The EULA and Data Farming

[Tihor]

Crowdsourced data is cheating. There's no getting around that. Those that use it can rationalise it any way they want, they are cheats. However, the point is that they are cheats, and thus care little for the spirit of the game itself.

Frontier can either:

• Wage a War on Insider Traders. They would probably fare as well as the SEC and other IRL regulators, i.e. pitifully. The resources wasted on this could also be astronomical, although seeing the odd careless fool getting permabanned would still be funny...
• Provide better, more accurate and timely tools in-game. This will mean the whole "Age Of Sail meets Rome...in Space" spirit of the game will be altered (for the worse IMO), but as mentioned earlier, these are cheats, and thus care little for that.

The blurb about enhanced Galnet services being "available for a subscription" is probably an indicator that the latter path is the one they will choose to follow.

i don't get how crowd sourced info is cheating? How is it any different to me phoning my mate and telling him I found a great route? Or sharing with my son sat behind me also playing?

am I also cheating when I tell my friends I found a decent vein of ore or about some some awesome exploration points that I may have found?

 

[_Flin_]

There is NO NEED for 3rd party tools.

Of course there is a need for 3rd party tools.
With 3rd party tools it would be possible to
- have a fast working navigational tool that calculates a route between two systems, instead of routes for all the systems in an expanding bubble.
- have a list of saved routes between often visited systems
- have a way to manually edit your route and add little detours
- have an "in game" notepad where you can add notes to stations, systems, mining areas, whether you want to explore this system later etc.
- have a marker for "i have visited this system"
- have a bookmark function for systems
- have a color coded commodities market indicating possible valuable trades
- have a tool to track your trades when you want to test things like the economy or the influence system
- have a list of known enemy commanders or pirates
- have an indicator or color coding for people on your friends list
- have a "wing" feature with a chat, positions and colorcoded radar in it
- have a bullseye; or have the choice of 100 different bullseyes, to your own liking
- have your own customized HUD, with colors, arrangement of instruments, fonts, key bindings
- have silent running configurations for different situations
etc.

Most of this isn't in the "FD doesn't WANT us to have it", but more in the "FD doesn't have THE TIME for that and it is low priority" category.

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.

Well, maybe it's not important for me what FD want. Maybe it is important for me what I want, and I'll do it anyway. Whether it is on a spreadsheet, in a private or guild database, or a public database.

In my opinion, Trading Tool ⇔ Aimbot ⇔ Cheat

Welcome to the world of MMOs and the 21st century, where communication, interaction and collaboration are assets and not frowned upon.

 

[kfsone]

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

Where's your proof of this?

What it makes them less desperate, I "speculate" from the position of being both an experienced MMO dev and also an Elite-Dangerous trading tool dev. It makes them feel less like they're groping in the dark. It makes them a little less nervous of going and visiting unlisted/unknown stations, because they figure they can probably scrounge up credits to undo the loss of a ship in not-unreasonable time again if they screw up.

But one thing I've learned from developing one of these tools is that it doesn't make them "good" traders.

All a trading tool can tell you is that, based on data from X hours ago and data from Y hours ago, there was an opportunity to shift some peanuts for a profit between A and B.

It can't account for fluctuations during your travel time, other player activity, etc; it can't help you predict likely market shifts. You have to actually play the game and pay attention for that.

But then - what's a trading tool?

In Alpha I took a notepad and started hand-writing a spreadsheet - with a pen - of prices. Was the pen a "trading tool"? Or was it the calculator I started using?

I upgraded that to a spreadsheet on the computer, was that a trading tool? Did that make me better than you? Or was it th eMS Access database? And when I wrote code that crunched numbers to figure out which crazy sets of combinations would work out best, well that's probably a good definition of a tool if you're starting out from zero, but it's not that far removed from the other systems - the data I use is all hand-entered. Unlike the notepad I used in alpha or in Elite on my acorn, I use a keyboard to scribe the data instead of a pen, but it's still me manually doing it.

 

[_Flin_]

But then - what's a trading tool?

In Alpha I took a notepad and started hand-writing a spreadsheet - with a pen - of prices. Was the pen a "trading tool"? Or was it the calculator I started using?

I upgraded that to a spreadsheet on the computer, was that a trading tool? Did that make me better than you? Or was it th eMS Access database? And when I wrote code that crunched numbers to figure out which crazy sets of combinations would work out best, well that's probably a good definition of a tool if you're starting out from zero, but it's not that far removed from the other systems - the data I use is all hand-entered. Unlike the notepad I used in alpha or in Elite on my acorn, I use a keyboard to scribe the data instead of a pen, but it's still me manually doing it.

Exactly this.

You just hardly can do efficient trading with only in-game tools, unless you got an eidetic memory.

To trade efficiently you NEED to record prices, either hand entered in notepads, spreadsheets/databases or graphically via screenshots (which aren't digital number data and therefore not analyzeable).
And to record those prices you NEED 3rd party tools (if only to view the screenshots and organize them), because you can't do it ingame.

So there is no way around using third party tools if you want to trade. And today a third party tool isn't a physical notepad and a pen (as 1984), but a digital one - with a spreadsheet etc. Or a wiki. Or a database.

 

[CMDR_Coenen]

For those that were around during beta, remember why FD announced they were going to ban the scraping of data via memory? Because it interfered with the running of the application. Some bugs and/or crashes were directly related to the scraping. So 3rd party tools reading and interfering with the memory and running applications were banned. That's all. I hope someone can link or repost the post from that era. It was not because traders were using these tools FD banned it, but because the way the tools operated were impacting the quality and stability of ED itself directly.

So OCR, Excel, paper or whatever gathering data on the markets that do not directly interfere with the running are freely usable. If you don't want to use such tools, feel free not to. Just like most other aspects of Elite Dangerous: Play it as you wish. There is no "end game", it's open ended.

 

[Basti]

Not better. Work at all.

Yesterday I spend 2 hours finding a profitable round run, just to spend another 2 hours going there and updating the data for the BPC, to see that the profit went down by 20%, as the data was days old.

Without the help of the BPC and similar tools, I wouldnt even trade, as finding a route that is actually worth my time would take weeks, if not longer. And given the broken economy, thats just not feasble, as those routes would dissapear rather quickly.

 

[_Flin_]

Not better. Work at all.

Yesterday I spend 2 hours finding a profitable round run, just to spend another 2 hours going there and updating the data for the BPC, to see that the profit went down by 20%, as the data was days old.

Without the help of the BPC and similar tools, I wouldnt even trade, as finding a route that is actually worth my time would take weeks, if not longer. And given the broken economy, thats just not feasble, as those routes would dissapear rather quickly.

Sorry to say so, but good trade routes always include the same commodities between stations of the same economy. And if you dont find a good two-way, you can always add more stops. Like extraction - refinery - industrial - agri - extraction.

So all you need to do to find a good trade route is:
Go where there are hardly any people. Find the relevant system combination with good stations.

Not really hard to do.

 

[Faerie]

+1 flin. I'm a veteran of the original game(s) &I refuse to use 3rd party tools, though I won't object to anyone else using them - you play your way, I'll play mine. A fully upgraded Cobra & a balance of 16 million, almost entirely from trading says I'm doing OK using the same method flin described.

 

[ggpwnkthx]

For those that were around during beta, remember why FD announced they were going to ban the scraping of data via memory? Because it interfered with the running of the application. Some bugs and/or crashes were directly related to the scraping. So 3rd party tools reading and interfering with the memory and running applications were banned. That's all. I hope someone can link or repost the post from that era. It was not because traders were using these tools FD banned it, but because the way the tools operated were impacting the quality and stability of ED itself directly.

So OCR, Excel, paper or whatever gathering data on the markets that do not directly interfere with the running are freely usable. If you don't want to use such tools, feel free not to. Just like most other aspects of Elite Dangerous: Play it as you wish. There is no "end game", it's open ended.

Could you please link to this announcement? If that is the case, there are ways to noninvasively read the memory of a running process.

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In my opinion, Trading Tool ⇔ Aimbot ⇔ Cheat

Does that mean you do not use gimbled or turreted weapons and those that do use them are cheating?

"Aimbotting" is literally is a feature already implemented in the game. There's no need for a 3rd party tool to do it for you. So that argument seems rather nonsensical.

 

[CMDR_Coenen]

Could you please link to this announcement? If that is the case, there are ways to noninvasively read the memory of a running process.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=35572&page=21&p=781628&viewfull=1#post781628

And Control-F for some more replies by Mr Michael Brookes.

I couldn't find the posts where FD explains the reasoning further and that they only blocked the direct memory way or something like that, so if anyone has a link bookmarked....

 

[ggpwnkthx]

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=35572&page=21&p=781628&viewfull=1#post781628

And Control-F for some more replies by Mr Michael Brookes.

I couldn't find the posts where FD explains the reasoning further and that they only blocked the direct memory way or something like that, so if anyone has a link bookmarked....

Thanks for doing that!

 

[bassman]

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.

In the real world, the profit from shipping good is based entirely on the time/effort/risk needed to do it with one notable exception: when there is some sort of "extreme event" e.g. a sunami, a famine, a war etc. If ED had a proper economic simulation then this would also hold true - there would be obvious stable bread-and-butter trade routes giving a fairly predictable decent but unexciting return, the opportunities for big profits would come from the extreme events that interrupted the normal flow of commerce e.g. you see in galnet that a revolt is brewing in a system and you gamble that its going to turn into civil war and speculate accordingly.

 

[ggpwnkthx]

There must be some way to do this in development, or at least a plan for the future. The tools that have been popping up so far, especially the possibilities with trading metrics, are very cool.

It's always seemed wild to me that we're playing in a universe where we can leap between the farthest stars, but don't have a method for communicating the price of fish to one another.

Part of that is because we want people to visit places, not just follow a pre-calculated. Of course we need to make sure that there is adequate information upon which to make a sensible decision.

Michael

So you will ban tools that use hand gathered data too? What about players setting up networks to share their hand gathered data?l

This hasn't been banned at all. It's directly accessing the games data, its resources and communications that isn't permitted at this time..

Michael

Michael is clearly stating that sharing the information is NOT condemned, it is merely the means in which the data is collected. This seems to be in clear contradiction with the EULA. What I do not understand is how scraping data from RAM is ultimately any different than taking a screenshot and parsing the image. The end-goal is without doubt exactly the same.

I can absolutely understand the desire to protect the users' account information. So if an app is ONLY collecting specific information that is deemed appropriate (and can be proven), and in a way that is noninvasive to the running process, I fail to see the harm.

 

[Vander Mey jr.]

Guys?

I've worked in transportation for several years (before getting the degree that brought me into software engineering). If you are talking "the real world", you'd be looking at tight route lock-in, dependent conractorship, and microscopic margins for the contractor, resp. minimal wage for the actual driver.

Think twice about what you wish for. The margins to be had by jumping between two random systems with different economies are positively luxurious, not even taking missions into account...

 

[Armour]

Neg rep me as often as you like, "normalguy" - doesn't make what I posted any less true.

 

[ggpwnkthx]

Crowdsourced data is cheating.

The above statement is categorically untrue according to Michael Brookes.

 

[neXib]

What I do not understand is how scraping data from RAM is ultimately any different than taking a screenshot and parsing the image. The end-goal is without doubt exactly the same.

If they "allow" 100 tools that scrape data from the game in different ways they start to get problems with monitoring what could possibly be cheating or defining what is cheating, besides they could introduce problems that they end up having to support because the users fail to see the cause is the third-party tool. Not saying these are their reasons, but those would be some of the things on my list if I was them.

By not allowing that at all and actively pursuing that goal they don't have to worry too much about that. Screenshots have no problems around it whatsoever.

 

[Clav]

Michael is clearly stating that sharing the information is NOT condemned, it is merely the means in which the data is collected. This seems to be in clear contradiction with the EULA. What I do not understand is how scraping data from RAM is ultimately any different than taking a screenshot and parsing the image. The end-goal is without doubt exactly the same.

It is not the end goal that they object to, you can clearly see that from his other posts in the thread. The problem with the old tool was that it directly messed with the game process and caused issues, when you used the tool in beta you could even see a hitch or delay when opening the market as the tool read the prices. The EULA was (i believe) specifically written with this in mind, when it says 'accessing the Game or Online Feature' it means literally accessing the games processes to manipulate or read information. Not just using your eyes to look at stuff on screen or a tool to analyse screenshots.

 

[ggpwnkthx]

If they "allow" 100 tools that scrape data from the game in different ways they start to get problems with monitoring what could possibly be cheating or defining what is cheating, besides they could introduce problems that they end up having to support because the users fail to see the cause is the third-party tool. Not saying these are their reasons, but those would be some of the things on my list if I was them.

By not allowing that at all and actively pursuing that goal they don't have to worry too much about that. Screenshots have no problems around it whatsoever.

It is not the end goal that they object to, you can clearly see that from his other posts in the thread. The problem with the old tool was that it directly messed with the game process and caused issues, when you used the tool in beta you could even see a hitch or delay when opening the market as the tool read the prices. The EULA was (i believe) specifically written with this in mind, when it says 'accessing the Game or Online Feature' it means literally accessing the games processes to manipulate or read information. Not just using your eyes to look at stuff on screen or a tool to analyse screenshots.

Manipulation I can certainly understand being condemned. If the problem is invasive scanning, then I can understand that, too. So if the scan is NONinvasive, where is the problem?

 

[AnnuverScotinExile]

Where's your proof of this?

Comments made (on here) by people about how helpful they were during the beta. So, just-so stories and not proof per se

What it makes them less desperate, I "speculate" from the position of being both an experienced MMO dev and also an Elite-Dangerous trading tool dev. It makes them feel less like they're groping in the dark. It makes them a little less nervous of going and visiting unlisted/unknown stations, because they figure they can probably scrounge up credits to undo the loss of a ship in not-unreasonable time again if they screw up.

But one thing I've learned from developing one of these tools is that it doesn't make them "good" traders.

Depends what the tool does. If all it does is record and regurgitate data (where data <> information) then I agree. It may help avoid errors that a good trader would make with no information and a wrong guess - it is not unusual for some of the trade routes shown in the game to actually make a loss, and those could be avoided. There is an ability to buy trade data - I've never used it, so do not know what it does. But at the very least tools could provide that data at no cost. However, back in the beta days, my spreadsheet (yes, a third party trading tool) would recommend the run and what goods to buy to maximise profit from a given point. Including doing not-obvious-to-poor-traders things like deliberately underbuying the commodity that gives the greatest profit to buy one that gives less profit, but where you can buy more of them to fill up the holes. A tool that did that sort of thing would clearly help people become good traders, especially if it gave then decisions backed by data they had never earned themselves.

All a trading tool can tell you is that, based on data from X hours ago and data from Y hours ago, there was an opportunity to shift some peanuts for a profit between A and B.

It can also do the sort of thing I described above. Mind you, that was much easier with the more limited galaxy in the beta.

It can't account for fluctuations during your travel time, other player activity, etc; it can't help you predict likely market shifts. You have to actually play the game and pay attention for that.

But then - what's a trading tool?

In Alpha I took a notepad and started hand-writing a spreadsheet - with a pen - of prices. Was the pen a "trading tool"? Or was it the calculator I started using?

I upgraded that to a spreadsheet on the computer, was that a trading tool? Did that make me better than you? Or was it th eMS Access database? And when I wrote code that crunched numbers to figure out which crazy sets of combinations would work out best, well that's probably a good definition of a tool if you're starting out from zero, but it's not that far removed from the other systems - the data I use is all hand-entered. Unlike the notepad I used in alpha or in Elite on my acorn, I use a keyboard to scribe the data instead of a pen, but it's still me manually doing it.

Doing those calculations is far removed from the data entry and regurgitation tools. Sure, if you are sharp, you can immediately prune the tree of potential routes to test, but it would still take a non-trivial amount of time to work out the best route. Time that people with the tool would use to get another trip in - indeed, in most cases manually working out the best route is a bad move, because of the opportunity cost of spending time doing so.