EPTThere is a portion of the SC2 end user license agreement (EULA hereafter) that states something to the effect that "no user shall make any effort at obtaining ladder related data." I can not find the EULA on my computer or anywhere else except as paraphrased (if someone can find the full text, would they mind pming me the whole thing or telling me how I can access it?).
While I certainly would not wish to insinuate that anyone should violate the terms of this agreement, I will say that it is a shame that this data is not available to the public. Blizzard, for instance, uses the data for adjustments to patches, etc. and we can therefore conclude at the least that it paints a valuable, because empirical, picture of the meta-game. There is no reason why it shouldn't be avaliable to the public, except that it might be too useful.
Because this data is empirical, it could be used, if available in large enough numbers, to run correlations between, for instance, amount of siege tanks at time x and opposing units killed. Or any other question you can think of: Correlation between 2 starports with tech labs at 7 minutes and # of opponents harvesters at 10? Correlation between APM and winning percentage? How strong are these correlations? Etc. SPSS or any like program could give loads of data that would make meta-game and strategy discussions more articulate and beneficial.
Thus, the point of this post is to ask any computer programers out there if they could develop a software that automatically records all of a persons score screen data (or other data, if you can think of any) that could then be put into a spreadsheet and uploaded into an internet database that is public. If a statistically significant amount of people (honestly, like 800 would likely be enough (? any stats people out there?)) used the program for a month and uploaded it, we could have a data set that could revolutionize the way people discuss theorycraft. If you theoretically know how to do this, please post your idea and recapitulate it's process in laymen's terms.
Once we have the exact terms of the EULA, and a rudimentary understanding of how the program would work, we can figure out if such program would violate it's terms. I can also find case law that will say if that portion of the agreement is legally enforceable or not. In the mean time, we would have a few months of data to make effective correlations. Eg, EULA's printed on the outside of a box are binding on buyer when that buyer attempts to resell the data and is a merchant. ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (7th Cir. 1996). EULA's are not binding on people who are characterized as distributors. SoftMan Products Co., LLC v. Adobe Sys., Inc., 171 F. Supp. 2d 1075, 1087 (C.D. Cal. 2001).
If the information could (somehow) be gathered under the auspices of a third party organization that is not an 'end user', than that portion of the EULA would maybe not be binding. However, my impression is that it still would. But if blizz sued and it wasn't, it would be awesome (power to the players!). Also, if the program were to exist outside of the B-Net system, Blizzard would have no way to enforce that particular term on individual players. Very wiki-leak sort of endeavor.
Do you:
A. Think this information would be valuable enough to be worth the effort?
B. Have thoughts on whether or not software that automatically gathers a persons score data after a set number of game violates the EULA, or more importantly thoughts about how it might not?
B. Know how to write such a program?
