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

[ForteNightshade]

FFlogs and Tomestone aren't something that stays at the individual level, aren't something that's kept in private as it is literally publicly available websites tracking data and activity for every player in the game. Furthermore, anybody can upload data obtained in the game about another player without them knowing, and without their consent. I am not writing this from a legal point of view, but from a consistency point of view. If you think that third parties can be infringing upon others in a bad way, then I want you to take a cold, hard look at those types of websites and data aggregators, that while they may provide a lot of useful information at a statistical level or for self improvement, they also collect data about other players without their consent and are usually widely used to dismiss or outright harass others.

The reason consent isn't applicable here is because that data doesn't belong to the individual user. It belongs to Square Enix. Everything from the buttons you press to the name of your character is Square Enix's property not yours. ACT and FFlogs simply calculate numbers that are displayed in the battle log and relay that information in an easier to read format. Which makes even the fact said numbers belonging to SE irrelevant because you can't own what is essentially math.

Furthermore, you're trying to argue an assumption as fact, e.g, parsers are "usually widely used to dismiss or outright harass others." There's no basis to this. Do some people harass others based on logs? Yes. There will always be bad apples, but it's quite the leap to claim it's the wider majority. Especially when even a cursory glance at popular discord channels where FFlogs is openly discussed would suggest otherwise.

Do you think they'd be receptive to the concerns (honestly asking)?

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.

I'll save you the trouble. It's been brought up several times before and the answer has unanimously been "no."

FFlogs relies on traffic. Making it opt in would severely hamper that traffic as people wouldn't have any real need to continuously look at the website.

I do think tombstone.gg is a several leagues too far, and that site should be scrapped. Its just a bad-attitude, a bad ethos, kind of a poison really.

When you prog an Ultimate in PF, you'll realize how invaluable being able to tell whether people who just joined your party are lying about what their prog point is. That site exists because of the sheer volume of players who felt entitled to waste other people's time.

The reality is until SE allows an option to restrict access based on specific phases of a given fight, people will seek an alternative because they don't necessarily want to help you get through a phase they just spent the last two weeks progging when they're trying to clear.

Yep, as always, the problem is Square-Enix's inconsistency and hypocrisy, only made worse by the number of people who act like Mare was Satan-incarnate but think ACT is perfectly fine (or should even become an in-game feature!) even though they're equally guilty of doing all the same things. Exclusion, harassment, very public, people bring it up in-game, and so forth.

Anyone who supports the C&D of Mare SHOULD ALSO be supporting the C&D of ACT, but lo and behold, there's quite a few sanctimonious ToS-thumpers out there who think it's only "rules for thee but not for me" when it comes to mods even though ALL of them break the rules.

This correlation doesn't work because Mare and ACT operate on a fundamentally different level. One alters in game data and relays said alternations to other users while the other simply calculates numbers. To put it plainly, you won't unknowingly walk into sexually explicit content using ACT, but could easily do so with Mare. That's what prompted the C&D for the precise reasons Yoshida outlined. It risks their bottom line either due to the rating itself no longer being an accurate reflection of the game or certain countries deeming XIV too explicit to continue operations. A prime example of this is the whole controversy surrounding Mastercard/Visa and Steam. A plugin like Mare puts SE at risk for either company to threaten them in similar pretenses.

Additionally, Mare actively allows people to share cash shop items they don't own, thereby impacting potential sales on said items.

None of these are a concern of ACT or FFlogs who don't even interact with the game. Once again, to put it simply Square only targeted Mare because people wouldn't shut up about it and it caused potential damage to their profit margin. Nevermind, their image as people couldn't help posting their modded screenshots all over twitter. While ACT is openly talked about that's where the comparisons end. And it's why SE leaves it be. Although, I won't deny another likely reason is they directly benefit from it. Yoshida comes from WoW and knows how invaluable parsing data is for the wider raid community. But instead of implementing it themselves and having to deal with the headache. They get an option of complete deniably as if anyone brings it up in game to harass others, they can be reported.

In other words, SE gets all the benefits of having a parser without many of the drawbacks. It's a win/win for them.

[Ayan_Calvesse]

Wait doesn't ACT use PCAP? so that it can intercept network data. Its actually looking at packets moving from your client to the SE server; its not reading your screen to my understanding. If anything ACT is far more intrusive then mare was due to mare being sandboxed in the means that allows you to use it.

[AmiableApkallu]

Wait doesn't ACT use PCAP? so that it can intercept network data. Its actually looking at packets moving from your client to the SE server; its not reading your screen to my understanding. If anything ACT is far more intrusive then mare was due to mare being sandboxed in the means that allows you to use it.

It might have used pcap at one point, but no longer. It does rely on gaining access to network data, but at the application layer, after the packets at lower layers have been re-assembled and decoded.

[Valence]

The reason consent isn't applicable here is because that data doesn't belong to the individual user. It belongs to Square Enix. Everything from the buttons you press to the name of your character is Square Enix's property not yours. ACT and FFlogs simply calculate numbers that are displayed in the battle log and relay that information in an easier to read format. Which makes even the fact said numbers belonging to SE irrelevant because you can't own what is essentially math.

Furthermore, you're trying to argue an assumption as fact, e.g, parsers are "usually widely used to dismiss or outright harass others." There's no basis to this. Do some people harass others based on logs? Yes. There will always be bad apples, but it's quite the leap to claim it's the wider majority. Especially when even a cursory glance at popular discord channels where FFlogs is openly discussed would suggest otherwise.

The reason I explicitly mentioned that this was not written within a legal context is precisely because of the reasons you expose. This has never been about what's legal or what's not legal. The only illegal side of that activity is found at the level of ACT which sniffs packets of the game (no Yoshida, it's not just a fancy excel spreadsheet, sorry) and the players actually using it. That's never been the point of the OP.

If you think as well that this is just about blatant open harassment, then I fear that I was just unable to convey it better in my original post then. Else I'll just have to agree to disagree on this. I think the damage that has been done to the community as a whole by those websites is incommensurately high.

I'll save you the trouble. It's been brought up several times before and the answer has unanimously been "no."

FFlogs relies on traffic. Making it opt in would severely hamper that traffic as people wouldn't have any real need to continuously look at the website.

Thanks for confirming what I suspected already.

[Minali]

Not surprised the people developing such tool with an opt-out are against changing it, but I'm not sure I understand the "traffic" argument. The people who care about logs and stats would still get there, even if they go only by stuff other people upload. They just would have to make an account - a thing many players visiting the site would do so anyway, I can imagine. Making it opt-in just means you don't involve people who are unlikely to visit there. And people don't have to appear publicly by name to analyze battle data a tomestone or fflogs user uploads either, the function doesn't need to be limited. Just replace the name registered in the logs by "(job)", or "(job) 1" and (job 2) if there are multiple people with the same one. Or "Player 3" or "Anonymous 1" or so. "Cheesecake" for all I care. Data about the battle would still there and the person who was in the duty with you. Considering people keep arguing that these websites are just for "self-improvement", these changes would not impact the function, nor their traffic, at all.

The only reason why people would feel entitled to other people's information with these tools with full name and data is the option of judging or even harassing a person before they even met. And I read more than one post of a person who was excluded or accused simply because the clear or best game they've been in was not uploaded. Hell, I myself would be in this situation with the last Unreal trial. Some pulls from some groups are in there, but the ones where we got her down to 1.9% or what it was, is not. So if I would apply to anything and the group would treat tomestone and fflogs as gospel, as many people apparently do nowadays, I would be accused of lying about my prog point and instantly kicked and blacklisted, maybe my name would even shared as "confirmed prog liar" or whatever. All of this due to a website I had no influence in and a run where people happened to simply follow the game's ToS, or not bothering uploading a log of a run where a person kept disconnecting several times. (Meanwhile also a person with good stats can simply have a bad day. This would also not shop up in any log and yet can cause frustration.)

Yes, being lied to sucks, nobody likes it, but saying "preventing this 100% instead of discovering this after two pulls justifyes unconsentual recording of player data of millions of people playing this game"? Which is basically what a lot of people seem to do here? Don't you think this goes a tiny little bit too far?

Should they say this kind of use of their website brings them so much traffic they can't change it without going broke, despite officially just offering a system "for self-improvement", this certainly would say a lot about the community...

[Valence]

What numbers are you talking about? The enmity gauges in the party list? This is only viable to compare personal dps outputs between DPS classes.

[VerdeLuck]

No, enmity list is not the same as a DPS meter. No, you cannot recreate logs with the in game combat log and a calculator, no one does this. If it were viable they would do that instead of injection.

And the sites being default running on everyone affects people's personal enjoyment when it's used to beat new ones over the head with their performance and used as a measure of who is allowed in PFs for new content. FFLogs and Tombstone are a prime example of a mod that has gone so widespread people aren't even afraid to talk about using it and aren't afraid to use it against other players maliciously.

If Mare crossed the line, those sites definitely cross the line.

[BlisteringFrost]

No, enmity list is not the same as a DPS meter. No, you cannot recreate logs with the in game combat log and a calculator, no one does this. If it were viable they would do that instead of injection.

And the sites being default running on everyone affects people's personal enjoyment when it's used to beat new ones over the head with their performance and used as a measure of who is allowed in PFs for new content. FFLogs and Tombstone are a prime example of a mod that has gone so widespread people aren't even afraid to talk about using it and aren't afraid to use it against other players maliciously.

If Mare crossed the line, those sites definitely cross the line.

It's not against the TOS to talk about mods. It's against the TOS to actively advertise one.

Read it.

[Saraide]

No, enmity list is not the same as a DPS meter. No, you cannot recreate logs with the in game combat log and a calculator, no one does this. If it were viable they would do that instead of injection.

And the sites being default running on everyone affects people's personal enjoyment when it's used to beat new ones over the head with their performance and used as a measure of who is allowed in PFs for new content. FFLogs and Tombstone are a prime example of a mod that has gone so widespread people aren't even afraid to talk about using it and aren't afraid to use it against other players maliciously.

If Mare crossed the line, those sites definitely cross the line.

No one uses a calculator because it's vastly more inconvenient than just having a program read all the relevant info directly. If ACT didnt exist, then people would use copy and paste the combat log into an excel macro. No one really cares about your logs anyway, using it to filter out progliars is not malicious either. Naturally there are also people who are not smart enough to read logs and will try to shut down valid opinions but in doing so they just reveal themselves as fools to anyone else which i see as a benefit.

Edit: The thing with hiding logs is that you kinda show other people that you care too much about logs by doing it.

[Aravell]

Naturally there are also people who are not smart enough to read logs and will try to shut down valid opinions but in doing so they just reveal themselves as fools to anyone else which i see as a benefit.

The problem here is that people who use logs beneficially are greatly outnumbered by the tools who treat logs as the ultimate truth yet can't read any part of the log except the shiny percentile number.

Can't really downplay the negative effect when so many people fit the bill. See how many people on the forums try and shut down discussions on anything from savage content discussion to MSQ dungeon discussion with "Erm akshually, you're grey on the numbers website, so you dont get an opinion".