Pursuit does NOT go against any terms agreed on the EULA

General Discussion
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Another topic about this subject, yeah, I know.

I was one of the people that got the email. I’ve never used Visor, I’m not even very familiar with it, besides seeing one or two clips of people using it on stream but I use Pursuit. That are several things that worry and upsets me in all this.

I didn’t hear about Pursuit on a blog/reddit/forum post by a player, I heard about it in the official Philadelphia Fusion twitter account. While I know it is not an official Blizzard communication channel, is not a crazy assumption to think that if an OWL team is advertising the software, that software is known and authorized by Blizzard. But that’s fine, mistakes happen, and since Blizzard is only sending warnings so far, that’s all good.

Except that in the warning they reference the ToS. Nowhere in the ToS there is a term that forbids what Pursuit does. It does not influence your gameplay. It does not send commands or control the game in any way. It does not access or modifies the game. It does not facilitate the gameplay in any way.

I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t care what a community manager or a warning email says, you have to comply with the ToS to play the game, not with forum posts or emails.

Let’s say I didn’t follow the forums and haven’t seen the warning email, I keep using the software and my account gets suspended. While that is reasonable in an actual rule infringement, since Blizzard can’t be at fault for someone not checking their email, it is NOT reasonable when no ToS terms were infringed.

If the ToS have any meaning whatsoever it should AT LEAST be changed so it aligns with the warnings and official response. It is really upsetting being stopped of using a software that complies with the ToS that you accepted when you bought the game, while the company doesn’t even bother to adjust it to new rules they want to enforce.

But what REALLY upsets me is that Persuit only does is give data that ANY respectable competitive game would give you natively anyway. It really pisses me off that the devs can’t implement basic competitive game features, like match replays and statistics, that were asked since beta over TWO YEARS ago, but also actively stops anyone who tries to do their work for them.

TL;DR If you are going to make rules on the spot to stop people from having basic tools that should be included in the game anyway, at least change the ToS to include these new rules, instead of just sending warning emails out of the blue and trying to clarify the obvious confusion in random forum posts.

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They interpret their own CoC extremely liberally. But yes, I more or less agree as in the future, if someone uses this without being “plugged in” to the forums, they are going to get banned for not cheating… and support is going to call their own customers cheating scumbags. Great management. :hugs:

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Or maybe you should spend a second to realise that visor exposed an exploit that any program disguised as something like pursuit could abuse to gain an unfair advantage and they dont have the tools to differentiate not make sure that every program that attachs to the wow through those resources is fair.

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If this were true people using OBS would be getting the same email. Warden reads the title bar of windows. If it sees “Pursuit” or “Visor” in the program name or title bar your account gets flagged. It’s not hard to distinguish the two. They have different names.

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What exactly does Pursuit do?

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They can’t differentiate it from OBS or any other recording software either. They will have to monitor processes and ban specific apps anyway, banning or not banning pursuit makes no difference for other apps that uses the same technique to achieve different things.

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This video sums it all up and the difference between the two:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICjQcj296kI

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Except OBS processes video output. The programs in question actively analyze data from the game.

They’re two entirely different programs that achieve two entirely different goals.

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They do not. You are misinformed. The programs record video output just like OBS does (Pursuit uses OBS internally) and sends that to a server which does all the work.

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And they can adjust their ToS or make additional changes decisions at any time… We agreed to this when we signed the EULA.

Edit: Added a missing word to my syntax.

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The end goals are different my dude. Just because the programs do something similar (or in this case identically) the motives and use of the program differs.

In this case the differences, motives and goals between OBS and v.gg/p were pretty noticeably clear.

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You said “The programs in question actively analyze data” - technically the programs, those installed on the computer, just record image frames. The servers that do the work are not on the user’s computer.

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What Blizzard’s decision has done is something only a few people are mentioning on the forums at the moment.

Those of us who have operated on the Linux platform for Blizzard games have just been given a huge push to submit a distro that is Blizzard specific. Right now Blizzard is monitoring your registry like malware. They do it with your permission. I for one am tired of this and will be actively helping get a solid version of a Blizzard friendly OS in Linux, if one isn’t already available.

I want to throw out a name suggestion. It should be called Heatwave. Then we will see if the Blizzard can stand the heat.

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Fine then they have to actually do it. My complain is exactly that, they didn’t even bother to change the ToS. At the moment i’m writing this I can argue that I can still use the software because there is nothing in the current ToS that stops me from doing it.

The point of my post is just show my frustration on how little they seem to care about players trying to improve in the game. They don’t provide basic statistics, and actively stops other apps from doing it without even bothering on changing the official rule set.

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You’re jumping through a lot of hoops to challenge my wording while avoiding the facts here.

OBS isn’t the issue here.

Using services that give unfair advantages is.

If said service uses OBS, OBS isn’t the issue, it’s the service utilizing OBS that’s the issue.

Bank robbers drive getaway cars, does that mean cars are the problem? I don’t think so.

It’s clear Blizz has some way of tracking the players utilizing the service and they want it stopped. It’s well within their rights to do so.

Stop dancing around the issue due to the way I word things.

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I mean I welcome your frustration and I can understand why, but it is also about making changes that aren’t limited to the EULA. They can make decisions for the game like this one and we consented to this. They explicitly wrote this in writing on the forums right and have apparently made this clear in-game too? That’s a legal change that we consented to afaik.

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Dude. My first post was simply stating they can tell the difference between the two programs. People assume that the detection is based on what the programs do. From a technical perspective, they do nothing different than OBS on the users computer. So stating that what the program is doing is being detected is false. I am not in any way “jumping through hoops”. I am simply trying to provide correct information here. If Blizzard was detecting what the programs do, then they would also be detecting OBS. At least in Pursuits case - Visor does overlways which is a big no-no.

Is Visor cheating? Probably. Should it be allowed? Probably not.

Is Pursuit cheating? No. It provides a carnage report after the game is over, many minutes after the game is over.

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blizzard gets to choose how they interpret their tos not you, so you dont get to use it if you think the tos doesnt cover it… it just doesnt work that way
and their own tos covers them for banning anyone for using it as well

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You think he’s jumping through hoops because you’re missing the point. Pursuit bases it’s info off of screenshots from the game that are sent for automated analysis. Similarly, a person could use OBS to capture video and send it to a person for manual analysis. The outcome is the same, the tools are essentially the same, and the intent is the same. Pursuit doesn’t give an “unfair advantage.” Realistically, the only statistics the program provides that the game doesn’t on its own is the other players’ K/D. The major difference is it allows you to access these stats after the game is over.

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Blizzard monitors your pc? Damn