Hey Everyone,
What is a minimap
The definition of a minimap is pretty clear across a lot of the internet, from game to game and the following description describes what a minimap is/does.
A mini-map or minimap is a miniature map that is often placed at a screen corner in video games to aid players in orienting themselves within the game world. They are often only a small portion of the screen and must be selective in what details they display. Elements usually included on mini-maps vary by video game genre. However, commonly included features are the position of the player character, allied units or structures, enemies, objectives, and surrounding terrain.
Mini-maps have become very common in real-time strategy and MMORPG video games because they serve as an indication of where the current screen lies within the scope of the game world. Most first person shooter games also have some version or variant of the mini-map, with the odd exception of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, often showing enemy and teammates locations in real-time.
Second Monitor Maps
In all sorts of games lots of players load up maps on their second monitor to help them navigate the worlds, find loot, quests⌠etc as they tend to always have a lot more information on them that the game doesnât have.
Just look at the following web interface for a 3rd party, browser map showing resources:
Most of the time players do this on a second monitor, however some will have to alt-tab if they only have 1 screen to use. Though Iâve seen others use their laptops in order to do this.
Normally this is through the use of websites like mapgenie.io who offer interactive maps for 71 different games and in all of those maps they provide a LOT more detail than you can get in-game.
If we look at a game like Escape from Tarkov for example, there are no maps in-game yet these 3rd party maps show you resource locations, points of interest, extracts and a lot more useful knowledge that aid various players. They recently changed their loot so it spawns dynamically which actually made the game worse because now hackers have it even easier to find items like LEDX (high value loot) because the hacks tell them where the loot is any players donât know the loot spawns so canât even fight and get lucky killing a aimbotter/esper.
Maps in New World
New Worldâs map in game is relatively poor, it shows limited resources, locations and information that is useful to the player. For a lot of players itâs annoying, frustrating and super inefficient especially when the in-game map has lots of annoyances itself with war popups, lack of auto-zoom⌠etc
As such a lot of players load up websites like mapgenie to help find the resources, points of interest⌠etc that they are looking for.
New World Map Addons
The addons that have been produced for New World basically provide the same content (their own versions) as these websites, just in a much more useful and friendly way.
Adding and updating your location to the maps makes finding where you are on the map much easier.
All of the addons (5) that have been released for New World all feature the same core features and have had these features since their release!
The plugins have not changed to add these features, so therefore Amazonâs stance on allowing these minimaps should be allowed
- A minimap overlay.
- The reading and updating of location on the 3rd party map.
- Optional display/filters for resources / POI⌠etc
Which you can see an example of below:
Some of these addons now have a 2nd monitor version of the minimap, which is essentially a full screen minimap displaying everything the websites do/can just with the location of their character on the map. Not really that much different to a website.
Which you can see an example of below:
For reference over 150,000 (combined) people have downloaded these minimap addons, bare in mind over the last 5 days, the maximum players online at any one point was 269,000, unique players would be about 400,000~
I wouldnât be surprised if 1/4 of those unique players (100k) are using these minimap addons, thereâs a reason for that⌠because theyâre a good tool that fixes inherent problem that the game has. Amazon donât want to ban a quarter of their players because Iâm pretty damn certain the game would spiral into a dead game real fast.
Banning Addons
A big problem New World will face if it starts banning these addons is users will simply find ways around EAC and then begins the cat and mouse game of developers wasting time trying to catch those using these addons of which the users will always be able to find a way around the anticheats.
If we look at this game, it wouldnât take much effort from developers to read the game memory or fps counter to extract the location data and parse it into a website to achieve all of which is undetectable and achieves a similar end result.
Likewise, the use of services like TeamViewer or other remote control softwares and then the use of OCR programs to read the FPS position
If you have more and more addons/softwares trying to bypass the anticheat software it actually helps those that want to use bots and other much more serious hacks that exploit the game to the max and it becomes ridiculous.
Even Diablo 3 (Blizzard) was smart enough to not bother going after TurboHUD which was a much more powerful map/UI addon that alerted users of legendary drops, certain monsters close, showed the routes, dps countersâŚetc because they learned from Diablo II that if users want these tools they will find ways to beat the anticheat softwares.
Ambiguous / Unclear Statements
Amazon have put out a lot of mixed statements that are confusing, unclear and have a lot of grey areas.
Their first statement said they were in discussion, that doesnât tell users if they can use these addons or they canât use these addons.
Their follow up statement 14 days later after many people raised the issue with live chat, on the forums and on reddit stated that these addons were allowed but if their functionality was to change to include certain features then they would change their stance on these addons⌠the problem with that statement is these addons all include the features that they mentioned so it was still unclear.
That follow up caused a lot of confusion for players who made it clear on the forums that it did not make any sense.
Kay then came back and posted an update trying to clear it up but clearly hadnât used any of the addons to actually understand what they offer because one part of Kayâs post says that theyâre okay, followed up by another part saying they are not okayâŚ
- The addons only pull location data from the game - Allowed
- The addons do not pull resources from the game - Allowed
- The addons do not pull resources, nodes or places of interest from the game. - Allowed
- The addons do pull resources, nodes, places of interest from the addons database. - ???
- The addons do pull player made routes from a server (not a website per se) - ???
If we look at this comment from Kay:
What makes this that much different to a user going over to the likes of mapgenie and looking up the resource locations� Should that be against the ToS?
If you ban these addons, surely i am getting a significant advantage because I have multiple monitors thus allowing me to have the resource map open on my left screen while I play on my middle screen?
If we look at [Dev Blog] Mini-map
You canât go against addons for changing how you feel theyâd affect this, if youâre not going to go against 3rd party sites like MapGenie who offer pretty much everything that these addons offer (if not more) just without the location data.
Much like how players spend days and days just farming the exact same chests⌠thatâs some amazing gameplay, scenery and exploration⌠No. Itâs 10x worse. No one would be staring at their minimap the whole time, let alone most of the time.
But websites can?
So how are they supposed to conform if you and Overwolf donât have the API endpoints in place to facilitate these requirements?
Whatâs the current stance given that theyâre not conforming?
Iâve not even got onto the fact that this developer corner post does not have any of this information posted in the announcement thread so which one is right? Update the announcement with more details, clear up that past information was incorrect and make it super clear what is and isnât allowed.
Amazon either need to:
- Explicitly permit the user of these tools while discussions are ongoing without the fear of being banned.
OR
- Explicitly prohibit the use of these tools while discussions are ongoing.
Forum Moderators/Community Managers
Repeating the same thing over and over and posting snarky comments to users asking for clarifications is not acceptable and not a way to be transparent or handle this issue.
The same goes for closing threads prematurely when users clearly arenât happy with the unclear stance.
If the permission was to changeâŚ
If Amazon were to give us permission to use these tools without fear of being banned and then after ongoing discussions they come to a conclusion of outlawing these tools then that too can be handled in a fair way fairly easily.
Amazon could update the game so anyone flagged with using these tools would see a notification every time they launch the game / login to a server that they are no longer allowed and that Amazon would start banning users who continue to use the tools after the date of dd/mm/yyyy
Announcing it on the forums only is not a fair or sufficient way of alerting users because 75% of players donât read the forums. Also only providing 24 hours is also not a fair or sufficient way of handling such a change in stance. At minimum it needs to be 7 days notice.
no tradeskill shows chests or poiâs or other such data and thus your addon is still against ToS even at 200 on all