With the official CCP announcement that in the interests of "community engagement" groups of players that CCP decides they like will be given piles of rare or unreleased ships to make a private profit off, I'd like to throw my hat into the ring for goonswarm to be the next in line for massive unregulated handouts to people a random dev decides they like.

Goonswarm has done more for raising EVE's profile and gathering new players into EVE than SOMER or any other CCP partner. It is goonswarm that makes international news when we butcher some worthless alliance that barely puts up a fight, or decide to pay half of empire to kill the other half, magic trillions of isk out of thin air by breaking a headline patch feature, or our many other delightful exploits. And we bring a constant stream of new players into EVE, to fill our ranks. Given the precedent set by the SOMER gifts, no player group deserves a free handout more than Goonswarm. And no player website deserves a handout more than goonfleet.com.

Now, some people might argue that it would be favoritism to give them to us, as we'd just keep them rather than run a for-profit lottery for the ships to convert them to isk like SOMER would. I assure you nothing is farther from the truth. Rather than have some dumb ship I too will ensure that the ships are available to the EVE public, at the fairest price possible (the highest price the market will bear). That means any EVE player will have a fair chance to get the ship rather than having to lose scads of money in a for-profit gambling scheme.

Now, some people might protest that we're only in it for ourselves. And those people certainly have a point: just like a for-profit gambling corporation that maintains its "trust" solely because that keeps the money flowing, we look out for #1. But as we look out for #1, we provide great benefits to the EVE population at large. We spend our vast sums of money creating content and obliterating abscesses on the eve community like highsec miners, and TEST.

Some people might also claim that giving us ships would be blatant favoritism. To that, I can say nothing but that I agree - but since CCP has now decided they're openly showing favoritism by gifting hundreds of billions of isk worth of ships to SOMER, surely EVE's most successful alliance deserves some favoritism too. Some might argue that we should not be creating new unique ships, and that may be a fair point: I will happily accept sabre BPOs and other t2 BPOs as a replacement care package.

CCP has argued that SOMER is a fitting partner because they are "honest", though studiously avoiding actually claiming they've investigated to determine SOMER is honest and also studiously avoiding promising they would do anything if SOMER just walked off with all the ships. Some might argue Goonswarm therefore does not qualify. To that, I have a simple argument: SOMER openly tells you that it will take your isk, tells you how, and then takes your isk. So too does Goonswarm tell you we're going to take your isk, tell you how we're going to take your isk (after all, our public wiki specifically tells you what's going to happen with your security deposit) and then we take your isk. That is just as honest, if not more honest, than SOMER: after all, our odds are public while you have to do a little math to figure out SOMER's.

Do the right thing. Give Goonswarm hundreds of billions of isk. Nay, give us trillions: we are better than SOMER and deserve greater CCP largesse. Thank you for your time, and the sabre bpos we so richly deserve.