EVE Technology Lab

I'm really enjoying station trading within EVE but as my workflow has progressed, I'm worried about the fine line between increasing efficiency and botting. The only statement within the EULA/ToS that I could find that discussed botting was the following:

Conduct
A. Specifically Restricted Conduct
3:
You may not use your own or any third-party software, macros or other stored rapid keystrokes or other patterns of play that facilitate acquisition of items, currency, objects, character attributes, rank or status at an accelerated rate when compared with ordinary Game play. You may not rewrite or modify the user interface or otherwise manipulate data in any way to acquire items, currency, objects, character attributes or beneficial actions not actually acquired or achieved in the Game.

Bolded in particular is what I'm curious about. I understand that they have to be broad so as to have coverage for everything but I'm hoping there is some clarification somewhere. I'm interpreting that as saying that I cannot:
1) automate station trading(boo.. this would be so much fun and I swear I'm competing against bots at times anyways )
2) cannot setup a single click macro to retrieve an item and update an order within a given set of parameters.

However, if I just optimize my clicks, I am ok? Elinor is what prompts the optimized click question. I was considering a combination of cache scraper + clipboard manipulation but it sounds like Elinor already does that for me. Is this valid?

Backstory: I currently use EveMentat to track orders with EMDR dumped into couchbase + some python to find tasty items to station trade. Now that I have all these glorious items to trade, I'm approaching a scale problem where my piddly fingers suck at updating my ~125 market orders. My current workflow of tabbing between EveMentat and EVE is slow and tedious. There's gotta be a better way as I'm training the Wholesale 5 and then Tycoon 1-5.

Didn't think of a support ticket. Hopefully I can get some answers or at least a more clear "that might get you whacked by the banhammer" or "definitely won't whack you with the banhammer over that". Thanks!

CCP have specifically said yes to the Reverence library https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&find=unread&t=6501 which allows cache scraping for current market prices + price histories (as viewed in game on your market window) and access to the SDD like data stored there. This is a pretty good guide to what will not see you under the banhammer :)

Support ticked filed, received a response from a GM, asked a few more questions, and in the end suffice to say I'm more confused then when I started. In short, they're sticking very closely to the EULA and TOS, which is understandable, including the TOS statement regarding 3rd party applications/tools:

"You will not attempt to decipher, hack into or interfere with any transmissions to or from the EVE Online servers, nor will you try to create or use any third party add-ons, extras or tools for the game."

So, following that guidance, damn near everything in this sub-forum is in violation of the TOS. I guess I'll continue to use Mentat and hope for the best at this point. I think my EMDR parsing process is also technically illegal? I don't know anymore

Thanks for the feedback. Your logic around the logfile vs cache scraping makes sense on top of the human vs non-human. I wish the market order system was a bit more complex in-game so as to not require tip-toeing around the EULA and TOS while fearing the switch judgement of the banhammer. CCP could add price undercutting to the default buy/sell order window and level the playing field. Then it would just be down to catching automated order updating, which I would think would be easy to catch.