Guild Wars 2

Good day,

I have also send an email directly to ArenaNet, but this might be a faster way to receive an answer.
I have recently stumbled upon
this personal damage meter

According to it’s creator:

“And here the description of why it is legal:
it is a dmg meter, which does not offend the ToS of GW2. It’s an external software which retrieves no information from the GW2 API directly. Instead it periodically takes a screenshot from the left part of the screen to determine the position of the chat panel. Afterwards it reads the first eight lines from the combat log of the screenshot and converts the read pixel data into numbers, which are then used to calculate outgoing/incoming dmg (depending on what is listed in the combat log). The whole process is specialized for the GW2 font, which means it won’t be able to convert any other pixel data into numbers.”

Full article here

I plan on testing it’s effectiveness and accuracy, but before i start this tedious work i would like to know if it is indeed legal so that if i plan using it in… let’s say YouTube videos, i am not in danger of having my account suspended.

Thank you.

ArenaNet does not vet 3rd party programs.

But yes, assuming what they say is true, the program is legal. It’s not against the rules to take a screenshot or record your gameplay. If you’re paranoid, nothing’s going to stop you from using OCR on a recorded video.

You should just wait for a reply to your Support inquiry, instead of advertising it here, as you seem to be more interested in doing. There is no way that thing would be accurate however with how fast the chat log flies past in combat, and I’d put a penny on it just being malware. Also, I don’t quite see why you would care for having a personal damage meter in the first place. In sPvP you can get a summary of your damage dealt in the match. In PvE I see no reason to have it, besides to create an increasingly toxic environment between players. In World vs. World, pft, it’s all about zergs and pressing 1 on your keyboard/holding LMB down (Action Camera) anyways.

By all means, I have minmaxed with thousands of Gold put into Versatile- and regular + 5/5 Infusions, plus everything being Ascended/Legendary equipment—I know my damage output is good and it’s no “threat” to me. But I don’t want to see this Community turn (even more, e.g., “20k AP+ zerk exp only”) toxic with tools such as this. It was bad enough in “that other MMORPG” and where it became a necessity to install and run all these different LUA mods to raid.

If you want to know your damage, just look at your chat log and calculate it yourself. There’s timestamps and/or you can use a stopwatch and time it yourself in realtime. But that’s my opinion.

since it doesnt modify the game, of course its legal… Question is how accurate with that method, the log goes pretty fast

Absconditus.6804:

If you want to know your damage, just look at your chat log and calculate it yourself. There’s timestamps and/or you can use a stopwatch and time it yourself in realtime. But that’s my opinion.

Isn’t this just doing the footwork for you? I see nothing wrong with it at all.

Absconditus.6804:

If you want to know your damage, just look at your chat log and calculate it yourself. There’s timestamps and/or you can use a stopwatch and time it yourself in realtime. But that’s my opinion.

This is exactly what the tool does, but in almost real time so you don’t have to spend 2 hours with a log book after every fight.

I don’t know how big of a box it looks at for the calculation. The fast scrolling problem could be mitigated by expanding your chat to take up the whole left side of your screen. That way it would have more time to capture everything. But if it only looks at the default chat box size then it might miss some dps from multiple fast hitting things like conditions or thieves. Best way to test the accuracy of course is to do a fight, see what number it gives you then do the 2 hour log book method to compare.

It’s unlikely that you’re going to get an official response.

In peoples’ previous inquiries, the answer was basically ‘We can’t approve of this program, as it would be taken as a blessing on all future iterations of it, and if in the future the project is altered to or recently found to provide an advantage over those that don’t use it, then we would have to deal with people complaining ‘but you said it was allowed’’