EVE General Discussion

As per the subject of my recently locked thread, CCP recently gave SOMER Blink 30 Ishukone Watch Scorpions as a gift. CCP never made any announcement of this giveaway, and SOMER Blink decided to keep it a secret as well in order to ensure that these collectables could be sold on market at an inflated value.

What most people seem to misunderstand about this issue is that our grievance here predominantly lies not in the nature of the gift itself, nor in the recipient. The most significant problem with what has happened here is twofold:

First, CCP's awarding of these gifts to SOMER Blink was in complete secrecy. While this may not have been CCP's intent, they certainly never made any effort to tell anyone else that they did this. Considering the nature of the gifts involved this amounted to a substantial amount of ISK directly in the wallets of SOMER's employees.

Second, there was (and still is) no defined criteria for reward selection. CCP has stated previously that they wish to reward players and player groups for excellent community services rendered. Nobody disputes that CCP has a right to reward anyone they wish, for whatever reason. However, picking a massively profitable lottery site (yes, with some philanthropic contributions) over the vast number of other groups that have rendered significantly more popular and useful services (Chribba, EFT, EVE-kill, EVEMon/Battleclinic, etc.) suggests that the criteria used in this case was little more than "we like Blink a lot. We should give them stuff."

While this is less important than the other two points, I strongly urge CCP to look into creating items that have significant sentimental value, but not necessarily the kinds of items that can be sold on market or that would have particularly high ISK value. This may have been what CCP intended when they repurposed the SIW, but they should have carefully noted market values and realized just how much ISK they were handing Blink when they gave them the SIWs. But I'm thinking more along the lines of statues that the awardee could have placed in a certain location, much like the monument in Jita originally intended as a tribute to the winners of a riddle challenge several years ago.

Long story short: most dissenters are likely to agree that we would all prefer that any items given away have reasonable ISK value or cannot be sold for ISK, that CCP should create and publish a set of well defined criteria for such rewards, and that when CCP selects a certain group or person to receive such rewards they make an announcement detailing why this person or group deserves these rewards

I think the most important question now is who else got special issue ships and we dont know about it (yet)?

As an addendum, I'd really rather not see CCP saying things like "this group is completely trustworthy", nor should trustworthiness necessarily be a criterion for receiving rewards for community outreach and service. That goes against the spirit of the game.

Personally I would love to see community involvement in determining the rewarded sites/groups/services. Hold a voting maybe 3-4 times a year, where everybody can nominate their favorite groups/services. Those with sufficient number of nominations will then be listed, and players will be able to vote for them - much like the CSM elections. The winner (or several on the top) will then be rewarded with shinies.

This will ensure that nobody can accuse CCP of favoritism towards any specific group of players. I also believe that players will be much more willing to accept the idea if the community is involved in the selection process.

especially the one the mittani won.

didn't he have enough votes on his own, to secure like the top 3 spots?

Imagine this

a) A small group of players is given very limited assets by developers in complete secrecy when the assets are desirable, valuable and tradable
b) By recieving those assets in secret, that small group of players have sensitive market data other owners or buyers of those assets don't have and cannot possibly obtain
c) Those players are not limited in any way in the trading of those assets

I also wanted to add that in the TMC article about the email between Somer and his corp that there was mention of the recipients not wanting to be mentioned.

Well, next time, refuse the gift.

Thanks for demonstrating that you haven't actually bothered to understand anything. All you see is red.

A thread with more than one thousand posts, four days fighting.
Thread locked, not one word from CCP.
All right, i've done all what i could. Now i unsub.

This, though i must admit the Kourmonen medal of which I am overtly proud of would of been a lot nicer if it was accompanied by a Ardishapur Armageddon worth multiple billions.