The way chatlogs are generated should be changed to improve fairness

For those of you who are unaware, the EVE client generates chatlogs as a series of text files, representing each chat your character is a member of. For instance, there’s on for your corp, fleet, intel channel, local etc. The chat files are updated when you jump system for local, or someone writes something to a particular chat.

The reason this is relevant to the title is that there are tools freely available that can be configured to give an audible beep when the correct input is added to an in game intel channel. Typically these kinds of things are set up to give a warning when a neutral is 2-3 jumps away.

Currently, this doesn’t appear to be against the EULA, as this method doesn’t interact with the game client, it only uses data from log files stored locally. However, it is my view that this essentially automates a part of the intel process. Though a player needs to manually input information into a chat channel, the notification comes from a program, NOT a human. A person doesn’t actually need to see the information posted to the intel channel to receive the benefit of that information.

I believe this should be addressed by CCP. A good solution would be that chatlogs, gamelogs etc should be updated upon closure of the EVE client. A simple change that preserves what players have access to already, without conferring an unfair advantage to people who are able to create or use a third party tool.

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I agree.

I think the game would be fairer, more interactive and fun if it were not possible to (ab)use these logs for automated alerts, alerts that allow players to spot incoming danger even if the player isn’t even paying attention to the game at all but is elsewhere in the house within hearing distance while their ship floats in space.

The line is very thin between players who are ratting in space all day barely touching the game yet avoid any conflict because of illegal automated bots or because they use legal automated alerts to warn them when danger appears.

Third party automated alerting tools are legal, but wouldn’t the game be better if this weren’t possible?

And similarly remove the “your ship got decloaked” sound and log as well - someone multiboxing a dozen ships to cloaky camp a region is allowed but I don’t think they should have access to automatic alerts either that someone is trying to fight them. If you want to be competitive you should pay attention to the game you play in my opinion, not “watch movies while your automatic alerts tell you when to pay attention”.

I agree, remove these real-time chat logs please.