EVE General Discussion

read the post you quoted for the explanation of the difference!

I can probably shed a bit of light on that although Navigator touched on that in his announcement following what was going to be the Gold Magnate event.

Why SOMER? Well, they are really popular and they have supported a ton of events so we wanted to explore what we could do with them. Their influence in the community is significant for the same reason that they are space rich - because they're good at what they do.

In the statement we go into who else have gotten the ISWs and also what sort of giveways we usually extend to fansites.

As we said, we agree with you that we went too fast and that's why we need to re-think this whole thing. We need to keep the CSM more involved, their input is invaluable.

I did and it doesn't address what I said at all. PLEX = $20. I'm a web designer in RL. So if I do a site for company X and charge them 5 grand, I could get 250 PLEX. I could do that right now. If CCP had me do a site I would charge them real life money for my real life work. I don't care about EvE at this point I care about getting paid for my work. They pay me 5 grand and I buy 250 PLEX. The only difference between these scenarios is who my RL client was... and what does that matter? Answer that.

There is one difference. EvE players who build sites for the community do it because it's fun. Thus, they will work for peanuts. It's good business to pay eve players to develop their labors of love, and encourage more of it. It's a frickin' bargain.

yeah, my post covered that.
since you have no intention of reading, i have no intention of further encouraging you to derail the thread.

I agree with you to some point. I would say it is a matter of quantity though. If CCP decided to hand just enough cash to a non-profit 3rd party community person to help with hosting costs or such I could live with that.

If CCP were "contracting" a community dev as you call it, then they are IMO business partners and I would expect that the community dev would have to follow rigid rules regarding his in-game activities similar to a CCP dev. Basically a business partner of CCP can't be a regular player anymore cause that would indeed hurt the sandbox.

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.

Some people have already mentioned this idea, and it's been done before. Immortalize individuals and corporations with permanent relics and monuments in-game as reward for their community contributions. You like what Somer is doing, why not a "Somer Gambling Hall" off Dodixie Fed Navy? You want to give credit to their members, let people warp to it and buy junk items like "1 blink credit - issued by [somer employee]." Like someone said, it's no different than "piece of steve," etc.

Even better, let them name their junk item with your final approval. CCP gets an ISK sink. Somer employees get a very VERY special in-game achievement, and players get something to do other than buy a passport from Poitat. This would be an achievement most of us will never accomplish because of what they've done for the community, respect or hate it, their name will be remembered even after they unsub and nobody gets a tangible ISK advantage over anyone either directly or indirectly. I get that a couple billion ISK to outfits like Somer is just a rounding error, but it's still an in-game advantage. I also get ships and junk have been given before, so what? Things change in this game.

-RvB gets some magical kill number in their eternal war, how about a flaming statue named after the pilot who died or something?
-Some event attracts 10k people in local with super duper reinforced nodes, maybe they'll get a station named after them in that system?
-How about an item for sale at SOE stations called "A Map of Eve - by Dotlan"?

It's not that hard.

Nobody will have a problem with this. The player is immortalized and the community gets FREE content; free as in I'm not paying $14/mo for in-game corps to get marketable items which benefit them in some tangible, non-existential manner, that may or may not be used against me.

For comparison, for most players their corporate titles and medals are more meaningful and treasured than ISK gifts and their equivalencies (rare items and such). Usually you get them for spectacular in-game feats, or spectacular in-game failures. It's hard to say which kind is more regarded by the individual they were conferred upon

The precise criteria isn't that scientific at the moment which is why we're planning to design a more transparent criteria for contributors and others as well.

We selected to reward SOMER and his staff because the time was right to do stuff with them, Vegas sponsorship being an example. Same story with the SCL which was having an active period and doing really exciting things.

That’s it for now, let us know your thoughts.

Should we stick to out-of-game things only?

Create non-transferrable in-game items as rewards?

Give no personal rewards and only prizes?

Only items below a certain expected ISK value?