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Legal/Future Develoment Question about using Guild Member Notes for Addon Communciation

zgrssd
zgrssd
✭✭✭✭
It is common knowledge that Addons cannot communicate (fully automatically) across the clients, simply because they cannot send any chat messeages and even Mail only once every 5 seconds.

But when recently somebody asked for a Guild Callendar Addom I noticed that Addons can still write the Guild Member Notes (asuming proper rights). And there also is a Event to be notified of changes to the member notes.
My first thought was "Hey, we could use this to let addons communicate guildwide via the member notes". My second thought was "I wonder what the limtis (characters per note/how often you can write per second) are".
My third thought was "let's call this MoGMN - Multicast over Guild Member Notes" (because I always wanted to develop and name a network protocoll).

Now a few dozen thoguths later two things came to my mind that could spell doom for my idea: Is it legal (under the TOS) and is this just an loophole that was overlooked and will be fixed in the future? I will need answer from Zenimax to both.

Legal Question:
According to TOS (2nd Paragraph): "You may not participate, take part in, initiate, or engage in actions that impose an unreasonable or disproportionate load on the infrastructure hosting the Game(s) and/or Services."
We already checked and there is a limit how often you can write member notes (more often and you get kicked). Similar to the limits on Send Mails and conscutive Guild Store Searches.
My question here: Would using this limit to it's max constitute creating a "unresonable or disproprotionate load on thegame servers"?
If yes, where would be the "save zone" (if any)?

Future Development Question:
This one was pointed out by Seraph "The main concern [...] is because ZOS has shown already that they are not opposed to locking things down. If they don't want addon communication, and you find a hole and abuse that system, they may just patch in the hole."
So the question is: Was this a loophole that is going to be fixed now that I found it?

If either of them get's answered with yes, I don't need to investigate this further and can focus on other projects.
If both get answered with no, I propably will ask you to include Group Member notes next (so we can make groupwide communication within limits). But even just allowing Guildwide communciation this way would be pretty cool already, so I could live with a no to that third question.
Edited by zgrssd on May 23, 2014 9:36AM
Elana Peterson (EU), Dominion, Imperial Sorc, Rune & Alchemy Crafting Char
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