Archon & External Partners
Archon works with a number of external partners in order to run our day-to-day business of serving MMO players with analytics and insights. This page serves as a central hub to explain who these partners are and how we work with them.
Any questions? Feel free to email us at [email protected]!
Analytics
Archon works with several third-party analytics platforms to provide anonymous and aggregated statistics about how our users use our products. These services help us identify and prioritize opportunities to improve our sites.
Our partners include:
- Google Analytics
- Microsoft Clarity
- New Relic
- Sentry
- Zendesk
Digital Advertising Platforms
Archon works with a number of digital advertising platforms that enable us to serve ads to our users. In order to maintain the high quality of performance and service you expect from us at Archon, we need to surface ads to non-paying users to ensure we can continue to afford to keep our servers running. These ads are non-intrusive and kept as minimal as possible.
These partners follow all pertinent privacy laws and regulations for each global audience that we serve.
Our partners include:
- Playwire: Playwire provides opt-out information on their site here.
- Nitro: Nitro shares its privacy policy here: https://nitropay.com/privacy/
- Adsense
Overwolf
What is Overwolf?
Overwolf (more specifically, the ow-electron library) provides a robust API for Electron developers to build apps that hook into games you play and provide integrated features to make your MMO experiences better. This document explains a bit more about how we use their services and how our applications communicate with the Overwolf API.
Is Overwolf safe to use?
Yes! Any app using Overwolf libraries comply with all applicable safety and privacy laws and regulations. Overwolf’s QA team engages regularly with our app to ensure we are still in compliance and follow all their guidelines and policies. Additionally, Overwolf works directly with game developers to ensure that application behavior complies with the terms of the games. You can read more about this here.
Most importantly, Overwolf does not sell your data. They have a video explaining how they make their money here:
What do the Overwolf libraries we use do?
We use a couple key features from Overwolf to make your MMO logging experiences seamless:
Game detection: This enables us to know which of our supported games are currently running and/or in-focus. This lets us do things like: detect the logging folder for your game install, hide your meter overlay when the game is not focused, change which game you have selected in the app when you launch a different game, and auto-open the app if we detect a relevant game has launched (if you have that setting enabled). Today, we handle this via a custom PowerShell script, but moving to ow-electron allows us to use their existing implementations of these features and get rid of the external script.
In-game overlays: While we already provide “always on top” overlays that are simply desktop windows that stay in front of other windows, ow-electron allows users to use true “in-game” overlays, similar to overlays from Discord and Steam. These in-game overlays can be extremely useful depending on which fullscreen mode the game is running in, or if the user only has a single monitor.
Game integrations: For Retail WoW and Final Fantasy XIV, we have special in-game overlays that allow players to more easily build groups and research applicants to their parties. Overwolf makes it easy for us to jump from “something happened in-game” to “present the user with helpful relevant information”.
Ads: Maintaining our Combat Log servers and keeping up with the daily high pace of report processing costs a significant amount of money, so we must serve ads in the client in order to be able to keep our lights on. Overwolf provides their own ad network and hooking into their libraries lets us make calls to them for providing ads. We would (sadly) not be able to exist if we could not serve ads.
How can I disable Overwolf usage in the Archon App?
Users have several options for disabling features that are powered by the ow-electron library. By following these steps, you can minimize calls to ow-electron code to near-zero:
- In Settings, disable all “Launch With Game” and “Detect Game Version” settings. This will cause the app to ignore any game detection events triggered by ow-electron.
- In Settings, set all “Window Presence” settings to either “Desktop” or “Always On Top”. The “In-Game” window presence uses ow-electron to draw the overlay in the game (like Discord or Steam overlays), but we do not call that hook if no window presence is set to “In-Game”.
- In Settings, disable event-based settings in “Overlays”, such as “Auto-Open Group Applicants”. If no event-based settings are enabled, we do not activate the ow-electron game integration.
- To minimize ad-related tracking, you can:
- Subscribe to our Patreon. Subscribing does more to support the site than any amount of ads we could possibly serve you. Being an active subscriber also automatically opts you out of all ad-related tracking.
- Manage your ad settings in the “Privacy” section of the Settings menu.
Note that these steps do not remove ow-electron code from the app completely. Users that want a more minimal experience with zero ow-electron code can read below to learn about a planned “lite” version of the app.
What can I do if I don’t want to use any overlays and just want to upload reports?
We are currently working on a “lite” version of our application with most features removed from it. This version will allow you to upload and process logs, but will not contain any Overwolf libraries or access to any other functionality. We’re hoping to have this out shortly after Open Beta, and will keep you updated once it’s ready to go!
Contact Us
If you have any questions, please reach out to us on [email protected]!