EVE General Discussion

The ONLY appropriate way for CCP to handle this situation going forward is to take all of the prizes back away from Somer.

In fact, **** Somer, I'm not even going to play promos anymore even though I have thousands of promo tickets left.

And what about the people who have been banned by SOMER from their third party site? Particularly for offenses such as using auto refresh in an out of game browser on their third party site to catch promos. Something that is not even listed as illegal in the rules on the site. Or for using alt accounts to abuse the achievement system.

Relevant quote:


Yet it's ok to lock out players from distributions like this based on "player grudges" that don't even take place within New Eden, but on a third party site?

I also hate to be 'one of those people'. But if this event goes to fruition with a non-CCP entity holding and distributing prizes then you can kiss all of my accounts goodbye.

The only embarrassing part I feel that I have in this is sticking around after t20. Its like getting cheated on twice knowing full well that the first time the apology didn't 'seem' sincere.

gg ccp.

Lets gamble if these voiced concerns, about open favoritism, will be actually answered by CCP.

I bet 100mil it will be ignored in a manner of: "lets pretend its not there, and we did nothing wrong and hopefully it will go away".

Their operation isn't really trackable though, becaquse there's no way to track the relationship between characters.

I'm generally willing to give CCP the benefit of the doubt over most issues, and even here, I don't believe there's any deliberate attempt at favouritism. Having said that, I don't think the current giveaway project has been fully thought through.

As I see it, the big issue here is that an event like that not only has to be fair, but has to be seen to be fair because of past history like the T20 episode. Even if the whole event could be monitored by CCP, accounting for every ISK, it wouldn't be enough because, unless the records were made public, doubt would still exist.

I think it's great that CCP are trying to promote and encourage community projects, but I think they have to ensure that any promotion, particularly when involving in-game items or ISK, is run in a completely transparent way. I believe that this event is being run in good faith, but I can understand why other people may need a little more evidence.

It may be a good thing if CCP and the CSM can manage to put in place some kind of framework for ensuring transparency (perhaps along the lines of an extremely simplified version of the ISO9000 standards). An organization would need to comply with these standards/rules Or maybe that's going too far, I dunno :)

What about giving the players the means to produce their own limited edition ships? This could be as simple as a corporate colour scheme and logo which remains attached to assembled ships regardless of current owner, or as complex as allowing a PLEX-paid lottery-selected facility to have player designed ships incorporated into the game (in a similar vein to the Deviant Art project which lead to the Tornado and Oracle).

There is also the option of a Gold Magnate tribute, the Golden Magnate. This could use the same model as the Gold Magnate with a different skin (a slightly shinier/duller/yellower/redder gold, for example), and the description text could include something along the lines of, "created as a tribute to the original hand-crafted Gold Magnate, the Ardishapur Family Golden Magnate celebrates the pinnacle of Amarr starship crafting. With detail such as the filigree and polishing technique of the Gold Magnate maintained, while the remaining hull is mass produced using contemporary manufacturing techniques, the Golden Magnate is a fusion of the micron-level accuracy of automated fabrication and the ornamental beauty of Amarr gold smithing."

You know, plenty of purple prose to allow collectors and hoarders a little recognition, without devaluing the other unique ships based on the same model.

Then CCP could announce unique ship giveaways for fan sites based on criteria such as "greatest effort in ISK removal" or individuals for "greatest number of Buddy invites converted to six month active subscribers."

This thread has ballooned quickly since it's start and rightly so.

The original, flawed decision of CCP has not been corrected by the current about turn and the impression of impropriety remains.

Scamming in game is no problem, it's part of what makes Eve so great. But for CCP to explicitly help someone scam outside the game, to promote gambling, to exclude some legitimate subscribers to Eve because they can't use Blink, etc., etc. etc, all the things mentioned in this thread - that directly raises questions about the integrity of CCP as a company.

For example, lets use "I quit EVE, send me your ISK and I will return it with a double amount" scheme.

A blue CCP dev decides to log into Jita and posts a local notice " Hello citizens of EVE, this uncreative scammer #1 is a trusted character because I say so even though I have no way to check his previous transactions and only base this on hearsay. Trust me and good day".

Uncreative scammer # n+1 response " WTF".

That will breed mistrust and undermine CCP position as a neutral party in a player driven world known as EVE.

If CCP wants to compensate somer blink for helping promote eve vegas how is that anybody's business? Would it be ok if it were done with RL money? What if that were then converted to plex and then isk?

If the rest of you ***** had an organization that ccp thought could help promote their game you might get the same deal. But you're all just a bunch of hysterical nerds ... so no dice.

Not to say that I support Somber, but I want to play the Devils Advocate for a moment since a majority of the post about this scandal are fairly one sided against CCP actions in all this. Somber Blink funded the New Eden Open, gave 10 billion isk to all the teams, funded the whole thing I think, right? It was during that time, if memory serves me correctly that CCP gave a statement about supporting more of these player driven events. I understand the anger that many of you are expressing. I'm with you on that, but at the end of the day it is their intellectual property. I would imagine that, let's say a scam were to happen and it be nothing short of the Italian Job, that whatever ships that were "won" would vanish from hangers, isk would appear from thin air, refunded in the wallets of the participants. Somber Blink is rich my brothers and sisters of New Eden. These ships are the rarest of the rare..... but they got 10 times that in the business they conduct and it would be baffling to think they would risk the payout and publicity they are getting to do anything too shady... but I also could be dead wrong.

Not to speak for CCP, but I think their thought process on it was that Somber had a lot of praise in past events from the community and they did not think it would not get the backlash it did, because letting a billionaire hold on to your credit card when you have fraud protection on it really doesn't seem like a big deal until you hear how the guy made his billions. Anyway, it is just a game, with internet spaceships, lottos, bots, trolls, elitist, pubbies, and last but not least evil Goons that deserve trillions of isk because, they have done a lot to keep this game interesting at any rate.