In-Game Events and Gatherings

This was indeed a fantastic event, kept my mind boggled how Somer keeps up with all the contracts to the winners.

I mostly just played the promo blinks, from which there have been hundreds scattered among many timezones. Thank you for all the prices and the attention put into this milestone.

Wishing good luck and health for the whole team in the new year.

Also from my side, thanks for the 500T celebration, it was a blast. Tons of fun playing Somer and even better winning. \o/

Complete and absolute bullocks.

Frag's Leader is 7 days old

Blinks Played 240
Blinks Won 34
Value of Blinks Won 47,988,000,000 ISK
Achievements Earned 31
Butans Answered 0

Has 4502 Bonks x 5 = 22,510 / 7 (days old) = 3126 per day / 24 (hours in a day) = 134 per hour for a straight 24 hrs a day 7 days a week to get this.. Yet, has only played 240 blinks. 4502 \ 240 (blinks\plays) = 18 tokens per win.. impossible


Favourite Bonks... Moros, Rorqual, 30 Day Plex.. and only 7 days old????

Absolute bullocks.

Note: and to add to it, I used 240 instead of 34 (actual wins), and its even more ridiculous.

They might only allow one of the same IP address logged on at any time. Since you're probably sharing the internet connection with your room mate that would explain it. There are ways around it where you set up proxies or VPN's. Although im not sure if this would be "cheating" in the sense that you could work togheter in order to win more, so it's on you if you want to take that further. Check with the blink-people and see how they stand on the issue.

Please get in touch with us and we'll get you fixed up.

Haha, I agree Rep, you deserve your own achivement. And I like TP's idea :P

Only the Shadow knows....

You quoted me, so I will answer.

First, it is not my staff, I am just a player. Second, I have never found the staff unwilling to provide anything but the absolute best in customer service. CCP could learn alot from them.

I think they do it this way is to prevent RMT. The rules are one player gets one blink account, no matter which 'toon they assign the blink account to or how many times the player changes it around. Once everyone understands this fact, the questions about RMT seem to stop, depending on the questioner's IQ and if they have even read the rules, of course.

I have often read other forum posts - you can search through and find them - about how they consulted CCP when setting up their rules and procedures to thwart RMT, and this may have been part of that.

If your search is not productive, you could evemail someone on their staff for a better answer. I have always found Andrev Nox to be very helpful and knowledgeable as he has been here about as long as Somer, I think. I know whenever I've done something dumb, he has done his best to unwind me from the knot I tied myself in. Beginning when I did not know that BONKS cost isk and not tokens as do MINI-BONKS, and I happily clicked away on the BONK button and noticing how pleased I was at how long the tokens were lasting and then suddenly got the message I was too poor to buy another BONK. I thought I had just learned an expensive lesson and started pulling for my few BONKS to win. I mentioned my mistake in chat was told right to get ahold of Andrev. I did not have to as he was watching the chat and had already sent me a message asking me how much ISK would I like refunded. So it turned out that I got to play more than the BONK that week.

If I've said something incorrect in this reply, there are plenty of other players who know far more about it than I do and will probably chime in. Given time, I'm sure Andrev will confrim or correct anything I've said wrong. If you do some forum research, you will see he is quite knowledgeable and a whole lot more pleasant than I would be with some of the questions he's fielded. Just don't ask him about code. That is Somer's baby all the way. I'm not so hot with it either.

I hope you enjoy playing the game, and if you don't think it is for you or don't trust the process, then don't play.

Edited in:

You mention one blink account per eve account and that is not allowed as it would give an unfair advantage in the blink games where each player gets only one chance to win. You also mentioned different characters depositing into one blink account, and that would certainly open the door to RMT laundering with an unlimited number of characters (or maybe even accounts) being allowed allowed to deposit into a single blink account. As it is now, only the active player who started the blink account can deposit to and withdraw from the blink account. And withdrawals are only allowed when a prize is won and the withdrawal can only be for the then current value of isk Blink places on that item.

Laundering RMT in blink is not possible, as Andrev has explained it so well - player A, through only one designated character is the only one who can deposit into the blink account and Player A, through only one designated chraracter is the only one who can remove isk from the blink account, only after winning a prize. Laundering money or any kind doesn't happen when a unique person walks into a closet with X amount and then the same unique person walks out of the closet later with X amount. The way isk moves now is most likely the easiest way for CCP to audit for RMT.

I know it seems like a loophole would be selling a character and the blink account follows to the buyer, but that does not happen either, prevented by some magic that happens behind a curtain out of sight of players with bad intentions who should not have access to it, and because it is impossible to read the minds of every player to determine who has bad intentions, it is just not released to anyone.

To be clear, even if one of my other characters on the same account as this, my blink playing character, were to transfer isk to the Somer site where blink account deposits are made with a note saying it should go into this character's blink account, the sum will be returned, as only this one character designated as the blink playing character can deposit into my blink account - not even a deposit made by my corporation can be deposited into the blink account. That keeps the isk that goes into and out of a blink account associated with only one character belonging to one player at a time.

Yes, it is possible for me to deposit gazillions of isk into this blink account, then transfer my blink account to another character I own, even if it is in a different account, then buy up every ticket in every blink to insure a win. redeem the prizes for isk. I would then be holding Gazillions of isk minus the cut Blink takes out of every ticket to cover their expenses. But while all that is going on, Blink would notice and because they want to stay on good terms with CCP, I suspect they would create a petition. Several hundred players would notice and that would produce a number of petitions and in the end, I would have less isk than I started with and the audit trail would be as simple to follow for CCP as if I had just just deposited the isk in a corp account and the second player withdrew it, or I made a contract selling a single trit for gazillions of isk, or just transfered the isk straight out.

People who do not understand how to hand wash a t-shirt often post how Blink is a site built for RMT laundering. It just shows how little each of those persons understand how ill gotten gains are truly laundered.

The way it is done may seem odd, but there is a reason. If I were on the staff, I would put a small explanation that would have prevented your misunderstanding.

[quote=mAkeena]. The issue I am talking about is mainly due to the fact that it’s 1 Eve Character per Blink account, and if a player wants to activate a different character on their blink account, that history is not displayed.

Rep responds: The blink history is displayed, it just shows some activity happening before the current char might have been born. We know the person who owns the blink account is the one who has been responsible for the condition of the account and anyone can ask them about it - you could have looked at the first achievement's award date "Baby's first blink" and asked the player of that blink account how it was possible and would probably have been told, "I switched the blink account to this one because I sold the other character."

In my own experience, this blink account was started a different character I own in a different account. That player is involved in many corporate and alliance activities which I don't want this character associated with. As soon as I realized Blink was not a scam and I wanted to continue my statistical experiments, I looked around and found this neglected, untrained alt whose avatar bears a good resemblance of my wife and brought her out to play. That let my other player slink back into the shadows to continue the kind of work he had been doing before I set out to expose Blink as a scam. If that original character were listed here, anyone could check the contract history of that char and have found many more members of the corp and alliance and that would have led to a new discoveries with each new name uncovered. One of my main characters is a third party representative buying and selling things between parties who want to be kept out of the transaction. This char's only use before blink was to negotiate deals and transfer ISK, but never do a contract with any other player in my main corp that is not a "civilian". Our Civilians never have a connection between our uniformerd players that can be tracked by another player. Blink showing a history of the chars associated with a blink account instead of just showing the current account held by the human who started the blink account could have adverse effects on many players.

I have not looked at your blink history or eve history, so I have no idea how long you have been at either, but this question comes up occasionally and if I were on the staff of Blink, I would want to put in a little scenario of what some might see and which pushes against intuition as this does. In fact, Blink has an award for submitting a suggestion they adopt and this may be one they would adopt. - I say got for it! But act fast as you may get beat to the punch. It won't be me, as I already have that award. Somehow, I feel certain you have not tried to join a corp that wants your full API so they can look into your char and see everything you can see. Intelligence and counter-intelligence are a huge part of this game. Having a popular player run game within a game exposing data about what characters are connected beyond the Eve controlled limits could mean large shifts and the death of Blink if not a severe wounding.

I can see a lot of reasons why this is different from employment history. I know a few characters who play Eve for one purpose, to join and undermine corps with bad CEOs. Think how fast they could move, if they could sell one character to another account they hold, getting the corp history wiped in the process but keeping the very special skill set they need.? Eve started out being all about accountablilty and created rules about keeping corp history and never being able to change a name that was sitting on a skillset someone had spent a lot of time getting just right. It wasn't until years later when they were still surprised to find themselves in business, that they began to think about how to legally transfer characters. Now you can buy a char pretty close to what you might want with a very innocent history. But that character had to play an innocent for a period of time. If every char could wipe their employment history clean in an instant, the game would be different because all those chars out there trying to build a clean history would be gone.

mAkeena continues:

Make a blink account keep history of its active characters on the account and display the contribution in winnings…. Otherwise there is no way to prove that it’s in fact not just a shill that’s been created out of thin air to influence the bonk. If you saw a person with the stats above in the OP, and they looked that off... You ask and are told the reason is because someone activated a second character, wouldn't you want to see the paper trail?

Rep responds:

The only paper trail you could really see is the birthdate of each previous player. Maybe I missed it, but what other paper trail could you see to convince you it is on the up and up? As I said before, if you don't feel confortable, don't play

mAkeena continues:

And back to the fairness thing, as a suggestion I also think the Gigablinks need to be capped… With only that many tickets, they are often bought up and farmed within 10 minutes by people who have an insane amount of cash. Not really fair for the people who may have enough to buy 1 or 2 tickets but can't check every 20 minutes for a draw, but that's just my thoughts.

Rep responds:

I cannot tell you how many times I've owned over 40 and sometimes over 50 giga tickets and lost to someone who had two tickets. Don't take the Giga personally, It is not closed unti 64 tickets are sold, one ticket will win. That winning ticket doesn't know how many other tickets it's buyer bought. If the winner bought one or 50 tickets and bought the ticket you wanted and it won, you would still lose. I'm trying to win the award for heroing the giga, so I only buy one ticket these days. Back when I was blitzing, I'd wait for about 10 minutes and then buy the rest.

See Rep, TP is right, you deserve a "wall of text" achivement