“Innocent” or not people shouldn’t be messing with the game files. This has been common sense since vanilla.
Reverting back their bans will just have the community accept you’re allowing game files to be altered if they’re careful or ‘clever’ enough to get around detection.
Keep the ban in place. People have been perma-banned over less. Keep the bans in place or make a topic addressing this and threaten with a perma-ban next time.
Though it’s probably riskier for the end user than Blizzard, it does open the door to viruses, malware, etc. Downloading programs that modify or alter existing files is generally bad news in the software world.
Perma-ban? I think that’s a bit harsh. A month would be a bit more fair IMO.
AFAIK, a decent amount of people got caught in the ban wave who legitimately didn’t do anythig. I think it’s those people getting unbanned.
Also, who cares, let people have their fun as long as it doesn’t affect actual gameplay.
Editing files is against the rules because they don’t want people breaking their games on accident, because if they tried to apply specific conditions to it, people would find loopholes, and because they don’t want people posting screenshots and such of their game with custom garbage because it still represents their game to people who don’t know better.
6 month bans for changes which do not affect player power, nor the economy, nor impact other players at all seem excessive.
However, I think there is a good chance (as there always is) that model changes may not be the full set of changes the people have made. It is also possible that Blizzard missed the model changers in testing and did not intend that steep a punishment for modifying appearance files.
A 6 month ban just for making gear look a little better is sort of ridiculous though. If they’re modding mining nodes and stuff then yeah, that’s worthy of a ban. But giving yourself some cool looking gear doesn’t affect anyone else. Folks do that in FF14 all the time and granted a lot of it is just fanservice, but it doesn’t harm anyone. SE sure doesn’t care.
Yup as I said in another thread which is why the game gets such praises. As long it brings positive results they don’t care. Unfortunately here at Blizzard they do not share that mindset therefore bans will be given meaning more players will ship towards FFXIV.
Bgs realizes they fall short here and let modding community do its thing. This is how they keep skyrim relevant long after they stopped working on it besides creation club.
Blizzard…has not heard even the requests of the night elves who have said you know…can we have a Armour like that night elf in the very intro movie to wow when it first started.
They seem to think they are just fine. And mail Armour suffers for that. Really it does…
they show up as gold dots on the map…not really cheating there. Run elvui and you get an even better map that shows more and not that stock circle that shows less.
Then you have add ons that in their own file record last known hits. I have very decent chances that node/flower is one of the circles my add on recorded from some run in the past.
Personally I think this node change would be more of hindrance to me lol. I game on a MacBook pro…bigger nodes would tax those apple gerbils on the wheels even more.
Pretending that it only changed models is disingenuous, If you are uninformed it’s alright but look into the mod more and you’ll see it wasn’t that innocent and allowed a lot of game breaking things such as being friendly to the enemy faction and using the others FPs.
I feel bad for the folks using it innocently but it was a very volatile and exploitable mod.
Getting a 6-month ban for using a mod that give you a better bra on women has got to be the weirdest thing I’ve seen in this game. Unfortunately this game isn’t as lenient as Skyrim is with modding.
Mods like ‘Hair w/ Helms’, ‘Clipping Removal’ would be massive.
Not even lying if they changed TOS for at least visual files I have a small list of BGS game mod authors I’d hit up, work up a job idea for them and slide their patreon account some money.
Punchline…2 of them could be female mod authors. Not just perv males lol.