EVE General Discussion

That's because you haven't read the thread, or even parts of it, not even the blue posts. That is the reason why you're repeating the same old arguments, which have already been debated to death again, and again, and then once more.

He wasn't going to pay for GTC codes, he'd buy PLEX (the ingame item). But only one for every PLEX code you bought via his affiliate link. Since PLEX are fungible, he wouldn't care where you got that exact PLEX you're giving him, just that the number in the contract matches the amount you bought from Markee Dragon.

You (in general) would have to have purchased GTC via Markee Dragon (or any other provider somer used but afaik they were only using MD as far back as the back dating goes) originally to get credit to use to exchange PLEX for ISK. It doesn't matter where the PLEX came from though as long as you had credit to enable the transaction. If you had say 20 credits from past GTC referrals you could have bought 20 PLEX on the market and exchanged them for 830M ISK each.

You can keep clicking on the blue eve dev bar on the avatar to go to the next dev post without having to wade through everything inbetween.

You, sir, are a genius.

Tough question. At the end of the day that is in CCP's hands, though to a degree also in the hands of the CSM. In a way it's your job here to prevent CCP from throwing up an iron curtain on "talk about stuff in game, anything else is ours and off limits".

Reason for that is simple. If you can't trust CCP's decisions in these matters, it gets ever harder for people to keep putting faith in the game itself. It creates completely different behaviour, and completely different expectation patterns

I'm sure someone genius in brand management and marketing would put Hilmar and Lisa in front of a camera with Community Management taking them through the various points of confusion / concern / questions emphasing what matters, taking both the human and the professional angles. But I imagine that's a bit of a bridge too far these days for CCP.

Either way, I can't see a devblog with abstracts solving integrity challenges here. Let's be honest, this situation is not the first time. And it isn't just a Somer thing. Keep in mind Markee got his special relationship, his community spotlight, his means to win the previous margin war - before taking in Somer as the instrument to achieve that veil of "legit" to prevent competition remaining a factor over time - while profiting from it in many ways.

It's not as if Markee doesn't have the exact same history of methodology and timelines in situations surrounding other games. I can understand why many people see Somer/Markee as the same thing. And that is a problem for CCP.

I'm much less interested, as most people probably are, in what procedural step here or there at CCP resulted in what issue or what happened before that (by now) infamous correspondence between Lisa and Somer leading to what many perceive as a weird communication thing. I'm much more interested in hearing from CCP how this repeat mess plays out for how they evaluate their external commercial relations. Which matters, because to many people Somer/Markee is symptom of the same. More so, let's not forget the benefits Markee was able to get over time.

People don't know why this happened again. That's a thing. But the rest comes down to the next parts of the investigation. Chribba already pointed that out (a signal in its own right).

And there the Markee angle needs to be put on the table. I understand there will be people at CCP who don't like that, but this is not about them, it's about the nature of the relation between CCP and the evolution of the baby they made. Pun intended, obviously.

Another thing I see a lot of questions about is where this proper cleanup and shutdown from Somer is coming. Someone who has repeatedly attempted to introduce RMT schemes suddenly going all moral? It's why people wonder if CCP pressured that. Or not. Let's not forget that Somer's financial relation is with Markee, not with CCP. And Markee has always demonstrated to seek legitimisation no matter what happens to the intermediaries connected with the target game environment itself. I can understand why it spooks people that such an agency has a veil of special relation. So that is a thing as well. It's a perception problem regardless of the underlying problem either way.

I'd love to see CCP seizing this as an opportunity. Not another kneejerk or knee bending. But a professional and human session of putting everything on the table so folks can maintain that integrity of CCP's relation with its customers. That's not dangerous, CCP should have learned that by now. On the contrary. But that will require them going over what happened, how it happened, what the road towards that was, the parties involved - but even more so about what priorities and considerations are important to them, how that plays out for customers - and all the parties involved.

"I think this is being done, so therefore it must be happening sans any evidence to support the suspicion"

You don't understand why people take umbrage at RMT?
Are you quite sure you want to go with that question?

By the way, most of what you describe is not how it happened. Somer is not an official reseller; he did offer extra ISK solely in exchange for real cash; and absolutely no-one is tearing apart a good idea.


They've been using it for quite some time now. It's basically CCP and CSM and other parties involved in whatever business they're conducting (and yes, even the players occasionally).

I was offered £50 for a tech moon in earshot of CCP Unifex a couple years back. I think it was supposed to be a joke but he didn't look amused..

CCP take RMTing pretty seriously, even after a few pints

Remember when CCP first introduced the terminology & methodology and CSM / Players took those concepts and went to work with it? CCP ended up not liking it very much, to a point where over the course of two CSM terms it went from "stakeholder" to "feedback instrument" reserving the stakeholder term to very limited applications of SCRUM methodology :P

Which is why I was surprised to see Falcon use the term in the current context, which is quite different from what it's been, much closer to during the days of CSM 4 / 5. Understandable, but a tad risky.