EVE General Discussion

8 pages of "is CCP-sanctioned referral practice actually not CCP-sanctioned referral practice?"

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WTF

Of course this is RMT and it’s disgusting to see that CCP is selectively tolerating RMT. CCP is pretending to be stupid but even a little child would understand what’s going on. Everyone who claims this to be no RMT is either a ****** with no clue how probability theory works or someone who is affiliated to SOMER and profits from SOMER.

SOMER credits clearly have an ISK value. It’s obvious if you manage to buy all tickets in a drawing. However, the ISK value of a SOMER credit remains exactly the same even if you don’t buy all the tickets. Example: There is a lottery with a price worth 180m ISK and all tickets cost a total of 200m SOMER credits (I’m assuming SOMER’s cut is 10%). If you buy 10% of the tickets you have to spend 20m SOMER credits. The expected economic value of buying 10% of the tickets is 18m ISK => You just converted 20m SOMER credits into 18m ISK on average. The economic value of 20m SOMER credits would be 18m ISK. It’s no black magic but simply the law of probability. It becomes even more obvious if you look at it from SOMER’s side: He probably earns like 2000$ per month. To earn that money he has to give away like 250billion SOMER credits. Players will convert 250billion SOMER credits into 225billion ISK or very close to 225billion ISK. The economic cost of giving away 250billion SOMER credits is 225billion ISK. Giving away 250billion SOMER credits will cost SOMER 225billion ISK or very close to 225billion ISK.

I think it is important to differentiate between two situations. Situation A is no RMT while situation B is RMT.

Situation A: A website has an affiliate link to a GTC vendor. x-amount of players use the link to buy GTC. x is a small number because it’s more convenient to buy PLEX instead of GTC and PLEX are cheaper if they are on sale or if you buy large amounts. The website owner earns x*2 dollars and gives the players no ISK in return. x depends on the popularity of the website. The website owner earns a few dozen dollars per month to pay hosting costs.

Situation B: A website has an affiliate link to a GTC vendor and the website owner gives everyone who uses the link an additional 200m ISK. x+y players use the link to buy GTC. x is equal to x in situation A while y is much larger than x. y are the many players who suddenly switch from buying PLEX to buying GTC because suddenly GTC (including 200m ISK bonus) are cheaper than PLEX. Compared to situation A the website owner earns an additional y*2 dollars. The only reason for earning the additional amount of money is because he pays players the total amount of (x+y)*200m ISK in return. That’s pure Real-Money-Trading! The massive demand caused by being cheaper than PLEX earns the website owner a few thousand dollars per month.

If CCP thinks the SOMERblink website has such a huge value for EVE then pay SOMER a regular salary but don’t allow him to sell ISK for real money!

Name some of these others then. Bear in mind we are not talking any referral scheme. We are talking any referral scheme that pays ISK to use.

You can call it entirely out of game as much as you want. But it's not. YOU GET ISK FOR BUYING THOUGH THEM. Just because they mask it by calling it "credits" means **** all. If you ran an RMT site and people bought "credits" for real money, then traded those "credits" for in game items, it's STILL RMT. You are basically saying that if there is any middle ground between the cash transaction and the isk transaction, that stops it being RMT. I'd like to see CCPs clarification on that. If that was the rule, RMT would be unstoppable.


Erm... no, not quite. The player is PAID ISK to click their link. It's an IN GAME transactions being used to encourage an out of game transaction. If they had no isk, they would not be able to encourage people to use their referral more than others. Thus, ISK is being used to generate their revenue.

You can pay for plex which in turn you can trade for isk. Against you seem to think that if it's not CASH -> ISK, it's not RMT. Buying plex from a player for cash is ALSO RMT, but it's still something you can do to CCP directly.

At the end of the day by giving away isk, Somer is making real life profit. You can try to blindly ignore that because there are other steps in the middle, but it makes no difference to what is going on. CCP are clearly allowing Somer to do things they ban others from doing, and it's utterly disgusting. Somer are violating at least 2 section of the EULA (1. RMT, 2. Running EVE accounts for business use).
CCP refusing to respond to this is all the answers we need really. They know it's wrong, they know they have no way to come back on it without either shutting down Somer or opening the floodgates by legalising RMT.

good job for this almost 3 month old necro....

Please forward all necro hate mail towards the perp "Trit" so this thread can go back to rotting in a corner