EVE General Discussion

First the relevant point from the EULA

"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."

Next the things that could possibly be categorised as breaking the above, or not.

1) Use the EVE In-Game Browser's ShowMarketDetails() javascript method to move the market pane to a specific item.

2) Use the EVE In-Game Browser's ShowMarketDetails() javascript method in a loop to cycle through a predefined set of items, (given that there is a built-in delay between each item showing to prevent server overload and abuse).

3) Load prices from the EvE client cache that have previously been viewed in the Market Pane, by using the many available libraries (libevecache, EveCacheParser, EveCache.NET).

It really is very, very easy to string these three together into something that will feed you up to date sell/buy orders of anything. Given your characters current sell/buy orders are available through the EVE API, even the simplest of simpletons could see how this could be 'used' to accelerate the rate that a character acquires ISK.

Now, up until the last week, all of these (apart from putting them together perhaps) were considered perfectly legal.

Commonly used sites with market scanners that have been linked to many times from these forums with no comment from CCP:

- http://eve.addicts.nl/market_scanner.php
- http://eve-central.com/home/upload_suggest.html
- http://eve-marketdata.com/update_market.php
- https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1721979

All of these sites us the In Game Browser *specifically* for the purpose of loading up the cached results.

- EveMon scrapes your cache 1), loads the prices, and sends them to Eve Central.

- Eve Mentat scrapes your cache and lets you compare the prices with your orders.

There are many, many, many player tools that have not been declared illegal that use one or all of these methods.

Then CCP Sreegs declares loading cache files to be illegal ( https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2601788#post2601788 )

The player base really needs some clarity on what allowed and what is not.

... should make for some interesting debates/question periods during Fanfest....

Screegs was pretty clear in the thread you linked. He doesn't want anyone interacting with local files at all. I can see his point. Technically opening a file is modifying it, since the file's metadata has to be updated to reflect the last time it was accessed. So that strict stance is just an extremely literal interpretation of the EULA.

It's not policy to ban people for cache-scraping today. Given the above-mentioned literal approach that Screegs takes on these things, I would take those words to mean exactly what they say. The implication is that the story could change tomorrow, or as soon as CCP gets the cache scraping functionality provided by the API, which is what Screegs said he wanted in the thread you linked to.

So yeah, bottom line is that cache scraping is illegal. But you won't get banned for it. Yet.

Opening a file is NOT modifying it - if you set noatime on the file system (and I do so to prevent unnecessary SSD writes), the file's inode isn't updated when you access it.

But I don't run a cache scraping program either (though the cache gets SCRAPPED as in deleted before I start the client after every patch).

So I really don't have a dog in this fight.

It was an official CCP statement regardless of how hard it is to believe.

YOU BETTER BELIEVE THE MAN!!!

If you have questions about what is and isn't allowed, you should file a petition.

Not everyone uses NTFS. I wouldn't ever not have time stamps on.


Regardless, I'm not trying to agree or disagree with you. I was trying to help you understand Screegs position based on what he said in the thread you linked to. That opening a file is modifying it under some circumstances was an interpolation of mine to help understand his point of view.

Maybe I was wrong. If so, I think the rest of my post still stands. Arguing with me as though I'm a mouthpiece for CCP is kind of silly.

I'm not here to explain Screegs. I was just trying to help you understand what he said.

I think it's a grey area now because there are things preventing him from wielding his hammer. His intent is clearly indicated in the thread. That fact that his intent isn't official policy is something he's also clearly not happy about. So you can bet that Screegs is going to give up on this issue and forget about it or quit or something because he just doesn't care, or you can bet that he is going to arrange things so that official policy reflects his opinion that has been clearly expressed.

Which one of those two things do you think is more likely to happen?

Is the cache uploader enabled by default in EVEMON? I can't remember. Mine has been on but I've disabled it for now.

If it's on by default ... then you're all banned.

Yes you are a special and unique snowflake. Obviously I was talking about my fellow mere mortals who are only cool enough to use EveMon.

I apologize for painting you with the same brush.