Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:Adding to my post above with a practical example.
There's a 3rd party tool that has been announced weeks ago (has 20 or so forum pages!) that completely automates in game market prices gathering. It really opens the right window for you, fills in the right item for you, then switches to the next and so on.
With such cumbersome default UI, a player seeing such software would rejoyce!
But wait, is this software - residing on the official EvE forums but never "checked" legit? Or is it a bot? What to the dozens who use it? Until what point an end user is meant to be so much geek to know if a certain python thing is good, another is bad, a DLL is ok and another is not? This is the lack of "tools" I am talking about.
That sounds illegal. It probably is and the ones using it will get probably banned soon (if its first time then rather temporarily). If in doubt you can always petition and ask if something you plan to do is legal in EVE. No need to guess.
It has been posted several times by devs and GM's what they consider illegal in EVE. As a rough rule of thumb - if it automates the game to the point where without your input the game "plays on its own" its illegal. And it does not matter if you are sitting at computer and watching it to do it or not.
Now fancy keyboards n stuff are a bit of a gray area, but there are limits what CCP allows in there as well. I know as I petitioned a while ago asking if one thing is legal and was told not to do it as it would get me banned. I was asking about old PI system which was very damn clik heavy and a mouse driver which were able to record the mouse movements and then replay them. So it would have been relatively easy to record the mouse movements once and then replay them every morning for 20 minutes it took me to refresh my PI farm while just sitting there and sipping my morning coffee. Ofc as I was told to not do it I did not and continued wasting 20 minutes of my life every morning clicking on PI crap until I got fed up with it and stopped doing PI.
It's ok to use fancy keyboard to activate hardeners or launchers/turrets with one button press. It is not ok to make the same keyboard macro activate the launchers once every ~3 minutes, load up with FoF and go watch TV (also, by the same logic, putting papewrweight on F1 is bannable offence, as it allows "AFK play"). Anything that allows "AFK play" is not allowed, regardless if it's fancy hardware, clever python script, some recorded pattern of movements or even just plain old rock put on F1 on the perfectly ordinary keyboard.