Over the weekend, the Borderlands community went ballistic over Take-Two’s user agreement following the circulation of a month-old YouTube video that suggested the game was effectively spyware (among other things). If you dig around as I did trying to figure it all out, you’ll find that most fans of the franchise there aren’t particularly fussed over it; the claim is that Take-Two and Gearbox now reserve for themselves the right to drill down into the guts of your PC to snurch as much of your data as possible as well as expand their anti-cheat efforts and outlaw things like community mods and VPNs. But a quick read of the actual changes makes the EULA look pretty basic for the industry, even if the boilerplate is not particularly applicable to antique games that most people don’t even play online.
Justified or not, the whole ordeal led players to review-bomb the entire franchise on Steam, specifically citing anti-cheat overreach. And that, my MMORPG friends, is worth talking about because I know quite a few of you simply refuse to play certain MMOs and multiplayer titles that deploy aggressive anti-cheat – not because you cheat but because you don’t want the tendrils of some temport wiggling into your system. Frankly, experiences deleting MMOs only to find fragments of them still embedded on my PC a year later, including anti-cheat files for games I expressly uninstalled, are exactly why I am leery of installing any old random MMO that wanders along.
What type of anti-cheat will you tolerate in MMORPGs? Which MMOs go too far in their efforts to stop cheating?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
