Injecting Arbitrary Python Into EVE Online

http://daeken.com/injecting-arbitrary-python-into-eve-online

by daeken • 17 years ago

57 18 17 years ago

And as usual, computers are great at automating tasks, even if somebody else thinks of it as cheating.

daeken3• 17 years ago

Indeed. Personally, I see automation of tasks in EVE as cheating, but it honestly surprises me that that's the case. In such an advanced world, you'd expect to see corporations automating defense, mining, etc. I'm surprised that CCP hasn't done something along the lines of letting people automate these things and leave it up to the market as to whether or not players want to do it.

It's a fairly arbitrary restriction in an otherwise very open game.

wmf• 17 years ago

It probably has to do with fun and game balance. Like the real world where you might as well go home if you're not front-running and flash trading, if EVE allowed macros and automated trading then it could devolve into a competition between programmers to write the best bots. Regular human players might be all but shut out.

mquander• 17 years ago

For everything that's more efficient to automate, that's one less thing that's fun for players to do. There are more people who want to play EVE than who want to play write-software-to-play-EVE.

CrazedGeek• 17 years ago

There wouldn't be any downsides to automating it, which I think is the main issue. If there's no difference between the automated goods and the handmade goods...

I'm sorry, I had to stop there. My comment was freaking me out with parallels to reality. Anyway, I think a move like that would give way more credence to the "EVE is a spreadsheet" idea, which I'd assume CCP is sorta trying to avoid.

dkersten• 17 years ago

Well, it makes a large portion of their game content useless. It also puts anyone who DOESN'T automate (maybe because they want to actually enjoy the game content) at a major disadvantage. Finally, if you don't have to spend lots of time collecting shit, then you have less incentive to pay the monthly fee for quite as long as you otherwise might.

njharman• 17 years ago

The main problem with automation isn't fun, gameplay, balance, etc. It is "gold", item, and other sorts of farming by non-players for the sole purpose of selling for RL money.

commiebob• 17 years ago

Major points for hacking the game before playing it.

daeken3• 17 years ago

Well, this post would've been up about 24 hours ago, but something was distracting me.

likpok• 17 years ago

You can decompile the Eve source code. Python is not in fact the best language for obfuscating what you do.

IIRC the EVE people do what every game developer does, and stupidly assumes that the client follows the rules.

Furthermore, all of this is against the TOS, so if you agree to that, you can't do any of this. If you don't agree to the TOS, it's fine.

daeken3• 17 years ago

Yes, I pointed out that decompilation is one of the steps that needs to happen to make this into something useful. However, without a simple, hard to detect mechanism of getting your code into the process (which this sort of injection is), its usefulness is limited. By injecting into the client rather than putting code into their archives, you make it considerably simpler and harder to detect.

DarkShikari• 17 years ago

IIRC the EVE people do what every game developer does, and stupidly assumes that the client follows the rules.

No they don't; everything the client does is validated server-side. The purpose of this is automation of client-side tasks, not doing tasks which would be impossible by game rules.

walesmd• 17 years ago

Link (and even the domain) is redirecting me to http://daeken.comrequest.url/?c=1 - which obviously will not resolve.

Injecting Arbitrary Python Into EVE Online

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