Wanted: Ancient History Lesson...

If PlayStation2 users installed the Japanese Seekers of Adoulin (SoA) data files to their North American installation of Final Fantasy XI Online - via the Free McBoot Project - would it be detected on the Square-Enix end? Would the players that used this bypass, have gotten banned?

Did SE not care by that time? If there are threads here that someone can point me to, it would be greatly appreciated.

I'm fairly certain SE doesn't care about where the software you have loaded came from, they only care that you have legitimate content IDs to add to your account in order to activate that content.

I'm not sure why it's relevant since Ps2 support has been canned for almost a full decade now (it ended in 2016), but no, it wouldn't have gotten them banned. The only thing S-E cared about was that you had a valid PoL license and your expansion registry keys were valid. The software itself was never scanned client side as far as I'm aware and they certainly didn't check to see which version (NA vs JP) the files were. I think there was legal red tape that wouldn't allow it too, wasn't there? Governments with cybersecurity regulations forbidding client side scanning right? Which meant that if they did scan the client they would have lost too much revenue because they wouldn't have been allowed to even sell their game at all in many places of the world. I'm sure that topic has been covered in the past here.

Just think about it, if the client were being scanned regularly I'm pretty sure people wouldn't have been able to get away with cosmetic .dat modding for all the years they did. We've all seen screenshots of the mithra with the wild hairdo or the hume carrying some great sword that looks like it was ripped straight out of Xenoblade. Back in the lvl 75 days people used to .dat mod their files so they'd know which order to hit the nyzule lamps in just by looking at them, and if memory serves there was something people did with modding treasure chests in an event to differentiate them for a reason too, although I'm fuzzy on the details of why they would have done that after so long. That was all client side so only the person with the modded files could see the cosmetics. So no, having a non local version installed on their ps2 would not have gotten an account banned back in the day.

I have had a Japanese account since before NA release with a fake address and name. They don't care and don't detect files. They might see JP vs NA client, unsure but they also don't care.

You can't use any expansion content unless it's flagged on your account to be activated, if it's flagged that you own and bought it they don't care where you get the data files from.

holy ***...

It wouldn't have worked due to DLNA. So whether or not SE would have cared is irrelevant. Another moronic thread by Bill.