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I appreciate your organizational limitations and not wanting to put CCP's foot in it's own mouth. We all know what CCP's foot tastes like around here.



I think everyone in this thread would like to hear some words about this along the lines of: "We understand this is a problem with the EULA, and we're going to make this right. We won't have a new EULA tomorrow, but we're going to cook on it for a couple months and do our best to address it within two months of the Odyssey expansion. No bans because of overview pack or cache market cache scraping will occur in the meantime."

Think you and your team can champion that cause within CCP, or find someone who can? You know we'd love you forever...

Whoever wrote the Third Party Policies page really stumbled. Banning cache scraping in such language makes a real mess of many extremely popular (and I would say essential) third party programs. The Third Party Policy fails to "clarify CCP's stance." A couple of simple edits on that page would quite down most of frustration and concerns. Look at the lack of posts about how multiboxing breaks the EULA.



I don't like this method of doing things, but everyone does it. The simple fact is that the EULA is designed so that CCP Stillman can ban you for essentially anything. Starting up the game is probably some sort of technical violation of the EULA. You don't have any legal rights, CCP keeps all of those for itself. I don't like it, but I have learned to relax and accept the tyranny that game companies make.

That does not mean that they should foolishly frighten their customers with statements which make it seem like they will be banned next. That is why someone at CCP should modify the Third Party Policy and perhaps temper CCP Stillman's statements. Note the difference in statements on multiboxing vs cache scraping:

Dev Blog
... we can’t say that multiboxing software isn’t against our EULA. But the same goes in this case, that unless we determine that people are doing things beyond “multiboxing”, we will not be taking any action.

Third Party Policies
We recognize that some players have engaged in cache scraping in the past, and we want to be clear this practice is not permitted. That said, unless there is an extreme case (i.e., cache scraping combined with other EULA violations), we will not penalize players who have engaged in this practice prior to 15 April 2013. Now that we have made our intent and policy clear, we may, in our sole discretion, deliver appropriate penalties for players that engage in cache scraping after 15 April 2013 (including temporary or permanent bans).

The Dev Blog makes it clear that so long as you are not botting or causing problems multiboxing is ok. The Third Party Policies seem to ban any cache scraping, and prepare them for banning players who do that after April 15. The difference is even more surprising since they both are interpretations of the same paragraph in the EULA 9.C. Now we have seen a number of statements from CCP Stillman and CCP Peligro that everyone should not interpret the Third Party Policy in the way it is apparently written. A simple rewrite along the lines of the Dev Blog would make things much better for them.

Despite all of CCP's "I was there" and "True Stories" hyperbole, this is just a silly computer game. If they ban me or anyone for simply using EVEMON or another program which fills a vital hole in their game then I will go play another game with better security personnel. I will also laugh when I hear that that person left for "other opportunities" or "to spend more time with their family."

P.S. It seems to me that CCP Stillman really has a personal problem with cache scrapping and all of this is just part of his ongoing efforts to remove the cache.

We can has riots pls :3

Seriously though, this is an absolutely terrible idea and you should be ashamed of yourselves for allowing it to get past the discussion phase. Clearly cache scraping has not been considered an automatic EULA violation in the past (since you explicitly OKed projects that involved it). Nobody is comfortable with the idea of you calling us all out as e-criminals for using perfectly legitimate tools while reserving the right to ban us at any time. This is a terrible policy and should be rescinded immediately. If your department doesn't have the capacity to evaluate and green-list third party tools then you need to avoid language that makes using any tool an EULA violation.

Reasonable post.

We could really use some data on any Market API that can be created to replace this functionality.

Maybe we can walk in stations now. That would be pretty cool.

I can use autohotkey to automate certain timing for smartbombing battleships. This maximises the number of smartbomb cycles I can get off whilst neuted.

Is this against the EULA? I can do a pretty good approximation of this manually, but it is more open to error and missing the crucial third cycle.

Here you go. This should be good for any piece of software you ever buy.

1) We make no guaranties that this program will do anything that our advertising claimed or is useful in any way.

2) We make no guaranties that you or everything around you will not suffer irreparable harm as a direct result of our program.

3) We reserve the right to do anything we like to you no mater what we might say otherwise, including disconnecting you, and destroying your ideas, and blaming you.

4) Otherwise please enjoy our game!

yes, I do.

It's been made clear that running EVEMon (under default settings) post April 15th is illegal and there should be consequences for that.

How are users supposed to take your policies seriously (and abide by them as a result) if the policies are not enforced?

Make it a slap on the wrist (a short temp ban) if you want to but punish violators in some way so the message gets out that the EULA is actually a thing that matters (and which CCP will enforce).

What is even the point of having an EULA if your official stance is that most players are in violation of it, but benevolent as you are you won't ban most of them? Either have the EULA explicitly allow things that you don't intend to enforce (eg. things that are not botting) so that players who aren't botting can feel safe, or just throw it out completely and say you'll ban anybody whenever.

If your official policy is selective enforcement, then any written rule set is completely meaningless.