Use of tools that allow players to more easily complete content. Discord?

[Arzalis]

Discord does NOT fall into the category "natively" of what SE consider's a third party tool by definition.

"Accordingly, the following activities are prohibited:

- Modifying, analyzing, integrating, and/or reverse-engineering game software or data."

Discord does not modify game files.
Discord does not analyze the game files.
Discord does not integrate with the game files.
Discord is not reverse engineering the game files.

But then again, I feel people who reference Discord with this line of reasoning are being intellectually dishonest as you know what they are referring to.

Obviously there are also people fishing for them to take a stance on Discord. And there is the obviously waiting GOTCHA moment when they do that in regards to ACT callouts and if they ban someone for that.

Discord reads your system memory to see what games you're playing, including FFXIV. It also has an overlay that integrates with the game to show who's talking.

Pretty sure Discord technically does fall under their definition of "Third Party Tool," just that they obviously have no desire to dish out punishments for using it. It does illustrate their definition is kinda bad though. The vague definition is only for their benefit. Not ours.

[Havenchild]

Discord reads your system memory to see what games you're playing, including FFXIV. It also has an overlay that integrates with the game to show who's talking.

Pretty sure Discord technically does fall under their definition of "Third Party Tool," just that they obviously have no desire to dish out punishments for using it. It does illustrate their definition is kinda bad though. The vague definition is only for their benefit. Not ours.

Discord isn't integrating directly with the games files to provide said overlay. It is integrating with your system files. That is literally not the same thing.
Discord overlay also works with programs that are NOT video games. It doesn't even know where your installation of said video games ARE.

This argument IS part of the intellectually dishonest strawman.

[Arzalis]

Discord isn't integrating directly with the games files to provide said overlay. It is integrating with your system files. That is literally not the same thing.
Discord overlay also works with programs that are NOT video games. It doesn't even know where your installation of said video games ARE.

This argument IS part of the intellectually dishonest strawman.

Discord was explicitly named by YoshiP himself on live letter as something that does technically violate their ToS due to the vagueness of the wording. So unless you're claiming he's intellectually dishonest too, you're just kinda wrong in this case. Yes, they will never issue an account action over it, but it's still violating ToS.

[Havenchild]

Discord was explicitly named by YoshiP himself on live letter as something that does technically violate their ToS due to the vagueness of the wording. So unless you're claiming he's intellectually dishonest too, you're just kinda wrong in this case.

If I'm not mistaken, he paraphrased it as... "then we'll be asked about Discord ehhh"
Feel free to send me the video

[sagacious]

Will SE's official translation do?

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...802-14-2020%29




They claim both ACT and voice chat programs like Discord are ambiguous. Logically, we can assume they sit in a similar space as far as the devs are concerned because they are mentioned together and classified the same way; that's how classification works. But it seems ACT is now not so ambiguous, so it's a legitimate question to ask them to clarify. The ultimate point is the "grey area" term came from SE themselves, and they've now apparently decided there is no grey area. So people want to know what falls where.

They do go on to talk about specific implementations of plugins that could be actionable, but to my knowledge the streamer was that banned only had a DPS meter, so it's not relevant to the actions SE has taken.

Asmongold says discord is a "separate party tool," not a third party because it does not interact with the game files