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EVE Central is now dead?

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CCP Stillman
C C P
C C P Alliance
#41 - 2013-09-05 12:37:54 UTC
Mara Rinn wrote:
Mashie Saldana wrote:
Just remove the concepts of market regions in EVE and make it all flat just like contracts. It is after all what all the cache scraping apps are doing anyways.


Or remove the cache, ban accounts that try digging into the EVE Online process memory, and put a five second delay timer on the "Export" button in market details. Level out the playing field between the market bots and the humans.


Let me think about that suggestion for a quick second...

No Blink

Just a random dude in Team Security.
Bubanni
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#42 - 2013-09-05 12:46:48 UTC  |  Edited by: Bubanni
:) if CCP made it possible to view markets across all of eve, from whereever you were... we wouldn't need sites like eve-central.com, maybe that's what they should look into, (view market from station, system, region, all of eve)

(not saying we should be able to buy items from anywhere in eve, just view them and their prices)

Supercap nerf - change ewar immunity https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=194759 Module activation delay! https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1180934
Tron 3K
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#43 - 2013-09-05 12:51:33 UTC
Bubanni wrote:
:) if CCP made it possible to view markets across all of eve, from whereever you were... we wouldn't need sites like eve-central.com, maybe that's what they should look into, (view market from station, system, region, all of eve)

(not saying we should be able to buy items from anywhere in eve, just view them and their prices)

Eh I'd still like a way to see that info outside the game as I like using my chrome browser looking up things and comparing it to other things..
Bubanni
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#44 - 2013-09-05 12:52:51 UTC
Tron 3K wrote:
Bubanni wrote:
:) if CCP made it possible to view markets across all of eve, from whereever you were... we wouldn't need sites like eve-central.com, maybe that's what they should look into, (view market from station, system, region, all of eve)

(not saying we should be able to buy items from anywhere in eve, just view them and their prices)

Eh I'd still like a way to see that info outside the game as I like using my chrome browser looking up things and comparing it to other things..


alternatively CCP could make market data public on their site

Supercap nerf - change ewar immunity https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=194759 Module activation delay! https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1180934
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#45 - 2013-09-05 12:55:21 UTC
CCP Stillman wrote:
Mara Rinn wrote:
Mashie Saldana wrote:
Just remove the concepts of market regions in EVE and make it all flat just like contracts. It is after all what all the cache scraping apps are doing anyways.


Or remove the cache, ban accounts that try digging into the EVE Online process memory, and put a five second delay timer on the "Export" button in market details. Level out the playing field between the market bots and the humans.


Let me think about that suggestion for a quick second...

No Blink


What about requiring market exports to be performed by people wearing sackcloth while self-flagellating?

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Pap Uhotih
Royal Amarr Institute
Amarr Empire
#46 - 2013-09-05 13:10:25 UTC
Bubanni wrote:


alternatively CCP could make market data public on their site


Actually you want them to make it available to 3rd party developers via their site, you don't really want them to make it available to all. Cache scraping and Eve central saved CCP from devoting resources to answering the same question n times which keeps things easy.
As I recall there was some tedious reading/forum trawling about the Battlefield 2/2142 stat server issues and third parties and how things could be better arranged than they initially had been that would probably apply. Essentially letting third parties take the strain can be a very good idea.
Bubanni
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#47 - 2013-09-05 13:15:58 UTC
Pap Uhotih wrote:
Bubanni wrote:


alternatively CCP could make market data public on their site


Actually you want them to make it available to 3rd party developers via their site, you don't really want them to make it available to all. Cache scraping and Eve central saved CCP from devoting resources to answering the same question n times which keeps things easy.
As I recall there was some tedious reading/forum trawling about the Battlefield 2/2142 stat server issues and third parties and how things could be better arranged than they initially had been that would probably apply. Essentially letting third parties take the strain can be a very good idea.


I agree with your point.

Supercap nerf - change ewar immunity https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=194759 Module activation delay! https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1180934
Steve Ronuken
Fuzzwork Enterprises
Vote Steve Ronuken for CSM
#48 - 2013-09-05 13:47:17 UTC
[broken record]
Can we get a crest api for market data, with some caching please?
[/broken record]

Woo! CSM XI!

Fuzzwork Enterprises

Twitter: @fuzzysteve on Twitter
Lors Dornick
Kallisti Industries
#49 - 2013-09-05 15:25:16 UTC  |  Edited by: Lors Dornick
Bubanni wrote:
:) if CCP made it possible to view markets across all of eve, from whereever you were... we wouldn't need sites like eve-central.com, maybe that's what they should look into, (view market from station, system, region, all of eve)

(not saying we should be able to buy items from anywhere in eve, just view them and their prices)


I guess that limiting market view to regions was both an issue of game design and an issue of DB performance/load.

If I remember correctly then the original 3:rd party solution was players working together and uploading data.

Including that individual players to decide which 3:rd party they wanted to work with (or which parties).

Which feels like a reasonable solution for people playing an MMO.

It can of course easily be solved with some form of centralised access or api but that leaves the game design question.

Should everyone have all the data directly provided by CCP or should players decide which data they want to share and with whom?

CCP Greyscale: As to starbases, we agree it's pretty terrible, but we don't want to delay the entire release just for this one factor.
Steve Ronuken
Fuzzwork Enterprises
Vote Steve Ronuken for CSM
#50 - 2013-09-05 15:44:37 UTC
Lors Dornick wrote:
Bubanni wrote:
:) if CCP made it possible to view markets across all of eve, from whereever you were... we wouldn't need sites like eve-central.com, maybe that's what they should look into, (view market from station, system, region, all of eve)

(not saying we should be able to buy items from anywhere in eve, just view them and their prices)


I guess that limiting market view to regions was both an issue of game design and an issue of DB performance/load.

If I remember correctly then the original 3:rd party solution was players working together and uploading data.

Including that individual players to decide which 3:rd party they wanted to work with (or which parties).

Which feels like a reasonable solution for people playing an MMO.

It can of course easily be solved with some form of centralised access or api but that leaves the game design question.

Should everyone have all the data directly provided by CCP or should players decide which data they want to share and with whom?


Limiting to regions also introduces benefits for traders. Sure, the thing /may/ be cheaper 6 jumps away, across a region boundary. But it might not be. Will you spend the time to go check? That Eve central data isn't entirely up to date, so maybe someone's already normalized the price?


One of the reasons I'd hope for a degree of caching on any official market data source. Live data, on demand, isn't good for the market. aggregated, or time delayed data can be.

Woo! CSM XI!

Fuzzwork Enterprises

Twitter: @fuzzysteve on Twitter
Lors Dornick
Kallisti Industries
#51 - 2013-09-05 15:50:23 UTC
Steve Ronuken wrote:
Lors Dornick wrote:
Blub blub


Limiting to regions also introduces benefits for traders. Sure, the thing /may/ be cheaper 6 jumps away, across a region boundary. But it might not be. Will you spend the time to go check? That Eve central data isn't entirely up to date, so maybe someone's already normalized the price?


One of the reasons I'd hope for a degree of caching on any official market data source. Live data, on demand, isn't good for the market. aggregated, or time delayed data can be.

Yup I agree with you (as I assumed that I would, even before you answered ;)).

Just wanted to point out that the design issue is a bit more tricky than just having the data provided by some technomagic.

CCP Greyscale: As to starbases, we agree it's pretty terrible, but we don't want to delay the entire release just for this one factor.
Bubanni
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#52 - 2013-09-05 16:24:36 UTC
Steve Ronuken wrote:
Lors Dornick wrote:
Bubanni wrote:
:) if CCP made it possible to view markets across all of eve, from whereever you were... we wouldn't need sites like eve-central.com, maybe that's what they should look into, (view market from station, system, region, all of eve)

(not saying we should be able to buy items from anywhere in eve, just view them and their prices)


I guess that limiting market view to regions was both an issue of game design and an issue of DB performance/load.

If I remember correctly then the original 3:rd party solution was players working together and uploading data.

Including that individual players to decide which 3:rd party they wanted to work with (or which parties).

Which feels like a reasonable solution for people playing an MMO.

It can of course easily be solved with some form of centralised access or api but that leaves the game design question.

Should everyone have all the data directly provided by CCP or should players decide which data they want to share and with whom?


Limiting to regions also introduces benefits for traders. Sure, the thing /may/ be cheaper 6 jumps away, across a region boundary. But it might not be. Will you spend the time to go check? That Eve central data isn't entirely up to date, so maybe someone's already normalized the price?


One of the reasons I'd hope for a degree of caching on any official market data source. Live data, on demand, isn't good for the market. aggregated, or time delayed data can be.

Again valid points, but what if that data itself was "old" so when viewing market data from another region, it would be some days old, or from last dt, that would potentially save some server load, while also keeping competition healthy and allowing someone to still have potential profit

Supercap nerf - change ewar immunity https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=194759 Module activation delay! https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1180934
Dirk Decibel
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#53 - 2013-09-05 18:04:44 UTC
Tetsuo Tsukaya wrote:
Minmatar hits T5 in faction warfare, LP store calculators stop working the next day.

LOL

Cause --> effect?
Vaerah Vahrokha
Vahrokh Consulting
#54 - 2013-09-05 18:19:39 UTC
CCP Stillman wrote:


If we decide to make away with the cache, then we'll make sure not to create a huge void in it's place. We had this discussion at Fanfest, and I've had this discussion both with other CCPers and with the CSM lately as to how to remove the cache without causing major disruption.

That's not to promise that anything is going to happen. As a security guy, I can't make promises. But I know there's a desire for the cache to be removed, as it's actually decreasing performance rather than increasing it.



EvE is so great because we get those challenges that no other "premade" MMO gives.

We build communities around solving challenges like providing a live data stream, those communities reinforce players retention and attachment to the game that lets them get the satisfaction of being able and say: "yes we did it!

I dare say this "sandbox even outside the game" is an huge enticement to play EvE, we need *more* ways to develop and expand on "EvE the engine" and not removing current ways.

Therefore please keep us engaged with tasks like building data feeds and similar, it'd be very bad to drop one of the most distinguishing features (giving challenges to solve even with 3rd party utilities) of EvE.

EvE Online portal | EvE markets tutorials
Dirk Decibel
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#55 - 2013-09-05 18:21:06 UTC
And how about making some colortags in your wallet for your market orders that show you when an order is not on top/bottom anymore? I would not call manually clicking all your orders to check how they are doing immersive gameplay....
Rischwa Amatin
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#56 - 2013-09-05 19:16:57 UTC
CCP Stillman wrote:
Bill Saisima wrote:
CCP Stillman wrote:
You're right, technically cache scraping is not currently something the EULA allows for.

Maybe our english vocabularies differ a great deal, I never found anything restricting reading game files. Just re-read it and it's just not there. Reading game files is required to play and it's not your business what I do on my PC outside of eve process space as long as I respect the terms (which don't prohibit reading of files).
Maybe you are talking about a version that is not even published yet..

Lets start by looking at the EULA for a quick second
Quote:
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.


Seems pretty clear-cut to me. And our lawyers, this being a legal document, agrees that cache scraping is covered by this. That's not the intent, but it's what it says. We've gone over this topic in depth already, so I'm not going to engage in another discussion about this. It is what it is. We won't enforce it as far as cache scraping goes.


While i'm no lawyer, technically none of the things mentioned in the paragraph is done by cache scraping:

"You may not reverse engineer, disassemble or decompile, or attempt to reverse engineer or derive source code, or from any information accessible through the System (including, without limitation, data packets transmitted to and from the System over the Internet"
->Source code is not needed for cache scraping, so none of this applies imho.

" 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"
-> cache scraping doesn't look at any streams + it hasn't anything to do with source code

" If the Software and/or the System contains license management technology, you may not circumvent or disable that technology"
-> doesn't affect cache scraping

What am i missing?
Dirk Decibel
Pator Tech School
Minmatar Republic
#57 - 2013-09-05 19:30:42 UTC
Rischwa Amatin wrote:
CCP Stillman wrote:
Bill Saisima wrote:
CCP Stillman wrote:
You're right, technically cache scraping is not currently something the EULA allows for.

Maybe our english vocabularies differ a great deal, I never found anything restricting reading game files. Just re-read it and it's just not there. Reading game files is required to play and it's not your business what I do on my PC outside of eve process space as long as I respect the terms (which don't prohibit reading of files).
Maybe you are talking about a version that is not even published yet..

Lets start by looking at the EULA for a quick second
Quote:
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.


Seems pretty clear-cut to me. And our lawyers, this being a legal document, agrees that cache scraping is covered by this. That's not the intent, but it's what it says. We've gone over this topic in depth already, so I'm not going to engage in another discussion about this. It is what it is. We won't enforce it as far as cache scraping goes.


While i'm no lawyer, technically none of the things mentioned in the paragraph is done by cache scraping:

"You may not reverse engineer, disassemble or decompile, or attempt to reverse engineer or derive source code, or from any information accessible through the System (including, without limitation, data packets transmitted to and from the System over the Internet"
->Source code is not needed for cache scraping, so none of this applies imho.

" 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"
-> cache scraping doesn't look at any streams + it hasn't anything to do with source code

" If the Software and/or the System contains license management technology, you may not circumvent or disable that technology"
-> doesn't affect cache scraping

What am i missing?
If you regard the (structure) of the cache files as 'source code' it would apply, but that's getting a bit technical on the linguistics.
Tim Sebo
Doomheim
#58 - 2013-09-05 19:33:31 UTC
CCP Stillman wrote:

Seems pretty clear-cut to me. And our lawyers, this being a legal document, agrees that cache scraping is covered by this. That's not the intent, but it's what it says. We've gone over this topic in depth already, so I'm not going to engage in another discussion about this. It is what it is. We won't enforce it as far as cache scraping goes.


I suggest after humans go through the next apocalyptic event, we leave the idea of lawyers behind.
Pap Uhotih
Royal Amarr Institute
Amarr Empire
#59 - 2013-09-05 20:24:14 UTC
Dirk Decibel wrote:

If you regard the (structure) of the cache files as 'source code' it would apply, but that's getting a bit technical on the linguistics.


Computer science would consider that the cache was a part of the program, a program can be considered to be an area of memory, there is no limitation as to the volatility of that memory or the type or format of information stored at a location. That is a little technical but if you try to draw a line around what is Eve you would not be able to leave the cache on the outside of it.

It wouldn't count as source code as such, im not sure what's in it exactly but really source code is instructions where as a cache is data storage, it is what to process rather than how to process it. That said, holistically the cache will at some point form part of an instruction and an instruction cut into three is still an instruction even if it must be re-assembled to make sense.

The cache is compiled, it must be or it couldn't be there, the only way to read it is to decompile it - even if it is written in an open format. If you whipped out the binary and used your brain to read it that would still be decompiling. The cache clearly belongs to/is a part of the program and can not be treated or considered as if it is simply a random assembly of data that has occurred on your hard drive.

Discovering how the program works is obviously reverse engineering and you are learning a lot about an area of the program if you know that it is using a cache and the format of that cache - also as you know that information is coming via a data stream you could use that knowledge to discover more but I really don't think its a great plan to elaborate on how that is the case.

I don't see how there is even a slight question of if its against the EULA, it clearly is however there is effectively missing functionality and it is a nice courtesy from CCP that cache scraping is ignored. It would be in many ways much more sensible for them to take the opposite approach as it makes things a lot clearer and simpler.
Definitely leave lawyers behind.
Rischwa Amatin
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#60 - 2013-09-05 20:38:21 UTC
Pap Uhotih wrote:

Computer science would consider that the cache was a part of the program, a program can be considered to be an area of memory, there is no limitation as to the volatility of that memory or the type or format of information stored at a location. That is a little technical but if you try to draw a line around what is Eve you would not be able to leave the cache on the outside of it.

It wouldn't count as source code as such, im not sure what's in it exactly but really source code is instructions where as a cache is data storage, it is what to process rather than how to process it. That said, holistically the cache will at some point form part of an instruction and an instruction cut into three is still an instruction even if it must be re-assembled to make sense.

The cache is compiled, it must be or it couldn't be there, the only way to read it is to decompile it - even if it is written in an open format. If you whipped out the binary and used your brain to read it that would still be decompiling. The cache clearly belongs to/is a part of the program and can not be treated or considered as if it is simply a random assembly of data that has occurred on your hard drive.

Discovering how the program works is obviously reverse engineering and you are learning a lot about an area of the program if you know that it is using a cache and the format of that cache - also as you know that information is coming via a data stream you could use that knowledge to discover more but I really don't think its a great plan to elaborate on how that is the case.

I don't see how there is even a slight question of if its against the EULA, it clearly is however there is effectively missing functionality and it is a nice courtesy from CCP that cache scraping is ignored. It would be in many ways much more sensible for them to take the opposite approach as it makes things a lot clearer and simpler.
Definitely leave lawyers behind.

No, the cache is just plain data, no instructions, no source code.
There is no reverse engineering of source code needed to read it (just reverse engineering of the data format).
It is not compiled in the computer science meaning of compilation (that is translation of source code to some kind of machine language).
If the interpretation would be like you suggest, no file format could be legally reverse engineered, although this is common practice (e.g. think about old .doc support). This suggests to me, this can't be covered by the reverse engineering part, but, as i said, i'm no lawyer ... :)