As noted previously, the EULA is broadly prohibitive. Section 3.e implies that even taking notes on commodity data is prohibited.
The EULA and Data Farming
- Thread starter ggpwnkthx
- Start date
As noted previously, the EULA is broadly prohibitive. Section 3.e implies that even taking notes on commodity data is prohibited.
Not true. The game is under development and will continue to evolve over time. Just because something is not in the game now does not mean that they do not want it there. It means that they have had other priorities. We cannot infer exactly how they foresee the game evolving, hence the need to ask them directly.
Oh I would like to see you type...
I have encountered people like you on every MMO forum I ever visited. What you don't take into account, however, is that there is no way a game is ever "meant" to be played.
There are developer resources and priority development features.
So tell me, when the design discussion states a player log with market data and visited systems, does it ever occur to you that maybe the game is "meant" to be played differently than it is currently implemented?
When WoW started, it took over half a year for their ingame tools to support raiding in a meaningful way. People like you were all "no, you cant use addons, because thats not how the game is meant to be played" while all others were happily raiding.
The ages old discussion about addons... same old same old... just dont believe that because you don't want to use every tool availabe because it somehow spoils your subjective platonic ideal of what the game should constitute, that others share this ideal, even the developers.
This dogmatic stance always comes down to:
I want to tell you how to play the game because I (for whatever reason) see myself as the defender of the holy faith. And you have to do as i tell you.
To which I say: Thank you, but no thank you.
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EULA are the weakest rules to enforce and hold about as much legal power as a wet trout.
Weird, you say you've encounter people like me on every MMO forum you've ever visited. I guess I'm wrong and all of them are wrong too, huh?
If you're using a 3rd party tool to do stuff for you, then you're playing a completely different game to me. I'd suggest you stop posting your opinions on the forums of a game you're not actually playing.
EULA clearly states...
3. Licence Restrictions
You are not permitted:
(a) to load the Game on to a network server for the purposes of distribution to one or more other device(s) on that network or to effect such distribution;
(b) except as expressly permitted by this EULA and to the extent expressly permitted by applicable law, to rent, lease, sub-license, loan, exploit for profit or gain, copy, modify, adapt, merge, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or create derivative works based on the whole or any part of the Game or use, reproduce, distribute, translate, broadcast, publicly perform, store in a retrieval system or otherwise deal in the Game or any part thereof in any way;
(c) use cheats, automation software, hacks, mods, or any other unauthorized software designed to modify or defeat the purpose or experience of the Game;
(d) use any unauthorized software that harvests or otherwise collections information about others or the Game, including about a character or the game environment;
(e) use any robot, spider, scraper, or other automated or manual means to access the Game or any Online Features or copy any content or information from the Game or any Online Features;
(f) probe, scan, test the vulnerability of or breach the authentication measures of the Game or any Online Features;
(g) violate any technology control or export laws and regulations that apply to the technology used or supported by the Game or any Online Features.
Defeat the purpose of the game... What is the purpose of the game in regards to trading? Is it to dock at stations and find trade routes yourself? Or to log into a network of 1000+ players and get given the best trade routes in the known galaxy by clicking a search button?
If it's the 2nd, maybe you could show me where that button is in my game, oh hang on, there isn't one. Like I said you aren't even playing the same game as me.
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Like I said before... It really wouldn't be so bad that you use these things if you didn't come on the forums saying "it's easy to find a good trade route". I've made a few threads about low profit margins from trade routes and every single one has had replies from people saying the profit margins are fine, you just got to find the good routes.
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There was an incident during gamma where someone shared (here on the forum) a fast, highly profitable in-system two-way trading route that they had been grinding for a while. I went there, and a few others did, and within a couple of days the profit margin had almost halved. I think. Maybe it wasn't as bad as that but I could see it going down on about every other trip.
I saw someone argue earlier that many anecdotes aren't data.
That is because the market actually isn't dynamic. I do see down variations when I trade a route heavily... I just have to stop playing for a few hours for it to go back up. and that's a system with 5k+ ships daily.
It may be dynamic on the personal scale, but you can have a lemmings army of T9s on your route it doesn't change a thing.
Yes... and no. Because game studios have another weapon which is very useful in achieving the first step of any successful legal dispute: put the burden of procedure on the other party.
You do X.
Editor says "X is contrary to our EULA"
You laugh.
Editor bans you.
It's now you who have the burden of procedure to get your account back and dispute the EULA validity. The EULA can be worth nothing, you'll still have to spend time and money to have a judge acknowledge that. Over 50€. Yay. And every single customer must do likewise, which is why EU companies are fighting tooth and nail against the possibility of class actions.
The EULAs and bans are there so all of the burden is on you, companies knowing most people will just give up at that point, and that the EULA will still stand as a ban tool.
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Aren't turreted and gimbled weapons essentially aim bots?
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What is the purpose of the game? Is there even a single objective purpose?
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This is the reason i dont trade atm and equipped my ship with guns instead. I hope FD shapes up the economy over time. You shouldnt have to look for good trade routes in the dark. Super routes and rare routes is another thing, but standard trading should be clear as day to a trader looking at the info at hand. We have seen some weirdness like farmers buying what they produce and sell plus a lot of other oddities. The items sold, their prices and the information on the system need to all function together, and it needs to be clear to the player.
The whole trading mechanic (like mining) is flawed and in my opinion not fun at all. Which is why there is a need for 3rd party programs to make it work. The fact that your ship can jump from star to star and speed faster than the speed of light, but it isn't technically capable of storing trade data from each system you visit is a simply a cruel, immersion breaking, joke... Its just another easy game mechanic they could have added to make the game way better. You could even sell your trade data to stations for others to download to their ships (just like system data). Right now there is only one thing Elite does well and that is combat.
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There is NO NEED for 3rd party tools.
The fact that your ship computer doesn't store this data, means that at this point in time FD don't want it to work that way.
If you can't make money on your own you haven't tried very hard.
In my opinion, Trading Tool ⇔ Aimbot ⇔ Cheat
Of course that is just my opinion people will play the way they want, even if it is not considered cheating by those that use such tools it is 'morally cheating'.
To the arguments regarding sharing data cooperatively in game or via groups vs. an online trade tool, there is a big difference, one revolves around what could be realistically expected to be shared via person to person encounters the other by definition is a collection of data that could not be realistically collated in the game world by an individual or even realistically sized group of people.
Lets hope the devs don't end up having to spend more and more time fixing or patching broken economies because of the sheer power of crowd data.
A denial of service attack is just a 'crowd sourced' collection of data requests pointed towards an unfortunate server, usually justified with a 'because we could' and 'they should have had belter servers'. Now to be clear I am not for 1 second suggesting that anyone here is malicious or that what they are doing is in anyway actively attacking anything. I am just pointing out that just because something can be done doesn't mean that it should be done, and when you add the word crowd to any collective even more caution should be used.
Those that disagree with this will continue to do what they do, and those of us that don't will spend our time playing the game the way we want to.
I am pretty sure there is someone out there using the trade tools to become the first Elite trader to claim their £1000 prize.
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Slopey and I have disagreed on this one from about day 2. However, I can certainly confirm that he has said more than once that he would shut it down if FD tell him too, and I believe him.
The major problem I have with these tools is that I am a pretty good trader without them. The tools help turn bad traders into good ones, and thus erode any 'advantahe' that I may have. We all know that if I wrote an aimbot, to turn me from a poor dogfighter to a good one, then I would be banned permanently. So it is not fair. But then life is not fair, either.
That said, as Slopey also said, what people using these tools do does not really affect me directly. I, too, rarely see other pilots, and have not interacted with any at all.
You can certainly disagree with my perspective, however based on your response, I have my doubts that you understood my my comments at all. So let me elaborate...
The EULA has some area that is clearly black and white. Some things are strictly forbidden. It is also full of gray area: things which are vague and unclear, or things which are forbidden but absolutely impossible to detect/enforce. I understand that you are attempting to make a counter example, however aimbots and free credits... miss the mark. I'm not sure what free credits have to do with anything; and aimbots are strictly forbidden. There is no ambiguity here. A 3rd party tool which does not scrape data from the game and function like a more organized, large crowd-sourced Google Doc, falls into the gray area.
We could argue until the end of time about what FD does or does not want us to be doing with respect to that gray area in the EULA. However, when FD are aware of the tools being developed within this gray area... but neither ban their users (very often because they cannot detect such things), but also do not explicitly forbid them... then they are implicitly condoning their use.
My larger argument is that this implicit tolerance of such 3rd party tools is a second-best argument; the best current solution would be an explicit statement from FD that directly addresses their sentiments about these specific tools. Slopey's BPC tool (to use a specific example) is not new; nor is it at all secretive. He has made it perfectly clear that he would stop developing the tool if they told him to. They have not. The reality of the situation is that the game is currently in a very raw state, and the EULA is both broad and vague. I would assume that FD are in their offices wrestling with this very issue. But it seems odd that individuals would condemn such tools, when FD (the maker and enforcer of rules) are unwilling to do so.
As far as I'm concerned, in this day and age, a game in which players gain a competitive edge by using 3rd party software is a poorly designed game. These tools should be built in.
As a very wise EVE developer once said, "Players will optimize to the point of boredom". Nothing could be truer for this game. The BEST ways of making money involve the LEAST involvement in the game. When I'm trading I spend a huge amount of time plotting routes and calculating commodities OUT OF THE GAME. It's silly! Frontier should make the most lucrative methods of making money use engaging, in-game mechanics.
As a very wise EVE developer once said, "Players will optimize to the point of boredom". Nothing could be truer for this game. The BEST ways of making money involve the LEAST involvement in the game. When I'm trading I spend a huge amount of time plotting routes and calculating commodities OUT OF THE GAME. It's silly! Frontier should make the most lucrative methods of making money use engaging, in-game mechanics.
To be fair, Frontier have repeatedly said that the development of an API is something they do want to do (I asked David Braben about this in person at the launch event and others have asked developers/David/Michael on many occasions). This implies that they DO want to see 3rd party applications - or that they accept the inevitability of them. The 3rd party community generally enhances a game immensely. Where Frontier don't want something to be done, they can say so and most developers will respect that.
Short answer: yes.
Third party tools make a game better, not worse.
Not a single MMO I ever played was worse because of addons. Plenty were worse without, because comfort features were missing that could have been easily implemeented but weren't, because they had no priority. E.g. the auction system in SWTOR.
You want to find trade routes by flying to stations and dock to find out prices? Well, then do so.
It only shows that you do not understand how trading works.
Are 3rd party tools an issue? No. Because if you trade wherr there is a lot of data in the trading tools, you are doing it wrong.
It is easy to find good trade routes, you dont need 3rd party tools for it. It is nice, however, to have 3rd party tools to provide you with data about where you can buy specific commodities.
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I've worked on public-facing APIs for two MMOs(*), and my experience is that what happens is this:
Idiot programmer says, "Well, then someone could write a tool that would show them where to go to have fun in the game!",
Designer turns to stone, knowing that if idiot programmer just came up with something that destructive to game play, god only knows what the players will actually pull off with it.
Conceptually, the API is very daunting because there is a very delicate balance to be maintained between enabling people to embellish the game for themselves and allowing them to destroy the game, and most of us are terrible game designers so it only takes a little for a lot of people to make the game even more un-fun for themselves than it was before they started downloading 3rd-party tools.
The second problem, the problem of users seeking support for 3rd-party tools?
Sure, it'll happen, but as a defense against 3rd party tools: bull. It's most likely to happen when the 3rd-party tools are least supported and they resultingly have that sort of buddy-buddy-with-the-devs feel to them, but even then, it's not going to happen on a statistically significant level.
Some people are perhaps remembering the issue of "EMDN", but that was not the same thing.
I'm also a developer of a trade calculator tool which is based on hand-entered prices and an extremely powerful/flexibile profit calculator (its also open source in python: TradeDangerous), and while it can run using just your own data, the data format is simple enough that it's easy to share with other people to crowd source (e.g. maddavo's site). It seems that "EliteOCR" actually has a plugin to export to my tool, and I've been vexed by this. I think that my personal use of TD - especially manually refreshing prices - actually gives me a stronger connection with the market than if I was either using no trading tool at all or using something to automatically scrape the data.
There's nothing in TD that specifically supports EliteOCR, and I'm not going to go out of my way to make it harder for people to use EliteOCR if that's what they choose, but I also know how infuriating it as a dev trying to retain control of your vision and squelch "hack"s like this.
For my money's worth, I much rather that ED had a built-in trade calculator that was tied in to gameplay. The achilles heel of all trade calculators is and always will be time: they can only tell you what the prices are now, not what they will be when you arrive with your goods, and an opportunity exists for several gameplay systems which play off of that.
As much time and effort as I've put into TD, frankly we don't need a fraction of it. What most of us want is just a guide to where we can go next with a good chance our money will go up, so it's not even like Frontier have to compete with whatever is the most cutting edge BPC out there, they just need to make something that helps you get from a display showing 100+ arbitrary item names and 30 nearby systems to a sense of "try selling algae".
(* Both of whose names start with 'World')
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