So let us give some thought to how this could be handled in a more reasonable fashion. And how we can help make EVE last into the THIRD decade, shall we?

The following is a summary of CSM activity over the last few days regarding the SOMER Blink promotion.

The CSM was not consulted in advance about this promotion, so it was just as much a surprise to us as it was to the community. Our reaction was broadly similar to that expressed in the forums.

On Thursday the 26th, we received an update on the situation from CCP Dolan after our regular Stakeholder meeting with Team Five-0. Later in the day, we got a second update from CCP Dolan and CCP Manifest.

During those meetings, we outlined five areas of concern that we felt CCP's response should address. These were:

1. Reintroduction of historically important or unique ships.

2. Favoring one community fan site over others.

3. Trusting a community fan site, and more particularly, a player, with the task of selecting the winners.

4. Forcing players to use SOMER Blink in order to enter -- which may have legal consequences in some jurisdictions.

5. Providing direct benefit to a for-profit gambling fansite.

CCP Navigator's announcement on Thursday of changes to the prize structure has addressed (1), and details of the method of selecting winners (which we urge CCP to make public) leaves the CSM reasonably confident that the actual drawing will be fair, addressing issue (3).

Issues (2) and (5) are business decisions that CCP has the right to make. We think they are a mistake, and hope that the uproar over this issue will cause CCP to re-evaluate these policies for future promotions. Supporting groups that have a clear educational/public service focus in-game is one thing; supporting a group that is distinctly for-profit -- and one that can use the ISK it generates to secretly support in-game groups -- breeds distrust for CCP in the community.

However, the requirement that one must be a member of SOMER Blink in order to participate remains, and for a lottery with such significant prizes, is very troubling to us. Furthermore, the structure of the lottery, which encourages and rewards extensive use of SOMER Blink, may raise legal concerns in some jurisdictions. For example, in the United States, commercial lotteries cannot require the purchase of a product or service in order to receive an entry.

For this reason, we strongly suggest that the entry mechanic be adjusted as follows:

1) Members of SOMER Blink are automatically entered into the lottery and receive one ticket, regardless of how much they use the site.

2) An alternate method (such as posting in a particular thread) be used to allow people to enter who do not wish to become a member of SOMER Blink.

We further recommend that procedures be put in place to sanity-check future promotions to ensure that they are acceptable to the community.

On Friday morning we sent this statement to CCP for their comments, and on Friday evening David Reid (CCP Pokethulu, CCP's CMO) replied to us as follows (reproduced with permission):


The CSM will endeavor to keep the community informed as there are further developments in this issue, and as always, your input is most appreciated.

Sincerely,
The Members of the 8th Council of Stellar Management

Stickied on request of CSM. ISD Ezwal.

LOL at Eterne closing a thread about a CCP dev giving direct, secret gifts to individual players and referring us to this thread, which was a separate issue (granted both involved somer blink) entirely

good job, mate. Real smooth cover up

LOL at Eterne closing a thread about a CCP dev giving direct, secret gifts to individual players and referring us to this thread, which was a separate issue (granted both involved somer blink) entirely

good job, mate. Real smooth cover up

LOL at Eterne closing a thread about a CCP dev giving direct, secret gifts to individual players and referring us to this thread, which was a separate issue (granted both involved somer blink) entirely

good job, mate. Real smooth cover up

Posting here if only to say I'm still paying attention to this issue. I laughed when the only thing CCP could be bothered to do on the previous thread, after over 74 pages of customers expressing disapproval of their actions and requesting an official comment, was to shut the thread down and refer everyone to pages started as a result of completely separate topics.

I actually agree with the thread being closed as the subject had long been abandon and the thread had become nothing more then a few people sniping, flaming and trolling each other which is unfortunate.

If you do not want to get threads locked then simply do not respond to people who are clearly trolling / flaming as if they get no response they will quickly get bored and move on elsewhere.

Even if you think closing the thread was correct, why would CCP have not made a comment of their own before locking? I think that's all many of the posters with complaints were requesting for most of the weekend.

I'm still looking forward to how they respond to the fact that somer is known to ban people at their discretion (such as same IP address), and you are required to pay somer in order to partake.

There are plenty of people who pay their subscriptions and have accounts in good standing who were literally incapable of partaking in this give away, as the third party CCP gave control decided to exclude them.

That above all else is disgusting.

That would be true if you would buy tokens for Somer blink with real life money, which you don't. You use ISK to buy ticket in the lottery. While it is true, that there is a way to get ISK for real life money by means of buying a PLEX, there is still the issue, that there is no way to exchange the ISK back to real life money.

Eventhough it is true, Somer blink makes real life money, by a comission they get from linking people to the MarkeeDragon site, that is not directly related to the ISK people put into the site. So your analogy is not entirely correct and I still would say it is not a commercial lottery. But to each their own opinion.

Mr Reid said



So no, it isn't just ask and get. As to it being a new thing look back through the larger player meets and events. Swag has been happening for more than the past month. It is just this made the news because of the scale of the swag.

We (CSM) are working on it as the above letter shows. They (CCP) is working on it as well.

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