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.

- Eve Marketeer certainly did 1) and 2).

- There have been numerous posts on these forums, with no CCP comment, about 1) and 2) e.g. https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1721979 *specifically* for the purpose of loading up the cached results. No CCP comment.

- 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.

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.

In case they want to "stop" (uhuh) people from reading the cache, CCP's options are extremely limited. I could go in depth as to why it is impossible to prevent access to the cache files, but anyone with an interest in this activity knows why so I won't bother.

1) encrypt the cache on the way to disk

2) declare the encryption used as a copy protection device (the stuff stored in the cache is technically restricted use content from CCP)

3) user decrypts cache to do cache scraping

4) user goes to gaol under DMCA

5) sucks to be you

It's even easier than that. In a path of least resistance, if cache reading became impossible (very unlikely) then people would just install an hook on the network driver and intercept data packets a la Wireshark and then decode those.

So many tears. Tears are countable, the word can be pluralised. One tear, two tears, many tears.

So much crying. Crying is not countable, the word doesn't make a singular/plural distinction. There is crying. There is no crying. There is much crying.

Note that I'm talking JUST about the act of reading the cache (as was Sreegs), not about any automation or other less than honorable things one might do with the technology, that's an entirely different matter.

The result is the same, by reading the data of the wire you are also violation the EULA.

The EULA is pretty clear on that:

You may not reverse engineer, disassemble or decompile, or attempt to reverse engineer or derive source code from, all or any portion of the Software, or from any information accessible through the System (including, without limitation, data packets transmitted to and from the System over the Internet), or anything incorporated therein, or analyze, decipher, "sniff" or derive code (or attempt to do any of the foregoing) from any packet stream transmitted to or from the System, whether encrypted or not, or permit any third party to do any of the same, and you hereby expressly waive any legal rights you may have to do so. If the Software and/or the System contains license management technology, you may not circumvent or disable that technology.