EVE Online player malaire has started topic at eveonline.com with protest against automated IGB market scanner. The topic has quickly became an active discussion between opponents and supporters of using data harvesting bots.

Everyone are welcome to join the discussion.

OP from the topic CCP allows some market bots?:

The bot I’m talking about is included e.g. in EVE Mentat.

How it works:
1) start EVE Mentat and its IGB addon
2) open the local webpage created by EVE Mentat in IGB and click single button to start the bot
3) bot goes through all the items you are trading with and exports local market orders for each item. This can take hours and thousands of clicks, but bot does all the work while you can leave the computer and come back later.
4) you can now use all the exported data in EVE Mentat to analyze it.

I’ve heard that this bot is used by other trading programs also, and I’ve seen claims that GMs have said it is allowed.

Is it really true that CCP allows some bots while disallowing others?

malaire

From myself I would add that no one player was banned for using this function in different applications.