EVE General Discussion

I am genuinely curious as to what SomerBlink has done to 'Enrich your experience in the game' ?

Some people have already mentioned this idea, and it's been done before. Immortalize individuals and corporations with permanent relics and monuments in-game as reward for their community contributions. You like what Somer is doing, why not a "Somer Gambling Hall" off Dodixie Fed Navy? You want to give credit to their members, let people warp to it and buy junk items like "1 blink credit - issued by [somer employee]." Like someone said, it's no different than "piece of steve," etc.

Even better, let them name their junk item with your final approval. CCP gets an ISK sink. Somer employees get a very VERY special in-game achievement, and players get something to do other than buy a passport from Poitat. This would be an achievement most of us will never accomplish because of what they've done for the community, respect or hate it, their name will be remembered even after they unsub and nobody gets a tangible ISK advantage over anyone either directly or indirectly. I get that a couple billion ISK to outfits like Somer is just a rounding error, but it's still an in-game advantage. I also get ships and junk have been given before, so what? Things change in this game.

-RvB gets some magical kill number in their eternal war, how about a flaming statue named after the pilot who died or something?
-Some event attracts 10k people in local with super duper reinforced nodes, maybe they'll get a station named after them in that system?
-How about an item for sale at SOE stations called "A Map of Eve - by Dotlan"?

It's not that hard.

Nobody will have a problem with this. The player is immortalized and the community gets FREE content; free as in I'm not paying $14/mo for in-game corps to get marketable items which benefit them in some tangible, non-existential manner, that may or may not be used against me.

For comparison, for most players their corporate titles and medals are more meaningful and treasured than ISK gifts and their equivalencies (rare items and such). Usually you get them for spectacular in-game feats, or spectacular in-game failures. It's hard to say which kind is more regarded by the individual they were conferred upon

Personally I would like the rewards to be out of game.

But the biggest thing is for CCP to be transparent in these types of things, it looks dodgy when these kinds of things are hidden. You might not have meant for these to be kept a secret but you did not announce them your selves so that makes it just as responsible.

Also some customer service training for some ISDs wouldn't go astray. Closing a threadnaught and directing it to two different topics just showed us that they didn't have a clue. That just made it look like CCP where deliberately trying to shut down the communication on this issue by burying it in other topics.

As to the CSM some have shown (elsewhere) that they were pissed with the rest of us and others showed why the CSM regulations need the ability to recall members by the community because they had no clue what was going on.

This has been asked several times since page 1, but it conveniently remains unanswered.

What I forgot in my earlier post: You generally have to be very careful about rewarding in-game for-profit organizations. Even an endorsement from your side is potentially hurting their competitors. The nice thing here is, if an organization is run for-profit and is successful enough to catch your attention it probably doesn't need your support anyway.

Non-profit organizations might need the support and they don't have competition that could be distorted by supporting them.

Of course people owning PLEX would suffer devaluation. When you increase the supply the price decreases, it's no different for PLEX than for any other item in the game. Therefore PLEX are just as bad an idea. The only difference is that a single PLEX is worth considerably less than a single IshuScorp at the moment. But if they handed out 20b in PLEX to everyone it would be just as bad.

No, those items (if new ones were created for the reward program) would be rare and tradeable and therefore would have significant ingame value just as the IshuScorps. There would be no significant difference, cause nobody is against the IshuScorps for their very limited combat value, but because of their considerable ISK value.

Is this review going to include the lack of opportunity for some time zones to participate in in-game events where items worth billions are "dropped"? I'm including both Dev roams and RP events.

Well, I would disagree with some of what you have said, since it's the players that donate ISK to Somer that result in the sponsoring of events you noted, but I appreciate your reply.

Thanks you for the post Guard.

It seems that the internal company mindset is that the scorpions are nice but not overly valuable gifts. I don't think that this was communicated well enough.

(The in game price drop after the leaked mail and the surprised player reactions are a pretty good indicators of this)

I was thinking this too.

Thanks, Guard for a thoughtful well considered response.

I think one of the key things is that CCP has been investing in its player base and working with player organizations to help EVE thrive.

It may very well be that CCP misstepped here, but clearly not out of malice or corruption. Overly enthusiastic and without due consideration perhaps.

Calls for out of game gifts are all well and good. That is certainly the fairest. But does it give CCP enough tools to get the job done? Meaning the job of sustaining and growing eve's population?

What a petty thing to do.