I still don't get the justification that "Oh, it's unencrypted, so it's okay for me to look at it, despite whether Square-Enix is showing me!" It's sort of like "Oh, this guy's door was unlocked, I'm just going to walk on in!" Especially distance. I'm both amazed and depressed at the amount people will both defend and justify their cheats, and the fact that they came bundled with windower probably was to blame.
Way I see it:
1. It would be *so* damn easy for them to change it if they actually didn't want us to see it. You can't really argue this point, it's simple factual programming - all you have to do is run data through encryption and decryption. It's not hard. At all. Trust me on this. It can still be hacked at the client end, but nowhere near as easily. And encrypting it would send a very obvious "we do not want you looking at this" message.
2. They have *not* done the above. I said before, as an exercise to the reader, to think about why this may be. Below, enjoy a possible and far from unreasonable explanation.
3. In case you've been living under a rock, SE, GMs, and whatall have demonstrated a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude towards Windower and this sort of stuff. In effect, "if you tell us about it, then yes we will enforce our rules - but if you don't tell us about it, we're willing to look the other way because it's really not a concern to us, the way the stuff the STF is hunting *is*."
4. It's simply easier, on their end, to do it that way than to revise their rules to say "yes, it's all fair and legal and we encourage you to use 3rd party programs in only harmless ways". Because then there's a *lot* more legal loopholes in what constitutes "harmless", which ultimately creates more problems for them (both on a legal end and a programming end) than it's worth. Not to mention there's outcry from the non-PC users that they're now at a company-condoned disadvantage.
(And to fix that disadvantage, their programming team would have to do more work to make PS2 and X360 equivalents of PC mods. And considering how damn slow their programming team is in the first place, and considering how they've demonstrably *hated* going back and fixing/changing anything in something that's not the most recent expansion, can you really see them inviting more work for themselves in changing the basic game UI?)
5. Whereas if they simply don't go hunting down the problems, but nevertheless upholding the "official rules" if the rule-breaker shoves them in their face, then they're legally squeaky clean, but effectively - while not officially - allowing it.
Or, the alternative viewpoint:
"My morals are absolute, the official rules are black and white, and I'm a nice little sheep who never actually thinks about the reasons behind anything." No offense, but I roll my eyes at anyone who doesn't have a more solid argument than "it's just plain wrong" or "the rules say not to". And while catch phrases like "slippery slope" are all well and good for rhetorical purposes, I prefer more solid arguments.
Honestly, if you've ever been presented with a real ethical dilemma, you wouldn't be sweating the notion of "letter of the law" vs. "spirit of the law" in this situation. Which is really what it is. There are unofficial, non legally binding ways for SE to demonstrate their stance on their rules too, and it would do you well to remember that.
