EVE General Discussion

The two aspects of this that bug me are:
- It was not announced at the time. This makes it seem sketchy, especially since the value of the IWS in player eyes is based on how many there are.
- It was given to a for-profit enterprise. SB is a for-profit website. They make plenty of ISK doing their normal operations.

When I kill sleepers and sell their delicious gooey insides, that's my "normal operations" and I make plenty of ISK doing it.

So why exactly are they getting rewarded any more than me? It's not like they're providing a community service for free the way E-UNI or Chribba or any number of other people are.

I would be totally okay with stuff, even in-game stuff, being given to people who donate their time for the benefit of the whole community, as long as it's given out in the open.

But giving stuff to people who have as their primary goal making money off the stupidity of other EVE players? Yeah, no. That's basically saying, "Here. You're so awesome at making money that we're going to give you EVEN MORE money."

Almost equivalent to the United States Government rewarding Wal-Mart with some of the worlds rarest diamonds because they "helped" the economy out. I can see why CCP wants to reward people that take ISK out of the game but damn.... Shouldn't goonswarm be rewarded because they keep so many people interested? Or TEST because they are great at destroying a ships supply when they go out on a roam.


CCP should take a histroy lesson from every country on earth. People that help the economy do not get RARE goods for free, they get benefits that help them continue their business model. Prime examples are tax breaks and special zoning.

You don't help someone out but GIVING them something for FREE. You make their job easier to make a profit so they can in return help you! Allow these third parties freedom when it comes to coding so the processes can become more automatic or a special delivery service that spawns the ship in their hangar instead of jita. This gives businesses in eve something to strive for.

As we speak SOMER could keep all of the ships to himself and set the code to make sure nobody wins. When you let someone in your back pocket CCP they will take every dollar you have. Don't give too much......

SomerBlink provides additional revenue for CCP, that's about it (Besides donating a few in game items to certain events).

What positive impact has SomerBlink had on the Eve community that they would be deserving of rewards? Do they create game content? Do they run useful websites (Evefiles, Dotlan, blogs)?

Anything SomerBlink does is a direct result of the players that use their ISK to play SomerBlink. Giving in game items back to the community is not, in my opinion of any net benefit to the Eve Community.

Instead of rewarding someone for creating a website that takes something from players, CCP should reward those who aren't asking for ISK, but provide useful, thoughtful additions to the game.

For starters, you can't undock in a piece of Steve.*

*possibly something I would like to see in the next expansion

The Vegas thing makes sense (though I think it was still a poor decision to reward a for-profit site and that shouldn't be repeated - sponsorships don't really change that because they're advertisements for SOMER). I think the immense value of the prizes - and that you could only get a reasonable shot at them by giving SOMER gigantic piles of money - was really poorly thought out. It'd have been one thing to let SOMER sponsor and host it or something, but tying the tickets themselves to giving SOMER money was...not good.

A few questions, if you will:



To be clear first of all, what are SOMER's "contributions to Eve", exactly? They run a successful and profitable in-game business and they invest some of their profits into sponsorship of other in-game events. In that respect, they seem little different from a Jita alt playing the 0.01 ISK game to fund a lowsec PvPer's main, or Goonswarm's OTEC profits being used to bankroll Burn Jita.

Essentially what I'm asking here is: How is CCP defining and quantifying a specific organisation as making "contributions"?



In a way, something like the Ishukone Scorpion is pretty much the worst item you could use for this purpose. As a ship to undock and fly around in, it's A Bit Rubbish (having the pre-buff Scorpion statline) and Scorpions aren't exactly elitist prestige items to begin with (though they can be useful support ships in a large fleet fight), its a bulky item which is hard to move around, and it is unobtainable through conventional means. Essentially, they'll never be undocked and the only value they have as a gift is the fact you can sell it to collectors in exchange for a massive pile of ISK (in a perverse way, it would actually have been better if you'd handed out something like a bunch of Alliance Tourney prize frigates, since at least they might have been used to create some content in the form of hilarious lossmails).


Have Internal Affairs and/or the CSM been at all involved in the decision making process for these giveaways previously? I find it hard to comprehend the idea that CCP spawns in-game valuables for a selected group of players and nobody stops to consider the historical baggage associated with such an action.

The problem there is that whilst a limited ship is quite a cool thing to have, its arguably less cool a thing to have than the 15 billion ISK or so they were selling for. They're not very 'show-off-able', even if the character in question can fly a Caldari Battleship there's no reason to ever undock in one so it seems inevitable the end result of them being handed out to a select group is that they'll largely end up being sold to collectors to gather dust in a hangar.


You have barely touched here on the items given to SOMER as lottery prizes, which in my mind at least is the larger problem in this whole incident. Gifting these lottery prizes as well as the large amount of publicity that accompanied it, had an inevitable effect on the popularity of SOMER's business whilst these prizes were available, inevitably at the expense of other rival lottery organisations. In effect CCP decided to choose winners and losers within the community of lottery organisations, which is of great concern for those of us wishing to maintain the integrity of the sandbox.

The latest statement you have provided is a welcome start, but questions remain.

The "Bring Solo Back" podcast got ISK and ships for doing PvP and talking about it.
They made profit.

It's hard to draw a line with those community projects.

i would be ok with this too. and if/when you do decide to resume giving stuff out, please please please have it be a new ship that is announced for that purpose beforehand. leave the amount of ISW in-game as is

That's what we're pausing until we have a better system the community feels better about; All selective give-aways of rare in-game items.

Do you also think that giving Red Vs. Blue advertisement was wrong?

Competitors like E-Uni will have harder time.