In-Game Events and Gatherings

What an interesting conundrum.

The current form:
CCP wins because people purchase GTC's indirectly from them, for profit.
The retailer wins because they sell GTC's for profit.
The referral group wins because they get some RL money to help cover expenses.

Given the ability to give away ingame assets at will, Given the existence of out-of-game assets that can be gifted as incentives (blink credits, etc), the only solution to this form of Isk-to-RL money is for CCP to disallow retailers from giving referral kickbacks.

As someone all-to-aware of the cost in hosting a medium sized website, with VOIP services, and the like, referrals are a nice tool for covering these expenses. To give folks an idea, these can easily be $100-1000+ / year depending on the level of hosting you need.

Katarina, while I appreciate your evil-genius manipulation of this system to RMT your ingame assets, I fear the result:

a.) CCP changes the contracts with GTC retailers to eliminate kickbacks. At which point, I despise you. This not only undermines the business model of sites like shattered crystal, but it also hinders the ability of fansites to cover expenses.

b.) CCP allows this to continue, and essentially results in a CCP sanctioned RMT business model. This will again hurt fansites (which won't have the in-game assets to compete against RMTers), and might even disrupt the ingame economy (although the amount of RMT'ing that can be accomplished by this is very much limited by the number of people willing to buy GTCs).

Is there an option I'm not seeing? Is there a result that doesn't hurt EvE fan sites?

Disallow sites giving any incentive for purchasing GTCs through their affiliate links. You want to support a site you like? Fine, buy GTCs through them. But you can't say "if you buy GTCs through my link you will get X as a reward". (where X is ISK, "credits", paperclips, etc.)

While this works in theory, can CCP pragmatically enforce this?

In game philanthropy is not only allowed, but blatantly encouraged. Plex for "save the kittens" or this cause or that cause has been routinely implemented. Giving away assets and isk is pretty common, so now CCP would have to determine if said give away was out of the goodness of your heart or to incentive someone to use your link. I realize when investigating the asset transactions, the case becomes more clear.... but this seems like a real headache to monitor and enforce.

Furthermore, what is CCP going to do about rule breakers....
For the buyer: Revoke the GTC when bought completely legally? And if they don't, the buyer has nothing to lose. That's certainly not going to go over well.

For the seller: Revoke their remaining assets? The boon to the seller is from the 3rd party that's selling more GTC's (i.e. win win), and completely outside of CCP's hands. CCP's hands are probably further bound by contracts that give said 3rd parties the right to reward referralers.

60 day GTC Bought and Email sent :)

Also to add to this conversation.....More on her cause Taken up by Mittens site TMC: http://themittani.com/features/more-135k-somer-finances-investigated

Received 5.5B for exchanging (10) 60 Days.

Good stuff. Thank you.

I was Being Patient, didn't Expect it till tomorrow, Hope you slept well! Isk Recieve and thousand Thanks and good luck walking that Line!

Have you got your ishukone watch scorpions off CCP yet?

Confirming prompt receipt of 1 billion ISK having bought 2 timecodes.

Wallet is at 0 I have a 28b offer on darth which i dont want to take yet think i can get more for him. I can keep taking orders and they will be done within 24hours if your worried just wait. My wallet is here http://eveboard.com/pilot/Katarina_Reid pw 123

wallet has 30b now http://eveboard.com/pilot/Katarina_Reid pw 123