Ethical Considerations around Game Bots and Accessibility
December 14, 2019 2:21 PM   Subscribe

I'm trying to get into Eve online, because it's the kind of game I've always wanted to play, but the default game client is not great for accessibility. One approach I thought of was using bots to help even the playing field a bit, and I'd appreciate some help thinking through this ethically. Input from people familiar with the game would be appreciated.

I have a newly-created character, thanks to some very helpful community members on the Eve subreddit. I've run into some snags in the initial stages of the game, and happened to stumble across some tools which can do a lot of things by reading values in the memory of the game client.

I know that the game's creator's tend to frown on automation in general, from what i've seen, and from a certain point of view I can understand why they would. My notion was to use automation not so much to help me cheat as to enable me to get information which is otherwise very difficult to access in a reliable way.

I'd just appreciate some thoughts on whether this is a reasonable idea. At the moment I have ways to read the game text on screen, but it's very difficult to parse that into a structured format I can understand, and since its OCR anyway it has issues with tabular layouts and a general lack of context. I was hoping automation of some sort might help me bridge the gap a bit.
posted by Alensin to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (2 answers total)
 
Best answer: Almost everyone I know who plays EVE seriously uses bots in some form. The developers are very mildly against them and no developer I've ever worked with would be against using automation just to deal with accessibility issues. As long as you are actively playing, there are no ethical issues in my opinion

The only time there is an ethical issue with using bots is if you use it to gain an advantage over other players or hurt their experience. That is why the developers are against bots, if someone is using a bot to do things like mine, they can be mining while they are sleeping and gain an advantage over players who only mine while playing. Or, if everyone was always using a bot and never paying attention, then that would hurt the social experience by making the game feel lifeless.
posted by JZig at 5:03 PM on December 14, 2019 [3 favorites]


Do the thing you want to do that lets you enjoy the game you pay for.

Let them dislike bots if they want, but I figure if they really cared about what you do they’d have made this enormous, lucrative and popular product accessible to you.

Enjoy, I’m glad you found a way in!
posted by SaltySalticid at 10:47 AM on December 15, 2019


« Older How do I best support my struggling, genderfluid...   |   Saggy bottom pants Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.