I doubt there's anyone around still, but anyone who still follows this blog and plays PSO2 or NGS should really look into how horribly invasive Wellbia's XIGNCODE is.
The short version is: It records all file activity in a 48 hour period and will send that list off if you trip the anticheat (for which numerous false positives are possible). It is buried deep enough in your system that it takes registry editing to remove even after uninstalling the game. It bogs down your system and causes performance issues. We do not know if it will be installed on our systems regardless of opting out to continue using GameGuard instead.
I'll be uninstalling if that's so. I've been with the Phantasy Star series since PSO1 on Gamecube, but this is enough to finally get me to throw Sega out.
Safe for now. It does still forcefully install XIGNCODE3, but you can switch back to GameGuard and then remove XIGNCODE3 safely. Remember to delete it from registry, too.
Still no word from Sega about how long they plan to keep GameGuard around, and it's not very likely that they'll keep it forever. Why pay for two anticheat contracts, after all.
Even with Sega using the least aggressive configuration for XIGNCODE3, that doesn't mean it's not a privacy concern. Yes, GameGuard and XIGNCODE3 collect mostly the same data, but the big difference is that XIGNCODE3 sends that data off without consent when tripped. GameGuard only dumps it into crash logs, which you then have the option of sending for troubleshooting purposes. Or at least, as far as I know that's how they've both worked. Any time I've asked the people who pick these things apart, they brush me and everyone else off with "Everything's spying on you so don't worry about it", so who knows ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Best news regarding that is that their configuration for XIGNCODE3 doesn't disallow Linux, so if you're both super worried about privacy and super unwilling to quit, using a virtual machine is about as easy as it can get. You'll just have to go the extra steps to mask that it's a virtual machine, since anticheats really don't like those. Bastards.
(I, an idiot, didn't read up on recent news and launched it thinking my existing install would be opt-out rather than opt-in, and XIGNCODE3 did not like the tools I had open for archival work that had nothing to do with the game. Wonder if that'll come back to bite me.)
