Clear.

Reason the makers don't get chased up with a Cease and Desist is because it's a waste of Lawyer fees and time, doesn't mean to say SE doesn't have the option at their disposal or that they couldn't just do it tomorrow if they felt it had become a problem.

Edit: Additionally, just remember there is a company out there that willingly flexes the full extent of their legal muscle, SE are pretty chill and let a lot of stuff fly, they encourage creators, often share their work and do so in hopes of building community in a positive way, would you rather SE turn into that other company where they slap copyright strikes on everything because they can? To lawyer up every time a fan made mod community appears? SE are lenient and it's actually a blessing that they are....

Push too hard, they could easily go the same route as a certain "Family console" company, because they have all the legal text to act with impunity on many a things, they choose not to and that's why "Don't ask, Don't tell" exists surrounding that certain mod.

It's at their grace, poke the bear too much, it has very sharp claws.

[Ayuhra]

It's deeper than that, their choice to not allow addons was due to the toxic environment found in games like WOW that had them. So the designed the game in a way as to not need end game addons. They then banned the use of aftermarket mods, both for the legal and to avoid toxic game elements.

As to banning the use, they will if you tell them you use them. As SE is really on the ball when it comes to enforcing rule breaks when they know about it, and can prove it.

While this is true I feel like the addon ban is also an issue of practicality since there are console players in this game and they play on the same servers as PC players. If addons were allowed then playstation users would be left in the dust in many cases, it's not fair to them. (This is why ESO, which definitely allows addons, has different servers for different platforms)

[Mhaeric]

As to the others, especially the one deciding to use a forum rules breaking insult.

TOS states very clearly that the data belongs to Square Enix, even your Client side files and screen shots that you share belong to them. They "rent" you a license which they can withdraw at any time and without warning, when that license expires, you're no longer allowed access to that data, but ain't nobody going to chase you up for files sat on your hard drive you can't really do much with without server access.

You sharing screenshots & videos, no problem, it's copyright stamped so it's still shown to be property of Square Enix.

You sharing ingame data that is property of Square Enix on a 3rd party site which they don't want you doing, generating hits and thus revenue for someone else off Squares property? Problem. That's where the GDPR issue also comes in.

It's not your data, it's not my data, it's Squares data

To quote Willy Wonka

It's all there

Black and white

Crystal Clear.

Reason the makers don't get chased up with a Cease and Desist is because it's a waste of Lawyer fees and time, doesn't mean to say SE doesn't have the option at their disposal or that they couldn't just do it tomorrow if they felt it had become a problem.

Edit: Additionally, just remember there is a company out there that willingly flexes the full extent of their legal muscle, SE are pretty chill and let a lot of stuff fly, they encourage creators, often share their work and do so in hopes of building community in a positive way, would you rather SE turn into that other company where they slap copyright strikes on everything because they can? To lawyer up every time a fan made mod community appears? SE are lenient and it's actually a blessing that they are....

Push too hard, they could easily go the same route as a certain "Family console" company, because they have all the legal text to act with impunity on many a things, they choose not to and that's why "Don't ask, Don't tell" exists surrounding that certain mod.

It's at their grace, poke the bear too much, it has very sharp claws.

I see that you've finally changed to say that your data is owned by SE and not personal data. However, the GPDR has no bearing on corporate property and only applies to personal data. It has nothing to do with anything here. It's also only applicable to the EU, which might inform SE's policies certainly won't decide them. You really are just making things up.

I'll make it simple for you. This line from the user agreement is the reason why parsers are against terms of service:
"2.5 Data Mining. You may not intercept, mine or otherwise collect information from the Game using unauthorized third party software."
The Game is defined as "The Game includes software that is installed on your computer, as periodically updated by Square Enix ("Licensed Software"), as well as data that Square Enix maintains on its servers."

This is vague enough to possibly find a loophole for ACT since it only reads the incoming packets and some information temporarily stored locally in RAM and doesn't read anything from the software that is installed on your computer nor does it directly read the data on the server. This loophole might be argued away by noting that while ACT doesn't read directly from the server, it is collecting information that is otherwise maintained on the server. Note that it is absolutely not against the user agreement to do something like write it down or input the information into a spreadsheet. It is not collecting or utilizing the information for analysis that is against terms of service, it is using a software program to collect it.

[Melichoir]

This is vague enough to possibly find a loophole for ACT since it only reads the incoming packets and some information temporarily stored locally in RAM and doesn't read anything from the software that is installed on your computer nor does it directly read the data on the server. This loophole might be argued away by noting that while ACT doesn't read directly from the server, it is collecting information that is otherwise maintained on the server. Note that it is absolutely not against the user agreement to do something like write it down or input the information into a spreadsheet. It is not collecting or utilizing the information for analysis that is against terms of service, it is using a software program to collect it.

I think youre probably looking at this inverted. It's not that ACT finds a loophole in the ToS, its that the ToS is written specifically to allow said loophole by being vague and broad.

What I think people dont understand is that just because it's in the ToS doesnt mean that SE has to enforce it. It is their contract and they can choose to ignore or enforce parts of it as they see fit. This is, from a purely business and legal standpoint, ideal because it means they can allow for things that are a net positive to the player base but still have the means to address problems that crop up. So in this specific case, having a parser is going to be a net positive for Savage and Ultimate content and optimizing play for the player base, but they still have the wiggle room to punish players who abuse Parser information to berate or belittle players who may or may not be to concerned with optimal play.

To address a point that is constantly brought up:

No, it is not a violation of your privacy to have your combat data recorded by someone else. The simple truth is if the in-game combat log can pick it up, it is 'public' information within the context of the game. You have no recourse to prevent my combat log from displaying what you do in a trial. All parsers do (like ACT) is just translate combat data information into a more accessible format, but all the data you find on ACT can be put together via the combat log. So I can find out your DPS by painstakingly adding up the damage you do and doing the math. Youre not being 'snooped' upon because the information is out there in the air as long as we're together in a combat situation.

[Mhaeric]

I think youre probably looking at this inverted. It's not that ACT finds a loophole in the ToS, its that the ToS is written specifically to allow said loophole by being vague and broad.

What I think people dont understand is that just because it's in the ToS doesnt mean that SE has to enforce it. It is their contract and they can choose to ignore or enforce parts of it as they see fit. This is, from a purely business and legal standpoint, ideal because it means they can allow for things that are a net positive to the player base but still have the means to address problems that crop up. So in this specific case, having a parser is going to be a net positive for Savage and Ultimate content and optimizing play for the player base, but they still have the wiggle room to punish players who abuse Parser information to berate or belittle players who may or may not be to concerned with optimal play.

It's a legal document, so I doubt they purposely included vagueness. They are just, as you say, choosing to not enforce it selectively.

I'm of the opinion that if someone were to try to make a legal argument that the terms of service were vague enough to allow for ACT's use that they would lose that argument. The loophole is not that big and it's clearly against the spirit of the agreement.