EVE General Discussion

If a gambling establishment is your investment plan, you, my friend, have some serious financial issues that you need to seek professional help with.

Also, as with all investments, they are not garunteed to increase with time.

Man you've really been showcasing mod abilities in this thread: endless quotes per post, images, oh boy

Don't forget burning Dinsdale.

It's almost as if there is real forum software buried under here.

They just haven't unchecked the [Sucks] box in the config section for us regular users.

edit: the IRONY
/and divine confirmation.

Man I can smell the crap on your nose from here. Notice that CCP falcon's title is community manager and not CCP Lawer or CCP Accountant. Its CCP Falcon's job to kiss butt to the community. Its other people's job to make the business decisions that actually affect the game.

You can hear the pitchforks rattling from this thread for a mile. It isn't impressive imo how the community have reacted. Brings back memories of ripard teg.

Surely if CCP are serious then they should just scrap the monetary reward for selling an ETC, as that opens the door to all manner of real money possibilities, many of which are probably still going on.

If CCP are serious about this then they will scrap the current Plex scheme and make it so that they are purchasable from them only.

I could setup another website tomorrow, offer loads of cool stuff to join my corp, and "strongly encourage" (wink wink) anyone that joins that they need to but PLEX through me. The whole scheme is so easily exploitable, and will continue to be exploited unless CCP seriously want to do something about it.

I don't think they really do as long as the $$ are coming in, and yet again are pandering to the town hall pitchfork wielders on this one.

If it is, I'd wager it's an old version, and CCP have modified it to an extent they can no longer maintain a realistic upgrade path.

That, or they just choose to punish us because it amuses them.

tl;dr: While I agree 100% that the real impropriety that occurred is an issue of favoritism, the reasons for that favoritism to occur are not universally negative, wrong, or undesirable. If anything, CCP should just codify the terms of their favoritism.

I think it's important to point out WHY CCP might have been treating Somer differently, because this isn't the simple black and white issue people want it to be.

The EULA against RMT exists for a single purpose: ISK->$ typically creates a ton of very difficult problems for a game; hacked accounts, botting, etc.; that are damaging to the game and the community. This occurs because $ is such a powerful motivator that the game becomes irrelevant to the desire to make $ (in fact, in the case of hacked accounts, often even the real world law becomes irrelevant). This is on top of all the various legal/tax ramifications for CCP should they accidentally end up in a real-world $-based business scheme with a 3rd party that they didn't intend to have. The prohibition against ISK->$ exists solely to enable CCP to crack down on the providers that are making the game worse for everyone by employing these tactics to generate ISK, as well as to protect CCP from legal gray areas.

Now we come to Somer. As far as anyone can tell, nothing Somer did in their RMT scheme actually hurt the game. There is no evidence that Somer hacked accounts, ran bots, or did anything negative for the community or the game in their quest for ISK->$. Heck, as far as anyone can tell statistically, there isn't even evidence that the gambling service itself wasn't exactly as described (of course the house always wins, but the odds were above board and not obviously being manipulated). If anything, there is every indication that Somer was, at worst, a neutral impact on the game and possibly even a net positive to the community (this, of course, wandering into opinion).

Does the EULA exist as an abstract codified set of law that MUST BE ENFORCED just for the sake of enforcing it? NO. The EULA exists to allow CCP to do what they need to in order to PRESERVE THE INTEGRITY OF THE GAME. The integrity of the game is the principle, the "spirit of the law" if you will, which the EULA exists to codify. But as with all such things, written law can never fully capture the spirit of its intent, and sometimes even comes into conflict with that intent.

Finally, the crux... if you were CCP, and your EULA against RMT existed to protect the integrity of the game, and you see Somer doing a verifiable but somewhat low key ISK->$ scheme that doesn't seem to be harming the integrity of the game in any fashion while possibly even boosting PLEX sales, are you going to crack down and enfroce the EULA "just because", or are you going to understandably turn a blind eye? More importantly, what SHOULD you do, again understanding that the EULA doesn't exist just to be enforced for no reason but rather as a tool to allow CCP to protect the integrity of their game?

That's not to say there aren't real issues with turning a blind eye... foremost among them being the argument that 3rd parties cannot compete on an even playing field if there are unwritten rules about who is allowed to do what. But the funny thing is I would be 100% fine with CCP coming out and saying "Hey, Somer can RMT because they do it in a way that doesn't seem to hurt anything... we'll put in an approval process for anyone else to submit their RMT scheme to us as well so we can verify it doesn't damage the game world/community".

Ironically this all blew up when CCP (and Somer) started flaunting that favoritism back with the community spotlight/custom ship deal. Their RMT scheme had been well understood and frequently pointed out long before that, but there was no damaging community backlash against CCP UNTIL they began to so blatantly flout their back-room dealings in the public eye. If they had all just kept quiet and pretended to continue ignoring each other, Somer would still be happily RMT'ing today.

So once again, because CCP lacks any common sense, or ability to communicate, Somer gets thrown under the bus and the people at CCP go on as if nothing happened.

Reminds me of when The Mittani got banned.. CCP Devs were standing around him when he did his speal at Fanfest.. No action, no issues.. Then they re-aired it.. Un-edited.. again, no issues.. few days late drama starts and OMG we had NO idea and this is SO wrong we must BAN him for breaking the RULES..

CCP's Rep didn't ask the most OBVIOUS of questions, "How will you determine the price you pay for the PLEX?".. Didn't even forward it on to Legal, where they would have likely nailed down specifics. I doubt she even read it.

No rather than CCP standing up and saying it was THEM that ****** up, they evade.

Tell me what's gonna happen to Lisa?
What happened to the Devs that didn't take ANY action then The Mittani did his bit at Fanfest?
Nothing. Maybe a stern convo in the office..
But they take actual action against the other parties.


So, since you never actually gave Somer isk.. Really this is RMT because Somer gave you isk for an out-of-game service.. namely, using their referral link to buy GTC.

MANY programming projects, like killboards, forums, etc pay ISK to their programmers for out of game services.
TMC, and EN24 pay isk for writers, again and out of game service.
Many TS3 Servers, Mumble, etc are paid for in ISK for someone to host the server themselves.

How are these any different?

And we don't even want to talk about all the "RMT" that goes on in big alliances, on the forums, Comms, and IM's.. Be it paying $$$ for your titan from someone leaving the game, or as small as sending isk to someone for them to order you some item online or ship it to you.

CCP's got no answer there. The only act on Somer because of the mob mentality, same reason they did with Mittens. They never thought it was wrong, they never had an issue with the original Somer setup, but because Drama they gave in.

If CCP has rules they should be back and white, and enforced at the time. They need to stop living in grey vague areas and enforcing these rules retroactively, and only when there's some backlash.

There is no incentivization of using TMC/EN24/etc.'s referral links. That is, one of several, key differences in your analogy. TMC doesn't provide you an in-game reward for buying GTC/PLEX through their site. Them paying their staff in ISK to provide the service for the site falls in line with CCP's policy. When CCP change that policy, they will adapt or cease to exist. Pretty simple really.



Sans any evidence to support this accusation, it's best not to rumor monger. If you have evidence of that activity show it to CCP's security team.



CCP does have an answer for your claim there is RMTng of ships/out of game goods for in-game ISK such as other games, it's that it's against EULA. Without any actual evidence to prove it has taken place, they'd be silly to ban someone over hearsay. Again, you're making claims and accusations without any actual supporting evidence other than "this is CCP caving to mob mentality" when really, there's been no evidence CCP is caving to anyone. An issue was raised/brought to their attention and they investigated the problem, the result was that Somer threw a hissy fit and shut down because he has his own reasons not to continue. CCP didn't shut him down, the EVE community didn't shut him down, he did. He even admits as much. Thanks for playing, better luck next time.