Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-25730832-20160802053812/@comment-1853279-20160803030517

Vcharng wrote:

Also I've heard about these tools causing ppl to lose their ships in events. The suspected reason behind these unfortunate tragedies is that since these tools will apparently update significantly later than the game itself, it fails to follow up all the new features introduced in events in real time. In some cases, this means the tool may fail to warn the player of a taiha'd ship, causing a ship loss. This is quite true. Often new mechanics and encounter styles will not be supported in the viewers for the first few days. Viewers, at least fully passive viewers like KC3 Kai (ie: the ones less likely to get you banned), are also at the mercy of how often the server sends status update information to the client. For that reason, especially when entering a new map or playing during events, I stay glued to the screen.

That leads me into the main topic. In my opinion, viewers are less useful for things like events than for the everyday, routine kinds of things, where you are less likely to face that situation. Quest progress tracking (to a finer degree than the half-arbitrary 50% and 80%), morale checking, reminders when mindlessly grinding. You can check which formations and equipment loadouts you've used on previous sorties, to tweak or repeat. It also makes sharing such information with others a lot easier, since you can screenshot, export to a deck builder, or even the battle player.

For me, there are very few pros to going without a viewer, and I played that way for much of my first year with the game. I suppose there can be self satisfaction, but that is a very individual thing. There's also the fact that you're even less likely to be banned than for using a passive viewer, but I think every player foreign to Japan already doesn't have much hope there, if they really wanted to start that kind of crackdown.

The only bans I've personally heard of have been for viewers that actively poll for information, truly automated software solutions (that is, bots, that some seem to confuse for viewers), and possibly some non-PC players, whose particular browsers and systems could not hold cache long enough for DMM and Kadokawa's liking (though that was a warning, I have no actual memory of people being banned for it, simply that it was a possibility).

So, yeah. I hate being kept in the dark about mechanics and statistics, especially when the client basically lies to you at times (faux sparkles), so I'll keep using (non-intrusive) viewers. It doesn't play the game for me, it only makes me more informed about the consequences of the decisions I'm making, and I enjoy being able to go back and reference my own historical data.