All I would expect you to do even if you don't yourself feel irrelevant is to convey to CCP it is being perceived that way.

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.

In re: perceptions. All I would expect you to do even if you don't yourself feel irrelevant is to convey to CCP it is being perceived that way. Like I said earlier, I don't blame the CSM for this. It's CCP that seems to be returning to their old ways. Claiming Ignorance on CCPs part is hardly passable any longer given they have 10 years of experience in dealing with what will and won't cause a riot, and a group of players dedicated (and elected) to help them NOT do stupid things like this.

I also agree in re: accomplishments can be overshadowed by a few bad events like these. The biggest problem I have with it is this seems to be an increasing problem, and not one that is diminishing.

So where the complaints or forums post from the CSM for the previous prizes given away, unless you are saying that none of the CSM were aware of the prizes for the Q1 Celebrations?

aside from the one(s) that are just angling for later jobs at CCP (no name(s)).

e: Odds are you're wrong. Especially if I'm one of your candidates.

You'd have saved us both a lot of time and effort if you'd said this up front.

I imagine CCP is kinda confused as this isn't the first time they've given prizes to Somer to give away. For Somer's one quadrillion celebration CCP gave them 4 Collectors Editions and some Ishukone Watch Scorpions to give away using this same giveaway mechanic and nobody seemed to care about it then. Is it the large in-game value that makes this different?

so this clearly anything but a "developing program" considering that CCP has previously given things to somer blink with no strings attached under the assumption that they'd give them away to people on their site

i'm not sure what you're getting at, other than telling everybody that CCP are lying to the playerbase through their teeth, again, and presenting more evidence of CCP's favoritism towards one particular player

Poorly twisted and avoiding my original question

People can quite clearly see what I am asking and that is why did nobody have any issues before but now they do?

Poorly twisted and avoiding my original question

People can quite clearly see what I am asking and that is why did nobody have any issues before but now they do?

Third party developers and event organizers add additional features and content to the game that CCP does not have the resources or will to develop and maintain themselves. We'd be less well off without them.

Tossing them a few things here and there to help bring more people to their services is a good thing.

I'd like to see the people who make things like EHQ, Eve-Kill, EFT etc thrown a few gifts in the process.

We also want to assure you that we are working closely with CCP's legal team to ensure all legal concerns resulting from this event, and future events like it, are addressed.

as it turns out a lot of people are indeed surprised to find out that somer blink was gifted items by CCP not one, but twice

not all of us are gambling addicts who compulsively f5 for promos and celebrations, so forgive us for not being aware of every single thing somer blink has ever given away

Considering the amount of people who play Somerblink I find it very hard to believe that only a handful of players knew about the Q1 Gifts, especially considering a couple of well know Eve Bloggers posted about it and its was on both EN24 and Reddit.

So from what I can see, every response thus far from CCP has indicated they are going to continue with the favouritism, with handing control of special EVE items/events over to a player/group who are known to exclude players at their discretion, which forces players to use their third party site and purchase a GTC (I'm a bit murky on this one actually, but it sounded like thats how you had to initially get credit?), and a group whose systems and services are not public to either CCP or the players (and as such, no guarantees, like the ones Navigator made about the history or trustworthiness of the player group can be made)

well my response to that is thus:

-2 subscriptions.

For whatever it might be worth to you, I didn't know about it.

I still don't see the point behind this whole line of argumentation though. Just because something bad happened in the past we can't be arguing about something bad (in fact even worse because of the increased value) happening now? That doesn't make sense to me. The only thing this could IMO explain is why CCP might not have expected backlash, but I'm already assuming good intentions on CCP's side.

If Somerblink is so evil as some people portray them to be why are they so popular?

All I see are goons metagamining in this thread because they didn't get the shiny and somer blink did. I don't play lotteries so I don't give a rats arse about it. Also attempting to tie the game down to US law when it's clearly an international product is just stupid. If it's not legal where you live don't play...

This issue has pretty much nothing to do with participating in lotteries. But thanks for letting us know you don't care about it at all. I'm sure many, myself included, were wondering.

All I'm doing is outlining the fact the goons are metagaming in order to get stuff they'd quite like to have, but is being allocated to someone else. These are the same people that keep on screaming 'sandbox' every five minutes. You can rest assured if the goons had been allocated the stuff and somer blink hadn't been there wouldn't be any threads about this at all.

We want no-one to have special treatment. If you had even the slightest sense of irony it should be tingling right about now, since it was a very determined posting effort by GSF members back in the day that stopped CCP just sweeping the T20 scandal under the rug.

You people are so blinded by your ridiculous hatred you don't even know when we're helping you.