EVE General Discussion

Thanks for the statement. However, it doesn't particularly address the glaring fact that SOMER received free trips to Fanfest and unique ships for a "fair" contest "for the community" that CCP has no control over or audit power for. Further, the contest is inherently biased toward people who blow billions of isk playing blinks, giving them a disproportionate amount of entries for unique ships only obtainable through this medium (not to mention making SOMER even more isk), as well as giving a player-run, for-profit corporation the ability to decide who can even have a chance at winning it, considering SOMER Blink solely and unilaterally has the power to ban accounts at will.

The fact that you guys earlier compared SOMER Blink to a charity is shocking, off-putting and shows a deep disconnection between what CCP believes "a community service" is and what the players do. Many players believe that "a community service" is something that actually enriches the game or provides content to it. SOMER Blink is a third party website created solely to print isk for its founder. They provide no services in game. At all. (This doesn't even to speak to the fact that serious concerns exist for many players to the legitimacy of the SOMER Blink lottery system. For example, how is it that the player with the most blinks won, Replacement 234, doesn't appear in the most blinks played? Is Replacement 234, with an win rate at a minimum of 32.7%+ simply luckier than the next-highest winner, Featious who has a 28.8% win rate? Or the highest winner (with over 9 TRILLION isk more than Replacement 234) doesn't even appear to have played or won the most blinks?)

The difference in your example of "go to game trade show, get swag" and the SOMERgate fiasco is that as players we can choose to attend game trade show--at our wills--and get swag. We don't, however, have the luxury of playing blinks if the account is banned. Further, you're not limiting the prize pool to players attending EVE Vegas, as your trade show example would indicate. It is open to anyone willing to blow billions of isk on blinks. Even then, they would still have an inequitable chance of winning against other players who have a disproportionate amount of tickets. Your basic example of simply playing a promo blink and having an entry is pedantic at best and deceitful at worst, considering that everyone knows that blink players will have hundreds or thousands of tickets entered.

It's good that you've put future plans on hold for hopefully a better process. It's unfortunate, though, that you decided to stop recognizing community sites short of providing rewards to meaningful providers of content in the game, instead opting to enrich a for-profit corp's wallet instead. The fact that you haven't pulled the unique rewards, given the glaring deficiencies in using SOMER Blink as the provider of the contest, shows me that CCP has only a passing concern to the legitimate grievances we players have. CCP owes nothing to SOMER Blink, and if this were believed by CCP, it would have pulled the unique and fantastical prizes in favor of something more traditional like PLEX packs or Collector's Editions.

I'm still scratching my head about what these "great contributions" are exactly that SB made to EVE that CCP and others keep referring to. Is out of game gambling for isk and in-game swag via a 3rd party for-profit entity considered creating content?

I think my biggest problem with the whole situation is that I feel CCP is awarding a straight up gambling enterprise simply because they help sell plexes. When you give out upwards of 400+ billion ISK in rare ships to 'the house' who is already raking in ISK hand-over-fist it seems lame as hell.

jumping ship before it sinks...