Board Thread:Online Discussion/@comment-10207438-20130611042440/@comment-7153552-20130627184314

You're thinking of mods in the current franchise, you can't think of MMO mods in the way you do single player mods. They're completely different. MMO ToS and End-User agreements are much more in-depth and have a lot more legal remifications if you continuously and purposefully 'break the game'. Bots and auto-functions and anything that hacks the gamespace itself will not be allowed. The only mods that are traditionally allowed are things that affect your screen and gameplay experience without touching another player's directly.

Examples of that can be found most readily in World of Warcraft. There is a mod called Recount that gives you numbers for damage outpud, damage per second, heals, deaths, ressurections, etc. Another is called Deadly Boss Mods, and it has timers for special abilities and things of that nature for major boss fights. There are tons of user interface mods that allow you to alter the way you have your screen set up, or ones that give you a more detailed world map/mini map. All of these things are considered fine, some people hate them, some people love them, but Blizzard has deemed them fine to use.

However, there are mods called 'bots' that do functions for you while you aren't even at the computer. It'll enter battlegrounds and farm Honor (the PvP currency), they'll do things like travel to preset destinations (spawn points for resource nodes) and attempt to mine ore, or pick herbs. These are considered game-breaking modifications, and are bannable! Zenimax will do the same thing, even Free To Play games have these rules in place. There are two, so far, banned mods for a game called World of Tanks, and if you're caught using them you will be banned immediately. Intant and permanent.

So keep in mind that your gameplay experience on a console won't be affected at all by the mods, or lack there of, because you won't be playing against somebody who has access to them. But you can also sleep soundly under the two moons knowing that if you were on PC your personal experience would be the same whether the guy next you had mods or not.