My EVE

you gamble every time you push the undock button.

so, kettle,black etc..

someone good in math can make a tidy profit at blink with care. i tossed in 500m and walked away with 1bn.

but the important part is I WALKED AWAY WHEN I WAS AHEAD.

My guess is, based on the reaction in this thread and in the comment section of the news article, that it's more than enough compelling evidence for a segment of the braindead monkeys among us.

i see they don't limit the shills to actual betting.

"rate of return" makes it sound like you're investing. which is inherently misleading. its gambling. its unregulated. there are no safeguards or protections in place and no way to prove any of it is legit. The basic concept is so obviously ripe for abuse, none of this should come as a surprise.

its weird with all the scams in eve that no one has ever done real checking up on somer. theres no 3rd party checks or balances on the back end of the site. no way to prove or disprove anything without getting that backend info. even a 30% chance to keep players money adds up fast. the best part is the quote. just believe us that theres nothing going on. just forget everything else you learned in eve. forget it all. just trust us.

oh I've hardly won enough to rank as a "shill".

http://cogdev.net/blink/?act=profile&id=1079342487

I've only taken out of blink something in the range of (a little under, I think) 10b. consisting largely of I think the last count was 13 plex. (the "blinks won" includes whats been churned into more blink credit...)

and its not "misleading", exactly, as I'm not pitching anything. I'm not sure what the best way to depict the ratio of how much I've won compared to what I've put into it.
the last probably something like 200m I've put into it, I've won jack squat. my three winning streaks have simply been enough to far overpower my losses. if I only counted the seed money that resulted in a winning streak, probably less than 200m has resulted in 7b-ish in winnings. (~2.5b of my total was from promos, and the diffrence being winnings that weren't part of a major streak)

the fact is, that as they have argued before, if they were not behaving in a legit manner, it would show with much more conclusive evidence than there is. yes, its ripe for abuse. ... but the abuse would show, and they can make more money by NOT abusing it. why would they shoot their own cash cow?

what evidence do you see that it is NOT legit? every claim I've seen is rather weak at best.

oh, and the strategy *I* use, is this:

deposit a MODEST amount. (I think the most I've ever deposited at once was something in the range of 200m) whatever is modest for a particular person depends on their bankroll of course. but the point is, that its an amount you wouldn't be crippled by losing.
then, with that money I "bid" on blinks (1 ticket per blink, almost never more) that have per-ticket value of 1/10th or less of my current Blink Credit total.
for example, if I were to add 80m, and bid on say, Ishkurs, I would have 11 chances to win twice, and come out about even. so basically I have something around 60/40 odds of coming out slightly ahead. lets say I take my 11 ishkur blinks, win #3, and #11. now I have about 89m isk worth waiting for me to decide on. now, if thats rolled back into blink credit, thats something like 89m or more? which means to do the same thing an extra roll, which means 75% chance of winning 2 more times)

now, if instead of winning #3 and #11, you won #2 and #5, you can stop, cash out those two wins, and be ahead something like 10m isk. then anything you won with your remaining 45m in blink credit, is above water. even if you lost it all, you still have 10m more (or whatever) than you started with. now if you get lucky and win just 1 time with the remaining, you have enough to either make 40m+ in profit (the safe road) or the opportunity to take more rolls and possibly win more.

I had a streak once where I cashed out a PLEX to blink credit, and when gambling that 480m or whatever, I won like 3 more PLEX! and that was after having already paid myself back for the seed money.

of course all this depends on luck. and you could scale it up and do the same pattern with battleships or whatever instead, and setting aside that the bigger blinks have 16 tickets rather than 8, the general principle would be the same, just adjusted for the difference in odds. of course, you could work out the same sort of figuring for buying two tickets rather than one, ect.

having these sort of strategies and thinking about it, is how you "arm and fit" your blink account. sure it all boils down to having luck. but having self control and a plan, doesn't hurt either.

can I prove that they aren't cheating? no. but odds are if they were, it would either show, or take such an immense amount of work to cheat in a way that would not show, that it would be rather crazy to bother.

there is simply no reason for them to cheat, and there is no evidence they do.

show me where the numbers really don't add up in a way that can be explained rationally. show me SOME evidence other than sore losers making wild accusations.

just like real life, you generally can trust people to follow their nature. the nature of scamming is greed. if someone is "clever" enough to come up with something as involved as blink, ... doesn't it stand to reason that they are clever enough to realize that they would make more money, in the long term, by NOT cheating?

Because shills make sense - remember somer blink is fun because the lotteries fill quickly.

Today blink may be large enough that even during off-times lotteries are moving at an acceptable pace but that has probably not always been the case - look at some of their competitors and you'll see "microlotteries" that take hours or days to fill and nobody wants to play that.

The threshold to use some shill accounts to help getting the site off the ground, keep it moving at a nice pace during slow times and clear out stupid blinks that take forever to fill (clogging up limited slots and preventing other people from playing) is extremely low.

After all Somerset's income scales with the volume of blinks played and the job of a shill is to keep that volume going - you don't have to manipulate the odds for the shill to be profitable, you just have to give him a filled wallet and let him play like any other user...

You don't hurt any legitimate player in the process of using shills either (as long as you don't manipulate odds), the use of shills can be easily rationalized as providing a valuable service to players by making sure that everyone who wants to play a blink is guaranteed to find a blink that will complete quickly (at whatever stakes that guy wants to play).

The use of shills just makes too much sense business-wise, it is easy to deny if there is no solid proof, it is easy to defend if solid proof is presented and if Somerset did not use shills while the site was young he is less smart than I am inclined to believe.

That's my reasons for giving "we found shills on blink" claims serious consideration.

[I don't think Somerset would be stupid enough to manipulate any long-term odds (as eve players are just crazy enough to collect that data independently and run statistical tests) and while manipulating short-term odds may be a good idea (wrote a post on that some time ago) it also introduces a real risk for the house and Blink being risk-free for the house is a pretty nice feature]

There were no "microlotteries" before Blink. It did take hours sometimes. That was fast then, since forum lottos took days if not weeks. Somer had been doing forum lottos for ages before Blink, and poked the people who played those to be the testers and startup customers when Blink launched.

The clone websites fail because they go "Hay, blink is a website that makes money, I should make a website and have money too!" and ignore the fact that Somer laid the groundwork of trust and service for Blink months, if not years, before it launched - and it was an original idea at the time, not someone just glomming onto another person's success.

Hack. *snort*

So, that's what it's being called these days?

Try www.themittani.com for fair and balanced news.