The wiki page states that cache scraping is forbidden. If I'm correct, popular services such as eve-central rely on it... Do you plan to release an API access to the market to make up for this ? Or many player developped application based on eve-central api will just ... die. And it's not going to be good for the market !

It would just be clearer for anyone if a legal access to these vital market data was provided :)

Absolutely, yes.

Half the player population are now breaking the EULA. Nice job CCP.

This really is pathetic. How can you pop up and say half the player base are breaking the EULA and we will 'enforce at our discretion'? Please explain.

The cache scraping ban was unexpected, though. How are eve-central et al going to get their market data? I've configured my EveMon to not send in the market data now (and I assume any wise player will do the same). It kind of sucks that clarifications like these result in viable, useful third-party sites finding themselves in a position of being rules-lawyered out of being viable, especially after all those folks put in such massive effort to make something all of us players can use.

You've said that you're trying to lobby for getting Eve marketeers a feed they can use to get market data; did you consider putting a halt to cache scraping bans until you knew the outcome of that effort, or is it an instance where something bad out there is doing cache scraping (or using cache scraping to control something) and you need to act on it more immediately?

Hell, let's take this further. On one hand, in the devblog you state that you'll never approve any piece of 3rd party software, meanwhile individual CCP staff are stating that people won't get banned for using EveMon - surely that's an endorsement of a particular piece of 3rd party software?

All EULAs are vague, on purpose. Why? Because they are written to allow the first party to cover all eventualities and do whatever they want with you. The EULA also makes it clear that CCP can ban you for whatever reasons they feel like, should it come to that.

A dev saying that something is okay or another dev saying something should be okay to do doesn't actually void the agreement you've accepted which states that doing so is not okay. The EULA is written by lawyers to protect the company, and random members of staff can't alter its clauses.

What they can do is opt to enforce or not enforce the clauses on a case-by-case basis, which CCP's security staff does. They could just as easily take a blanket approach to the TOS and EULA and enforce it by the letter, which wouldn't just ban everybody using EVEMON but also everybody who's ever used Triexporter to play around with EVE's 3D models, textures, or fonts. But they haven't, because they value these things in the community and don't consider you a bad person. CCP has made an effort to separate botters from other people who violate the EULA, which is more than you can expect from most companies.

"Is this in violation of the EULA" and "Will I get banned for this" are two completely different questions.

This.

Also, I'm disappointed in CCP Stillman's lack of understanding of the cognitive dissonance induced in people that love this game enough to never want to violate the EULA.

Vague promises about "it won't be enforced" aren't really reassuring.

For years, CCP have been saying "cache scraping is OK". Then out of the blue we get a dev blog and wiki page telling us exactly the opposite: cache scraping is banned and CCP can ban you for doing it. Then, in the comments thread accompanying the dev blog, we get a dev saying in effect "it's banned and we can ban you for it, but we probably won't".

That's not exactly clarifying the situation to me.

I have a personal interest here: I have both written a market cache scraper and also run a website that uses scraped market data. Now, after investing years of development effort into both having been told it's OK to do so, CCP suddenly tell me I could be banned for it? That's not pleasant.

And there are many more people out there who've invested way more time and effort into developing third-party applications than I have.

It might seem like nitpicking, but when you've made a heavy investment into a game, suddenly being threatened with a ban for it rather makes one want to seek as much clarity as one can.

Please give us a CCP-sanctioned way of accessing arbitrary data about the sandbox, beef up your API functionality and capacity, maybe even make it compatible with other real-world systems, and let us continue our relationship with you as it's been: we make the tools and toys to fill in the blanks you and your development team don't have time or resources to produce. It's been a functional relationship up until now. There is absolutely no reason any of us are aware of that would keep this relationship from continuing, other than the current EULA interpretation.

Thanks for your consideration.

If your department doesn't have the capacity to evaluate and green-list third party tools then you need to avoid language that makes using any tool an EULA violation.