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Somer Blink: Legit or Scam?
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Pahah Pahineh
Universal Ally
#81 - 2012-07-04 14:05:33 UTC
All, and by all I mean every single gambling entity is designed at it's root to be a scam.
The point of all gambling is that, whatever happens, the house cannot lose. In that way all gambling is a scam.

Gambling establishment exists purely to unbalance distributed wealth into cumulated pools that are chosen by external influence, taking a cut of all the wealth as it passes through the establishment (house).

Like any self respecting establishment they keep their internal affairs secret, not transparent and you will have no means of determining if their scam is being run either more or less scamfully than the perceived level of scamness they are hoping you enjoy.

So it's up to. You're already of a mind to gamble on random chance, why not go that one step further and gamble on whether or not the scamsters are scamming more or less than you think they are. It's just gambling, so if you don't trust the house the gambling addict is getting twice the high for his money.

In the industry we refer to ourselves as "Tax on Stupidity" we have to label our products with the precise level of scam we're applying and we have to give warnings that we're about to scam your money right out of your pocket.

But they still queue to let us. Money -> Old rope. Old rope -> money.

Shut up and give me your money.
Gul'gotha Derv'ash
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#82 - 2012-07-04 16:28:25 UTC  |  Edited by: Gul'gotha Derv'ash
I will say there are some rather suspicious toons winning everything in sight.

The person who won the 250b in the last super event was someone I had never seen blink, ever, and I was blinking a lot during the few months going into the 200T event. Does make you take a double look and wonder if there are some shenanigans going on, especially since it is ungoverned by anyone other than Somer herself.

That being said I have either broken even, or made isk when playing. Also have won close to 3b from Promo blinks alone. There sadly are strings of playing where I can lose every single blink though. Latest was 325m with 0 wins on low priced blinks ranging from 2.5-35m.
Medarr
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#83 - 2012-07-04 16:32:01 UTC
Chribba wrote:
If it turns out to be a scam I demand a nice "thanks for all the fish" post by Somer lol


Don't forget Thanks for all the tears yo!
Mr Epeen
It's All About Me
#84 - 2012-07-04 16:36:32 UTC
Skimming through this thread, it seems like everyone wins and no one loses.

So either none of the people losing their shirts are posting or a lot of people are lying.

That, in itself, is fishy enough for me to not sign up.

Mr Epeen Cool
Soundwave Plays Diablo
Doomheim
#85 - 2012-07-04 16:37:05 UTC
FloppieTheBanjoClown wrote:
The longer you play, the more likely you are to lose money. That's the nature of any casino game or lottery. They don't need to scam anyone, the profit model is easily apparent: add up the values of the blinks for an item and it's higher than the market value of that item.

As for them using shills: It's entirely possible that they do, but that doesn't hurt the odds of any given individual winning. In fact on those lotteries where they use shills and real players win, they'd be cutting into their own profit margin.

The bit with the too-young character...do you really think guys that put in this much effort would make such a careless mistake? Probably someone biomassed and recycled the name, or someone else picked it up later.


Absolutely incorrect. You are equally as likely to lose money on your first 'game' as you are on any other.
Petrus Blackshell
Rifterlings
#86 - 2012-07-04 16:43:35 UTC
Mr Epeen wrote:
Skimming through this thread, it seems like everyone wins and no one loses.

So either none of the people losing their shirts are posting or a lot of people are lying.

That, in itself, is fishy enough for me to not sign up.

Mr Epeen Cool

It's psychological. The people who win a lottery are going to be much louder than the people who lost, particularly because the lost amount of money is small (since there are so many losers) and the won amount of money is relatively huge.

I haven't played it myself, but I know more than a handful of people who have lost significant amounts of money who just shrugged, said "meh, luck", and moved on. You won't find them posting here about Somer Blink being a scam.

Anyway, not signing up is the right thing to do, unless you're feeling spectacularly lucky. Rule #1 of gambling is the house always wins.

Accidentally The Whole Frigate - For-newbies blog (currently on pause)
Kunming
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#87 - 2012-07-04 18:32:00 UTC
Akirei Scytale wrote:
Vera Algaert wrote:

in blackjack you can count cards, so what was your point again?


I challenge you to attempt that at any modern casino. That technique is long dead.


Get a friend and play an 'open' hand of blackjack, evaluate the choices and you will see even if u knew whats next the best most of the time you lose by default.. it is a very interesting game, I think someone invented it to play magic card tricks on ppl. There is a pattern and it makes the house win almost always, so even if u count the cards until you get to a round in which you would win the casino would already be aware of you and take measures.



As for Somer Blink, common sense says stay away from lottery and payout sorta things, if u really wanna gamble there is always things like EOH...
Flirty Girl
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#88 - 2012-07-04 19:41:37 UTC
My story:

It is a scam. Bar none. Somer looks to fleece the big blinkers and not the little ones. Its the guys blinking the Dreads and Rorqs that are making Somer isk.

Every time I would be up and have isk in my bank, someone would show up and just clean me out. If I bought all but one ticket, the one ticket I didn't buy would win. Every time. And I am not the only one. Sometimes it would just be three people playing Ultra blinks, I would be on a convo with the other party, and no matter what we did or how we did it, the unknown 3rd party would win it. And not lose a blink they played. No one has luck that good. My losses would be streaks of over 15 losses, then I might win one. Then streaks of 15 losses again. Over and over. After awhile watching the losses mounting and it never once turning around, I walked away. About 60 billion isk lighter.

If I flip a coin, odds are 50/50. If I flip 5,000 coins or just one coin 5,000 times, the odds of winning will still be 50/50. And I should have won and lost close to 50% of the time. But that never happened. My wins amounted to roughly 25% on exclusively betting on half the tickets.

Yes, this is an alt.
Replacement 234
Tremor Recorded
#89 - 2012-07-05 01:49:54 UTC
The executive summary for this post is:

1) Blink is not a scam.

2) Blink is gambling operated from a webserver owned/rented by them and operates without a downtime.

3) Blink has safeguards against RMT laundering. Many are blatantly obvious, and undoubtedly there are others which would be counter-productive to be fully revealed. Blink uses Eve API but I am unaware of the extent.

4) Blink makes a profit from each ticket purchased. No matter which player wins, they have profitted nicely, and the more blinks which happen, the more blink profits.

5) Blink does not hold a stake in each of the millions of Blinks it has run other than the amount deducted from each ticket purchased, therefore Blink has no hand in the game, such as BlackJack and many other casino games.

6) Blink's withholding part of the ticket's price is no more of a scam than when one "drags" the pot at a neighborhood poker game to pay for beer and pizza. But with Blink, the hors d'oeuvres are excessive and quite delectable.

7) Anything can be addictive, including the washing of one's hands - all addiction requires is for the person to lose control over when and how much to indulge in the behavior. Behaviors that are rewarded tend to be repeated.

8) Of the four reward schedules, The Variable-Reward Schedule used in every casino game is the most addictive. Any surprise there? (http://psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/a/schedules.htm)

9) To pull off an alt scheme for enhancing the profit of Blink would require thousands of alt 'toons and most Blink players are not new to the game: buying those older characters would be prohibitively expensive: would require a vast army of tight lipped players to buy the older alts: or would be quite obvious for so many characters to be purchased by so few players.

10) "Win-Ratio" is a metric of how many tickets are purchased for each blink and has nothing to do with player profit. A player could have a 100% win-ratio by purchasing every ticket to every blink played and win themself broke quite fast.

11) Somer would have to be one of the most stupid people in the world to shoot the golden goose by doing anything which could have implications beyond tinfoil belief systems. Yet, people want us to believe someone that stupid to be capable of pulling off one of, if not the most difficult or complicated or duplicitous or deceitful scams in online gaming history.

12) As far as I can tell, any real world money blink develops is from their click throughs to Shattered Crystal (Blink offers a generous blink credit bonus to the clicker) or perhaps from Eve for click throughs for accounts. They have no advertising other than the single icon for Shattered Crystal on one page.

Read on if you like or you can just say,"Wall of Words" if you believe it will take you hours to read and days for your friends to explain it to you:

A little about me might put some things in perspective. I am a Retired Senior US Army Officer with over 30 years of service. I have never bought a lottery ticket in RL and have never gambled in a RL casino - Never dropped a quarter in a single slot machine. I played cards for money when I was a young soldier and my winnings could never begin to replace the damaged friendships, so I found other activities where friendships with my fellow soldiers could be nurtured rather than ruined. (and if you choose to only quote that last line, I have a pretty good idea what you would write and if it involves sex, or any kind of crime, you would be quite wrong) Door prizes have been the extent of my gambling for over 40 years. During my service (Retired in 1997) The Army liked to conduct business meetings in Casinos because of the reduced cost of large lodging bookings, greater access and lower airfares, and other other lower costs subsidized by the losing public. Among many of my interests and professional training, I am a "stats man" with a particular interest in probability theory, though my professional use of statistics was to assess the enemy's probability to do this or to do that. Like Andrev, I am not a "code man". I think I can still do a multiple linear regression with paper, stubby pencil and slide rule, but I can do it faster with a computer program where all I have to is enter the data and other necessary items where indicated and then make the correct selections to produce a speedy output.

If you want to know about my Blink career you can go there and find me on the Stats page where some information about my Blink career is available - to find the rest, just click on my avatar's face and it will take you a large page with nothing on it but info about me in Blink. I am particularly proud of an accomplishment I completed yesterday (July 4 in Eve time) which sealed a bet. The bet was about moving my Value of Blinks Won a certain amount in a certain period which will end (July 7 Eve Time). The CEO of the corp the other bettor and I are in has already delivered theimpounded proceeds of the bet to me and knows that it will blow my cover in that corp - so unfortunately, that 'toon will go to the Bio-mass. I don't agree with people buying the abilities garnered by another person who was also gaining Eve experience, so I do not sell characters. The posting of this will likely lead to a large surprise for the other bettor and I hope he learns from this experience, but I envision him holding his breath till his MuM buys him another MOM. I am hoping she will send him back to wow where he came from a few months ago. Now you know more about why I don't like people buying more ability than they know how to use.
Replacement 234
Tremor Recorded
#90 - 2012-07-05 01:50:42 UTC
I have been accused of being a Somer Alt many times, but all I have to offer is my word, which was my bond while I was an active duty officer. What else can one offer other than a peronal tour of my computers, which I think my family, friends and my CPA would all advise against. I have never compared this avatar's birthdate to any of Blink's pertinent points along the linear line of history, so I have no defense to offer there as I have no idea if one is needed.

Being a player of many avatars beginning with some other retired friends in 2004, before there was a facebook, we used Eve as a social media where we could chat, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, even Skype when one of the guys discovered it, or any combination of the above to keep up with each other. We started out in null, when you could travel through 40 systems and never see anyone else in local. Many was the time when we would start out to mine and end up never turning on a miner2, but just snipe what rats we could in our cruisers and move to another belt, or just sit floating at a "safe spot" chatting. When we wanted excitement it was Rogue Spear or Ghost Recon, then the Battlefield Series. Eve was just like fishing in a mud puddle for us with the chat being the feature and moving the fishing pole the excuse for being there together.

I've played just about every facet of Eve which drew my interest over the years. My original group grew and we went in many directions, yet we still keep in touch and we all have one of many mains in one corporation which is not revealed to any other corporation to which any of us belong. I have a few "mains" in few corps and none of the corps know of the others. Look at the guy next you, it might be me. I have even been at war with myself before. The particular part of the Army we all worked in was unconventional and none of us have ever gotten that out of our systems. This character is my "uptown 'toon", my eve counterpoint to my civilian self in a one person corp where I can be who I really am in real life. The others are all undercover parts I'm playing in the ongoing novel of Eve. Besides, this avatar looks amazingly like one of the pictures of my wife taken at our wedding so this one is never going to the auction block or the biomass.

I saw lotteries come and go over the years and looked upon them all as scams as one after the other was revealed. Incursions were fun and I really enjoyed many of the people in chat but some of my physical imperfections began to limit my success there and I started looking around. I noticed Blink had been around much longer than other lotteries, so I set out to bring my stats skills out of retirement and find their scam.

I first set out to be a regular player, but had difficulty being a regular anything, so I set my sight on obtaining awards or achievements, the terms are used interchangeably. Besides, being an old retired Army fart, I needed some new awards.... Nothing ever caught my heightened sense of smell for scams there, but I learned that by being very careful and buying 12 of 16 tickets, giving me a 75% chance of winning, I could drag the metric "value of Blinks won" forward playing for hours and not changing my total of blink credits very much in either direction. With 10 to 15 billion blink credits, I could move my value of blinks won forward virtually any amount with time devoted to playing being more important than available blink credit. Whenever I fell a little low, and for me that was 10 billion in blink credit, I would either switch to an incredibly conservative strategy using a constantly manually updated stat of each number to get some distantly vague, highly unreliable, idea of it's probabality or I would simply quit. To gather more information about where the scam might be hidden, I'd switch to chat where I found a wonderful core of vibrant people who were as ready to congratulate a recent win as they were to gank you at the next gate, then buy you a replacement ship with fittings. None of the Muppets are there and there is also no one from the world of TV wrestling seekiing a microphone into which he or she could spew self praise at high decibels with lots of expectorant.

The "win-ratio" depends entirely on how many tickets you buy for each blink. A player who buys every ticket for every blink they play will have a win-ratio of 100% and will win themselves broke in short order. I currently have a win-ratio of around 33 to 34 because of the strategy I have used to reach my goals.

Laundering RMT money: You cannot withdraw isk you have deposited from your account. You can only get ISK by converting a prize you have won to ISK. Yes, you could launder ISK by buying all the tickets to each blink and write off the cost that blink receives for operating each blink. Doing that would draw a trememdous amount of attention from other players and many petitions to CCP. If one decided launder RMT ISK by just playing blink as others do. It would take a tremendous amount of time, skill and luck - plus the cost of doing that would be horrendous. Remember, the longer you play, the more you are likely to lose. That is called regression toward the mean.

Like any casino, blink advertises how much people have won and not how much it cost them to win it. Anyone who has stood around in a RL casino and observed people gambling as I have done at so many conferences can see the Casino filling the ATMs quite regularly as the slot machines are being emptied regularly - but no one can use the timing of such as a metric to determine any thing meaningful. However, if you watch a single player and talk to that single player about "How's it going?" they will never mention their many trips to the ATM while they talk of hitting a "$600 Grand Slam" on a "hot" slot machine.
Replacement 234
Tremor Recorded
#91 - 2012-07-05 01:51:22 UTC
Well, I have progressed through every phase of play in Blink and have never found an inkling of a scam. Winnings are quickly posted, prizes you want to keep and I've kept and given away an untold amount are immediately available in Jita for the hisec items and the low sec items you choose to keep are made available in systems which are one jump from hi sec. If I chose to have the prize converted to Isk, it was deposited in my avatar's personal wallet with no delay. If one chooses to convert their prize to Blink credit, a 5% bonus is added to the already above market value of the prize. By rotating my blink credit to isk and then depositing the Isk, I won all the achievements and the billions of ISK that went along with them for depositing isk. There were times when I gave luck and probablilty a couple of chances to win a prize I needed to win a 500 million or one billion achievement and then cut my losses and bought all the tickets to overcome my bad luck with the surety of not having any competition.

Everybody can have opinions and beliefs, but nobody can have their own facts, If anyone can find any credible evidence of a scam - not just some loophole the Blink people have not yet found and plugged, but a scam that is actually happening and can prove it with incontrovertible facts, I will join your team and work to have CCP ban Blink. In fact, if you find a bug in their system, they have an award with a blink credit to your account for reporting it.

The truth is all I have ever respected, though I have often used subterfuge in my profession and I use out right deceit in this internet space ship game, I could not support any scam and especially one at such a high level of activity. My professional subterfuge was never for personal gain and was only for the furtherance of my country's foreign policies created by the elected officials of my country. I did not make them up or decide them and would have faced whatever awaited me for disobeying to do anything I had been ordered to do which I determined to be morally wrong. My outright deceit in an internet spaceship game began when I was invited to make up a name and choose a fictitous religion, college, even a gender choice, however I have never used what are known as scams in the game. Oh yeah, my other mains have killboard entries, but I only shoot at evenly matched targets or those more powerful. I could take no pride in defeating a much weaker target than a professional boxer could be called a champion by beating up drunks in an alley.

Now, have at it and parse my words out of context to suit your own arguments, or if you have no strenght in a point to debate, call me names. But never forget - bring me incontrovertible proof instead of bluster, hyperbole, mythical metaphors or channeled information from a past life.

I have not consulted with any Blink employees or other players about this post and they won't know it has even been considered until they read it. I am not an alt.
Nonnosa
420 Enterprises.
#92 - 2012-07-05 02:07:00 UTC
I don't think Somer is a scam, just a very good business model. They shouldn't need to scam, 8 tickets costing 1/6 of the price of the ship, a 33% profit on every lottery. (I assume the odds on the bigger lotterys are the same). Like all gambming in the long wrong you will end up loosing. All the stories from the winners, blink giveaways, promos and achievements have one thing in common: they were paid for by loosers.

My alts record is at the wrong end of the bell curve with 1 win from 30 blinks played making me the proud owner of a 120 million isk Navy Slicer. Straight I'm considering if to walk away or buy in more exspensive blinks to try break even as my turn to win should be coming up. P
Orzo Torasson
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#93 - 2012-07-05 02:30:35 UTC
Mr Epeen wrote:
Skimming through this thread, it seems like everyone wins and no one loses.

So either none of the people losing their shirts are posting or a lot of people are lying.

That, in itself, is fishy enough for me to not sign up.

Mr Epeen Cool



Just for reference, I love playing blink and I think it's very exciting, but I lose way more than I win. Last month alone I lost 1 billion (which admittedly, I won up to 3 billion before losing the lot because I got greedy. But c'est la vie, non?)
Takumi Ayaka
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#94 - 2012-07-05 04:53:07 UTC
Quite easy to determine if this is a scam or not by letting said player "Replacement 234" post his API key and check his Assets to see if he is receiving all those Ships or not.


The Site owner surely wouldnt made all the effort in transferring all the Ships to "Replacement 234" Hangar.




/Thread
Abditus Cularius
Clancularius Industries
#95 - 2012-07-05 04:58:30 UTC
That wouldn't prove anything either, as they could be transferred before posting the API. Plus, even if it were legit, there's no way of knowing if he kept the stuff, or just always cycled it for blink credit.

It's a trust issue. The question being - do you think they'd risk something making them probably trillions to make a percentage more?

If the answer is yes, don't play.
If the answer is no and you want to play, play.

The blog link just looks like butthurt gambler regret to me, and the logic on it is flawed in the extreme.

Do I blink? Nope. Not a gambler.
Do I think they're legit? Probably. They'd have to be the stupidest people ever to not be, and nothing they've done looked stupid from my viewpoint.
Croniac
Thunder Chickens
#96 - 2012-07-05 04:59:59 UTC
Ariel Armani wrote:
Hello,

I heard about this 250 celebration or whatever that Somer Blink is having, so I was interested. I have some extra ISK for "fun".

Anyway, I was asking around, and somebody sent me this link -

http://blinkexposed.blogspot.com/

That got me worried, so I asked about it in the Blink thread. Some dude Andrew Nox (with Blink I guess) told me to just "ask other Blink players about their experiences".

So that's what I am doing. Anybody want to share their experiences, good or bad?

Thanks! Smile


Ever drive up to the Mirage Hotel in Vegas and think, wow, a really rich person must own this?

Did it ever occur to you that the money that built it came from the slot machines inside?

SomerBlink is the same exact thing - Only a complete drooling idiot would think that they aren't turning a tidy profit. Why else would they do it?

But, its not a scam - every time I've ever won something on there it has been in my hanger in Jita in less than 20 minutes, exactly as promised.
Takumi Ayaka
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#97 - 2012-07-05 05:24:09 UTC  |  Edited by: Takumi Ayaka
Point is that Eve /= Real World



Casino's in the Real World are regulated by Gaming Commisions, and as someone stated out earlier, without the regulation there can be done anything to the potential Customer.


Quote:
It's a trust issue. The question being - do you think they'd risk something making them probably trillions to make a percentage more?


As the Site does not give out any Statistics, you have no Idea how many money the owner is doing at the end, since you do not see how many people transfer isk in the System, and it can very well be that its well under the number that the Owner is showing on top of his Page, as part of the deceipting nature of the suspect




Quote:
That wouldn't prove anything either, as they could be transferred before posting the API. Plus, even if it were legit, there's no way of knowing if he kept the stuff, or just always cycled it for blink credit.


I'm almost 100% sure that the API key wether id be new or old will show all Transactions from the Assets with a date and volume.

I hold my Statement i gave above, a simple API Check will clear this issue
Soundwave Plays Diablo
Doomheim
#98 - 2012-07-05 05:43:09 UTC
That 3 parter was more obscene than any midget porn I have ever accidentally clicked on.
Jonuts
The Arrow Project
#99 - 2012-07-05 07:38:39 UTC
Ariel Armani wrote:
Hello,

I heard about this 250 celebration or whatever that Somer Blink is having, so I was interested. I have some extra ISK for "fun".

Anyway, I was asking around, and somebody sent me this link -

http://blinkexposed.blogspot.com/

That got me worried, so I asked about it in the Blink thread. Some dude Andrew Nox (with Blink I guess) told me to just "ask other Blink players about their experiences".

So that's what I am doing. Anybody want to share their experiences, good or bad?

Thanks! Smile


Blink is legit. Enough of my corpmates are addicted that if it wasn't legit, I'd damn well have heard by now. It IS gambling, and it IS for profit. Over time, you're going to be a loser if you play, but at the same time, you can turn 5 million isk into 5 billion isk if you get REALLY lucky. The rules they follow are laid out, and I've not even heard of someone getting scammed by them. Selling their ship to get a quick blink fix? Yea. Getting scammed? Nope.

Hell, you can run the math yourself looking at the lotteries and see the huge profits they're making on each blink. They ARE raking in profit, no doubt. That's why they do it.
Cpt Roghie
Chemical Invasion Co.
#100 - 2012-07-05 08:00:20 UTC
As most sane people here say, Yes it's legit (i've actually profitted on it) and it's addicting.

This could be fun.