EVE General Discussion

Basically this.

You can see in games past where the same person as bought all the slots.

Clearly a dirty ISK loss, but a clean prize gain.

If blink is a scam, then this new chimera sitting on my hanger is a lie....but I'm looking right at it so it must be legit.


For once the Cake is not a lie.


I've won some nice ships off blink. Including a Chimera today for only 760 mill. :)

Its even worse than normal gambling, isk isn't real. So easy to fritter away billions.

I sent ISK. I had some "fun". I have a few more ships in my hangar now thanks to Somer.

Probably better ways to spend ISK, but I didn't find it to be a scam.

That bit is just some good ole fashioned tinfoil :p

The char in question is indeed younger than their Blink account. We only allow one Blink account per human being. When someone sells a character, or just wants to change which character they use to Blink on, we transfer their old Blink account over to their new character. No tinfoil needed :)

In answer to the OP - The person who made that blog sent us a mail a month or so ago. He asked us to send him 49B isk in order for him to post something happy in his bio. He said if he didn't get the money, he'd make a page to try and cause problems for us.

If we wanted to give away 49B - we'd just have lots of promos. If we wanted to give away 250B - we'd have a party: like the current one :p Last I checked, his "fee" to take down the site was around 100b. So we've still got a few more celebrations to go before his opinion costs more than we already give away :)

He did, however, mention in his mail "I will reimburse those players the amount they have lost, from the additional ISK collected." - so if you do wind up on the wrong side of luck, couldn't hurt to shoot him a mail to get it back :)

Edit to add: I'd also recommend asking people you already know, rather than anonymous strangers on the forums. Maybe start with some of these guys from the BPO investment corp you used to be part of - some of their members might be Blinkers :) Their blog was hosted on the same site in a similar style, so they're probably familiar with the author of the blog you're linking, too :)

I think it is useful to think of blink not so much as a lottery than as a slot machine (as its real-time playing style feels much more like playing a slot machine)

I think what spawns these suspicions is that many people intuitively understand that "true" randomness with a constant price/(probability of winning) is a bad way to keep players hooked.

If the player depletes his bankroll due to a losing streak after the first few games he will be dissatisfied and unhappy - remember that at the end of the day he pays for entertainment and that entertainment has to be provided to him.

In real-life regulations force slot machine designers to keep each roll independent from the previous ones (unless it is explicitly stated by the game otherwise) and they try to make up for this by giving some mid-sized pay-outs a relatively high probability (some excitement to keep the player interested but not enough to make him take his winnings and go home) and by allowing the player only to bet a small part of his bankroll on each roll (so he won't deplete it too fast).

In EVE no such regulations exist and it would be possible to design a system where wins approach a uniform distribution (for each number) over a long time but the randomness gets "massaged" a little in the short-term.
Why not give a new player a hidden bonus so he gets a favorable first impression of the site?
Is it really a great idea to allow unlimited losing streaks to any player?
How can I prevent the player from quitting early (due to losing streaks or wins)?

Blink faces two serious problems compared to RL slot machines (due to its lottery-style format):
- it allows players to lose a lot of money in a really short time (which is not fun).
- there is no way to keep the player happy with some small payouts, he either wins or loses each blink without any middle ground and the size of win/loss is chosen by himself (achievements try to make up for this a little)

Blink has one massive advantage over conventional slot machines:
- there is no way for the house to go into the red even temporarily (the only possibly loss is due to opportunity cost when market prices change)
- players don't occupy one of a limited number of seats, keeping them around playing is cheap.

The first advantage makes playing with the probabilities riskless for the lottery provider.

I don't know what Somer Blink is doing - I only use them occasionally to cash out the 100m credit I get from buying a GTC through their site.

But if I were to design a gambling site like Blink I would try to massage probabilities to take some control over the pacing of each player's play session to "optimize" his entertainment while still approaching the expected distributions over the long-term.

Blink is 100% legit.

Only word of warning I may offer is make sure to read the details on the website clearly, and make sure you youtrself dont make an error. Im specificaly refering to the deposit of ISK, alot of scammers have setup corps with names almost identical to the official sommer blink corp, so just doublecheck any deposits :)



blink blink... blink blink

It's a scam. It's possible to predict the winning number (80+% chance). The majority of wins are to 'normal' players to keep the ruse up, but a substantial percentage are to players 'in the know' and authorised by Somer Blink.

So basically, yes you can win but the odds are stacked against you.

It's even better - just get control of random.org and you can predict 100% of winning tickets.

I've played a bit there and so far my odds are near what they should be (13.33% currently, I allways take just one ticket and mostly in 8 ticket games.)

Only the creators really know i guess. Sure you win here and there but who is to say the winning ticket selection it truly random...