"Legality" of editing the config file to improve accessiblilty and usability… [ Edited ]

[haschischtasche]

Hi there,

today I received a warning on the Apex Legends discord server (from the semi-official mods) for "posting unauthorized game scripts" and was linked to your code of conduct, which, as it turns out, doesn't mention anything about the thing I posted.

As you might be aware, like Titanfall and Titanfall 2, Apex Legends runs on a fork of the Source engine. Due to that, it allows users to define alias commands and bind multiple commands to a single key in their configuration files. It's worth noting here that this is something the game itself even does with its default keybinds. It's also worth noting here that this isn't some undocumented feature, that in-game scripts in Titanfall 2 where commonly used by large parts of the community, and that Respawn devs themselves told people to edit their config files to, for example, set up an FoV that's higher than what they can choose in the menu.

Besides that, it is trivial for Respawn to disable aliases altogether, but they chose not to. They did however deliberately choose to disable commands that can potentially be used for ill-willed automation, like 'wait'.

Again, and I can't stress this enough: These are all options the game supplies. It's using the game's functionality. It's not some external automation or macro program. It's a configuration text file the game reads when you launch it, because that's how the game and engine were coded. It's not unpacking any files, it's not disassembling any code, it's not doing anything that is mentioned in the rules of conduct.

The beauty of PC-gaming, and the raison d'être for aliases to exist in that engine in the first place, is that players have choices to improve the accessibility and usability of a game.
If Apex Legends only has a toggle key for the inventory and map but not a hold key, players can edit their config file to change that and make it a hold. If pressing opposite movement keys at the same time makes the player stop instead of moving into the direction of the last pressed key, we can change that, because the game gives us the option to do so.
If I (like many other people on this planet) suffer from severe simulation sickness and can not move at low FoV values in the game without literally having to puke within minutes, but don't want to be at a massive disadvantage due to having a severely zoomed out view when standing still and aiming, I can replicate that missing accessibility feature by putting a mild FoV decrease on the key I use to aim down sights. There's no difference between that and moving my face closer to my screen every time I aim, apart from some additional comfort and quality of life. And it's not like this magically creates some additional zoom out of thin air that wouldn't be possible by just playing at a permanently low FoV.
I can do that because it's functionality that is coded directly into the game, and I'm glad that functionality is there. And obviously, if I do that, I want to share that with the community, because turns out that's what good people do. Simulation sickness isn't some rare condition, it's the primary reason why most games nowadays have FoV sliders in the first place.

However, because I want to share this stuff with the community, and because I don't want to get anyone banned for using it, I'd like to have an official and _clear_ statement on this topic: Are we allowed to use this feature? Are we allowed to edit (openly available, unpacked, and completely unobfuscated plain text) configuration files of the game or not?
Because, to be honest, I'd rather not play at all due to missing accessibility features than being able to enjoy myself while having the constant fear of being banned for using an option the game explicitly gives me. An option that enables some people to comfortably play the game for more than a single match at a time in the first place. An option that was explicitly not removed by the devs, even though heavily abusable sub-features of that option were (fortunately) removed.

Best Regards,

haschischtasche

[BullHorn]

I'm interested in this as well but that wall of text is not helping.

tl;dr: By editing the game .cfg files, you can have features like:

• Improved strafe movement
• Auto-adjusting FoV/Zoom when aiming down sights
• Binding extra commands, like FPS or latency counters
• Switching inventory from Toggle to Hold-to-open
• etc

 Is this breaking EA/Respawn ToS? Is some of it allowed?

[warslag]

I thought I would reply in the most honest way possible even though what I say might be quite unpopular.

'Simulation sickness'. I have never heard of that. Is it the same as 'motion sickness'?

Is it because you suffer from it that you need to alter the config file, and is that the issue you have, or is it purely a technical/legal issue?

Everyone deserves to have a fair game. But, if some of the changes you are able to make to a game by editing the config file are beyond the average user, then I think the majority of players would consider that to be cheating.

Maybe the game developers could agree with you on criteria for editing the config file, to help players cope with 'simulation sickness'. Or, 'officially' set-out exactly what you have to do in the config file, in order to change the game in such a way that you don't suffer the symptoms of 'simulation sickness' when you play.

[haschischtasche]

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@warslag wrote:

I thought I would reply in the most honest way possible even though what I say might be quite unpopular.

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You can say whatever you want, everybody is entitled to their opinion, and voicing that opinion is kind of the point of a forum.

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@warslag wrote:

'Simulation sickness'. I have never heard of that. Is it the same as 'motion sickness'?

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It has the same end-result, but it's essentially the inverse of regular motion sickness. Regular motion sickness comes from the vestibular system feeling motion that you visually don't perceive as such. Simulation sickness comes from seeing motion that you don't feel in your vestibular system.

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@warslag wrote:

Is it because you suffer from it that you need to alter the config file, and is that the issue you have, or is it purely a technical/legal issue?

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I do suffer from it, which is why I have to play at relatively high FoV-values. (105+, but it's highly dependent on the game. Something like Counter Strike is mostly fine even at ~90, but something like Apex or Quake needs to be more in the realm of 110-120, due to the movement speed.)
Do note however that this isn't just about simulation sickness, and neither is it primarily about simulation sickness. It's about using that feature as a whole to customize the gaming experience for the user and add quality of life features that the developer didn't think of or doesn't want to spend dev-time on. Like for example:

• putting in preferred key-behaviour that isn't available in the game (hold instead of toggle, or toggle instead of hold)
• make sprinting automatically lower your gun if you use toggle for ADS
• make left-clicking with holstered weapons pull out your gun instead of punching (because if you wanted to melee there's another button for that)

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@warslag wrote:

Everyone deserves to have a fair game. But, if some of the changes you are able to make to a game by editing the config file are beyond the average user, then I think the majority of players would consider that to be cheating. Maybe the game developers could agree with you on criteria for editing the config file, to help players cope with 'simulation sickness'. Or, 'officially' set-out exactly what you have to do in the config file, in order to change the game in such a way that you don't suffer the symptoms of 'simulation sickness' when you play.

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While I agree that everyone deserves a fair game, it's not like this is anything that's beyond the average user. It's editing a text-file, it's not rocket science. You already need to do that if you want to accurately set your sensitivity for example.
This is all based on a single command called "alias", and the only thing that command does is create a new command that invokes other commands. That is a complete explanation of how all of this works. I really don't think that's beyond the average user.
I also would like to strongly disagree with the general idea of "if the average user doesn't know you can do this (or doesn't know how to do it)". The average player (well, somewhere around 99%) has no idea that you can hang onto ledges or wall-kick in this game, let alone knows how to do it, yet I don't think anyone would ever consider that cheating and argue for it to be banned when they found out about it.

Besides that, only allowing certain instances of  in-game scripting is a slippery slope to go down. Everybody is different. Everybody wants different features or control behaviour. There will always be things that no one else has ever thought of, and asking for each specific thing to be sanctioned individually every single time is not gonna be feasible, considering how difficult it already is to get a single answer out of Respawn/EA. It's also next to impossible to properly phrase a rule-book for what's okay and what isn't in that regard.

Instead, they should just fix bugs, glitches and unintended behaviour that people abuse, regardless of whether they use aliases for that or not.

When someone uses a loophole to avoid taxes, you don't outlaw the pen they used to write their tax-return — you fix the loop-hole.