Are keyboard/mouse based programmable buttons allowed?

Communications Center General Discussion
1

A corp mate told me that macros aren’t allowed, but i’m not sure what this covers. I recently got a new razer mouse and have been making macros such as auto fire buttons for Battlefield 4 and grenade throw macros for Counter Strike. These are then programmed into the mouse key of my choice. i drew up some concepts for EVE such as activating all weapons with 1 button press, does this fall under the blacklist of bindings or not?

Please do keep in mind im very new to EVE and I dont know if theres a legitimate in-game way of binding certain “quality of life” buttons. Thanks

2

one button click = one action in game. if you map multiple in game actions to a single key, it’s not allowed. So no, activating multiple things with one button press is not allowed.

3

It’s a gray area. CCP has in the past done work to support programmable keys, but it seems to me if you aren’t allowed to use them for automation, then they should only be used for things you can find in the escape -> shortcuts menu.

edit: which actually does cover some useful things. You could map your f keys to mouse buttons. You could map broadcasts to mouse buttons. You could map drone commands to mouse buttons.

4

You can activate all weapons with F1 by grouping your weapons in the fitting screen.

Otherwise, the same rules for macros/bots (section 6.A.3) apply to programmable devices. The most you can do with it is combine cumbersome combinations of ctrl-alt-shift-x keys into easier-to-reach button presses.

You can NOT combine multiple in-game actions into a single button, have triggers or delays, send pages of text to the chat channels with a single press, etc., all of these are bannable as macro/bot actions.

EVE ships have up to 8 high, 8 mid, 8 low slots, + drones, so in theory you have to use F1-F8, Ctrl-F1 - Ctrl-F8, Alt-F1 - Alt F8, ctrl-shift-E, ctrl-shift-R, total of 26 keys involving ctrl, alt, shift combinations. Then, there’s also overheating of modules, heavily used in PVP, so that’s another 24 ctrl, shift, alt possible keys that you have to use.

However, for practical ship fitting configurations you rarely have more than 9 things to activate in combat, so I group my weapons and otherwise I rearrange my modules into the leftmost 3 slots in the user interface, so they match with a 3x3 grid on my keypad, with “drones attack” and “drones return to bay” also on there. This grid then activates F1-F3, Ctrl-F1 - Ctrl-F3, Alt-F1 - Alt-F3, and drone commands.

Then, I can change the page (and colors to red) on the keypad, and the same buttons now overheat said modules.

But, all of it is one action per key press, all I’m doing is avoiding having to press ctrl, alt, shift, etc.

5

One action per key press…

6

According to the above posted rules, macros are not allowed. However enforcing that may not be possible as macros are an integral part of Windows operating system itself and on top of that nearly all new hardware (mice, keyboards, controllers, joysticks, etc.) come with macro functions all built into them.

So to actually truly enforce that they would have to disable parts of the main used operating system + parts of the drivers for peoples devices, which just isn’t going to happen.

Macros in themselves in this game aren’t that useful anyways, as all that allows you to do is basically execute a sequence of commands on a single button which you would normally use 2-3 buttons to execute with the in-game given options. However, the manual options are just plainly better because you can alter that sequence or vary its timing etc. which you can’t do if you use a macro.

So all-in-all I don’t feel that macros are any big deal whatsoever. They make make it easier to perform PVE activities, but will actually be detrimental in PVP.

Bots on the other hand are a plague and are seperate issue. Main reasons for the plague of bots in this game are as follows:

  1. Game can be entirely played from spreadsheets with graphics disabled - This makes it super easy to collect even combat data and write bots using that. If CCP did what a lot of games are doing now, which is users have to actually properly respond to what they see on the screen instead of just such data, then a lot of the bots would die out. Sure there would be some more skilled hackers standing up to the challenge, but there would not be such a plague of them.

  2. Ceirtain elements of the game are so incredibly boring that many players are unable to stand them and either quit them or automate. This is a game design issue, its bad coupled with the above. As an example of this, just look at how many players actually use their mains for mining, how many actually sit there and actually mine vs. how many use alts, multibox with those alts etc.

  3. A lot of botters / hackers that get perma banned in other games end up here due to “friendly” game mechanics. This is again a game design issue from the ground up. Starting from multiboxing (perma bannable almost everywhere else), to the way plexing toons works, to the “scamming and hacking because its a sandbox” arguments, all the way up to combat mechanics. So this game has an unusually high percentage of these rejects that has accumulated over the years. Its just too friendly and supportive for them.

  4. Situation gone out of hand. CCP just can’t keep up with them anymore, maybe they gave up ? They would seriously need to hire additional personnel and rework a lot of stuff from the ground up, offending a lot of the sandbox purists and cutting into their own bottom line financially if they did go after bots and hackers.

7

Binding F1+F2+F3+F4 isn’t allowed. Against the EULA. (whether you’d be caught is another matter, but it’s against the rules)

Binding ctrl+shift+alt+G, that’s fine. (counts as a single key press). So you could bind that to something in the shortcuts menu in Eve.

Tbh, APM is a lot less important in Eve. With the one second tick rate, it’s not a twitch game.

8

“Tick rate” = the server only responds to commands once per second. Add internet lag to that (typically 0.3 - 0.5 seconds) and you realize that this game is not a twitch game.

Combat in this game is about fitting your ship properly for a specific situation, and then undocking to look for that particular situation, or bringing friends to force or trick the enemy into that particular situation. It’s not a dogfighting game, it’s more a tactical (battle)ships game. Weapons range, weapons tracking, electronic jamming, that sort of thing.

9

Macros are as useful as your imagination. For example I thought about using macros to tab between accounts and press F1 during a multiboxed bombing run. That would significantly amplify my bombrun multiboxing capabilities, and that would be hard/impossible to detect. Besides, it would be a macro for managing Windows tabs rather than Eve itself. So it’s a rather grey area thing.

But I feel like CCP wouldn’t be happy with it and I wouldn’t be able to showcase it in my videos with a peace of mind. So I’m keeping things completely manual and focusing on developing my manual skills. But I’m still curious what would CCP’s response be.

10

thank you all for the replies. u’ve all helped clear everything up :slight_smile:

i dont want to break the rules of the EULA or any other written agreement, so i’ll stick to grouping my weapons and modules.

what confuses me however, is how CCP plan to catch people who dont read or ask about macros and end up using them, do they have an anti-cheat system in place to counter this?

11

They use behavior metrics. Same with bots, since macros are basically the cyborg equivalent to bots. There are certain things that humans can’t do. Like always press the exact same sequence of buttons with the exact same timing down to the millisecond. The exact details of what they observe is obviously top secret, but they’ve been clear that it’s behavior metrics rather than client side anti-cheat software. Their rule is “never trust the client” which apparently includes when the client is telling you it’s not cheating.

12

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