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.

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.

Thank you ... you now convinced me to not renew my subscription.

In the same sense you could say that CCP didn't support SOMER, the players did :). Not trying to be a smartass, I promise, ...just a little late night philosophy

The vibe I got from this post:

Guess who DNSBLACK is in this.

Ill give you a hint, hes BLACK.

The moment has come...

Thank you CCP for taking away my motivation to play Eve Online!

Somer blink actually cannot be blamed, because it is CCP alone allowing their lottery business.

I dont care about the few thousand dollars i put into plexes and collector editions..

The thing what makes me very sad is, that you took away the joy i had playing eve, which is.. i mean was such a great universe for a virtual life.

I know nobody cares, just wanted to let you know CCP and maybe i am not the only one... :(

"GM Nythanos wrote:
Warnings include information stating that additional violations can lead to further action being taken up to and including a permanent ban if violations continue to be committed, such as:
"Please refrain from such activities in the future or we may take further action against your account, up to and including a permanent ban."

The other option is that we don't inform a player that additional action may be taken for future violations and just act if they continue but that's hardly ideal for anyone. It's better to let players know that they need to stop such activities since if they don't we may have to take additional action beyond warning them.


If a player receives a warning and has questions or concerns regarding it they are welcome to file a ticket and we can assist them with the matter accordingly."

LOL This is Irony and I think this is what the eve player base is telling you CCP community team.

I'm sorry if this offended you, was certainly not my intention. But it may be that we have slightly differing philosophies on what constitutes sponsoring an event and I was mostly just trying to highlight that difference. Note that I'm not talking about any specific entity here or any specific case but rather the overall point of whether a profit making enterprise can actually be seen as sponsoring something with a portion of the money they get from their profit making enterprise since they get the money from others. I think it can since it obtains the right to decide where that money goes once it's legally acquired it. Of course, everyone is always free to have their reservations about individual cases based on whatever factors matter to them. Just to add an example CCP has supported charities time and again and we are a company that has a board and investors and is expected to do well financially. Of course that support would never be possible without you, the players, so maybe we both have a point :). Anyway...philosophy aside, I'll address your questions.

1. We didn't because we were, at the time, treating this as business as usual. We don't generally bring individual reward or prize ideas up with the CSM. But looking back, if we had...maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation so there's that...
We

2. No special reason we didn't have one this time. We'll definitely have one for the winter summit.

You've asked for more clarifications a few times before in this thread and I-¦m not sure how I can clarify this to your satisfaction. I think it's fairly well covered in my reply why we thought it would make sense to explore a relationship with them during a time when we are thinking a lot about more tournaments and competitive events. If you just plain don't like lottery sites or SOMER in particular then of course you're just going to disagree with that judgement call and that's perfectly natural.

To answer the fansite question, they haven't been a registered fansite but we work with other types of enterprises than registered fansites.

Well, look at it on the bright side. At least you have puppets like the CSM members and CCP Guard being sent to this thread by the chief marketing officer and company stakeholders to try and pour some water in the fire, just to close themselves in hearts and back out again when the real matters start being discussed

Must be tough for CSM'ers and Guard to run errands giving out the body to the manifest and trying to clean up the sh*t others make

Blink credit = blink credit.

The fact that it's portrayed in isk value is irrelevant. It's being used for ease of reference. They could equally use Ladybirds as the named currency, but that would confuse everyone.

Isk can be converted into Blink Credits, but Blink credits cannot be converted (directly) to Isk.

Let's take a look at what the EULA has to say about it:

EVE Online-« End User License Agreement

6. CONDUCT

B. Selling Items and Objects

You may not transfer, sell or auction, or buy or accept any offer to transfer, sell or auction (or offer to do any of the foregoing), any content appearing within the Game environment, including without limitation characters, character attributes, items, currency, and objects, other than via a permitted Character Transfer as described in section 3 above. You may not encourage or induce any other person to participate in such a prohibited transaction. The buying, selling or auctioning (or any attempt at doing so) of characters, character attributes, items, currency, or objects, whether through online auctions, newsgroups, postings on message boards or any other means is prohibited by the EULA and a violation of CCP's proprietary rights in the Game.

Although I agree there was a degree of uptick due to the prizes, you'll see a similar uptick for all of their celebrations - including a far bigger uptick during their 1Q when they had titans as prizes.



And how many of those transactions include people who had a problem with it? How many hundreds of blinks would have to be rolled back, most of which would be for people who play blink for fun/winnings and not for the minimal number who came specifically for those two ships. Yet you talk about fair....


Ninja edit:
The only way to tell to any degree of accuracy would be how many NEW accounts were created to SOMER Blink from the time the prizes were announced to the time they were withdrawn - and how many of them stopped playing blink immediately after the withdrawal was announced.

Somer are giving you back some of the profit they make selling GTC in the form of Blink Credits. It could be argued that since they don't have to do this and could just keep the profits its not RMT and they're just giving you free credits.

The reality is that by giving away credits and losing some of their GTC profits to the occasional winner who cashes out, they're making it a lot more attractive to buy the GTC through them and thus creating more profits than they lose.

It's not really that complicated, but it's probably over the head of someone entertained by mashing F5 and clicking Blink!.

A quick recap for you. This is not really about somer or even secrecy. Both these are still important though. It is about transparency, the wtf value of stuffz given out, the lack of all eve players ability to participate, questions about the fairness of this and CCP's inability to explain who gets what and why, and CCP's out-and-out endorsing of any entity (or player) to name but a few of the issues that arose. It is about trust. What else have CCP given out that no one knows about? Do you trust CCP to be honest about what they have given out after all this? I know I dont trust what CCP Guard said earlier about secret give aways ; 'what have you given away secretly ccp guard?', "Secretly...nothing. ", yet more weasel words and he could be thinking that it is not secret as *someone* knew; tell us what has been given out, when and why and dont try to "jedi mind trick" us by saying you answered this when you did not as the answer we want is a list containing who/when/why and nothing else will do. I want to hear from IA about this; how, why and when their mandate to protect the game from this sort of thing changed. I will say a little about the Somer problems. Rmt is important as many see what somer do as rmt, somer being given stuffz and endorsed because they sponsor things is a rather spurious argument, somer making a profit is fine but making a profit without actually playing the game is a lot less fine. The values of the ships, and prizes, is fairly critical for me. I have made around two trillion in assets in about nine years, for CCP to give somer 600 billion in Scorps, easily 2 trillion+ in five unique ships for nothing is like a kick in the balls to me. (changed to 3 unique ships and 2 all expenses paid trips, still with a potential worth of, what, 1.4 trillion?) Can you understand this? Nine years gameplay versus a few server clicks to generate some space pixels. If you cannot see why this is wrong then we have no common ground. Dont get me started on how the actual wealth it made somer was possibly 35 trillion (which becomes close to a potential eight hundred thousand US dollars of rmt, oh, and the endorsement and advertising from CCP made them how much in real life cash?). Every answer from CCP is like a jedi mind trick. Getting the information we want from you is like pulling teeth. Will give you an example to illustrate this, here are three easy questions for you to (not?) answer... Big list of all the give aways please, by this I mean ships or things created by CCP that were not given to the entire playerbase. You have said nothing was given away in secret, so because it is not a secret there is nothing stopping you from telling us. Pop it all in this thread in one convenient post for people to see, as it is not a secret. If the list is too massive then a link to where you have published it will do. Can we see that which is not secret? Could you could also tell us how many GTC's have been sold by Somer (or their related gtc selling site). What is their $ value profit per GTC sold and how many have they sold; how real life profitable are they? I have two trillion I could convert to ISK so how do I get to become an affiliate to rmt my isk as gtc's for $48,000? Three easy questions to answer: what has been given away, how much has somer/their-rmt-site made and how do I get on the isk to $ conversion gravy train. Let's see how CCP do on these easy questions.

While I agree with your point, I would like to point out that the total value of gifts given to SOMER is worth roughly the same amount that was awarded to PL for winning the last alliance tournament (~5 trilion ISK).

"These new cruisers will be unique assets that will be owned only by these players. We will not give these out again."
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=281298&find=unread

You have some reading to do.

First I agree that there needs to be a policy, as the mistake in the first place is to rely on "common sense". I work in the medical field, and we have risk management folks and institutional ethics folks who's very job is to approve of certain relationships with other organizations to be sure no conflicts of interest exist. Clearly CCP also needs someone to review these sorts of things from an ethical standpoint. That requires not only policy but a department of folks which they may or may not have. The CSM can HELP, but remember that 'popular' opinion may not always equate to 'ethically right' (such as CCP Guard's assertion that they were correct in what they did due to the popularity of SOMERblink).Ethical clarity does not, unfortunately, come naturally to some folks - and to be fair some issues can be complicated.

As for the rock and a hard place - this isn't so difficult. The fact is, that what comes hard in ethics is not necessarily deciding what is right, but simply doing what you decide. The answers here are easy - acting on them them is only hard if CCP feels intimidated by SOMERblink. But the fact is, they are RMT'ing and they should be dealt with the same as any other RMT group. CCP needs to remain "above the fray" or they cannot be trusted to properly adjudicate their own game. It isn't difficult, you just need to do it.


Reminds me of something I once heard:


"Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences." - Midori Koto


"The moment you lose your honor, that's when your learn the hard way. Your choice, ALWAYS come back around." - CCP

Miss Ladybird's suggestion for resolution of the issue seems appropriate, in case CCP's verdict deems Somer Blink's actions illegitimate and forbids other entities/players to engage in similar conduct.

Action number 3), as Careby observed, may be nonetheless impossible to execute without affecting/reimbursing foreign players who might have already bought those ships.

Regarding point 5) it is my opinion that 1 week suspension would be too lenient as punishment for a RMT offense, as that kind of suspension is normally what CCP apllies to simple misconducts like player verbal abuse offenses.
Furthermore I agree that not only Somer Blink is to be held accountable for carrying on with the misconduct, but a fact finding process should also be conducted by CCP's internal affairs department to investigate the alleged involvement of CCP employees with Somer Blink. Neglecting the enforcement of the game's EULA rules of conduct (if that turns out to be the case) and even supporting and advertising the fraudulent scheme are unnacceptable actions that should not remain unpunished, in the same way that other similar actions performed by other CCP employees in the past did not.

This is however one of the possible outcome scenarios for CCP.

Well I would hope SOMER would get the same treatment as any other RMT entity.

Anything else might kill CCP and EVE.

Although I will admit that the manner in which they are conducting this RMT and micro transaction scheme is a bit complicated and people have had a tendency to overlook it.

If CCP started selling IW Scorps and SOE ships in the Aurum store the game would sink in a week.

But sell them through SOMERblink and it slips in under everyone's nose.

I'd like to see questions about contests that are open to everyone, contests that require some sort of simple registration, facebook like/tweet, or that require ISK deposits. I see those 4 cases rather differently.

honestly, that 'survey' crap just felt like a slap in the face to me

The other thing that was not covered is transparency. Now I personally would like to see a web register available for all players to see, for all of the gifts that CCP gives out. This register to be updated before they give out these gifts for example "Ishukone Watch Scorpions 30 to Somer blink" and then list why they are being given them and a date a week in advance" or "50 plex for EvE Vegas to be given at random" with the reason promotional and a date a week in advance. This will make this whole thing transparent to the playerbase and make CCP think before it decides to hand out 300-600 billion in ship to a for profit site's employees.

A quick note on Somers RMT and the other RMT sites following the same pattern, personally I think they should just stop offering the fake convertible isk but given CCPs past record in relation to RMT and how they have never before been lenient. They must do what they have done before, otherwise they have condemned so peoples RMT while favoring others RMT because it used a slightly different model and the stench from that will clear the hall.

Was getting an increase in traffic from forums.eveonline.com, and I thought I would come and see what all the fuss was about. Wow, this is a little over the top.... and this response will most likely not be popular.

-Gifts-
CCP is a business. The sole purpose of a business is to make money. If CCP wants to give gifts to users that are helping them be profitable, and in turn keep churning out content for YOU, then that's their prerogative.
I would imagine if YOU sold thousands upon thousands of GTC's, as Somer has done, then you would get some tasty gifts as well. What's next? A rage post about how CCP "secretly" gave all their sales staff a Christmas bonus last year, and didn't run it by the community first? Common guys, let's get some perspective here.

This is about Money. Actual real money. This is not little league where we don't keep score and everyone is a winner. This is business.
Want free stuff? Spend 6 months of your life coding a fan site, another 6 months getting users to sign up, then monetize it by selling GTC's and then spend the rest of your time, updating and maintaining it.

Sounds like a lot of work for a few free space pixels doesn't it?

-Prizes-

I would love some stuff to give away to my users from CCP, but Out of Game Items just wont work.

80% of my users won't even enter an email address (so they can reset their passwords automatically) Now you expect them to give their names and addresses? Not to mention the time I would have to spend to package and ship them a t-shirt? Spending 10 dollars in time, materials, and shipping all for what? A 2 dollar piece of a GTC sale? It doesn't make much sense does it?

In game items/isk/plex are the quickest, most cost effective way I have to reward my users.

-RMT-

I agree this is a grey area and the language could be clearer, BUT looking at the EULA... the current system I, and other sites, employ DOES seem to be within the rules. It would be nice to have some clearer language though...

We implemented our "Credit for GTC Purchase" program for a couple of reasons.
1) We had to, to be competitive with other sites.
2) There is really no other "thing" that we can offer as incentives to our users to purchase time codes from us.

We will continue to offer the credits for GTC purchases. Unless it becomes specifically forbidden by a change in language in the EULA, or we are asked to stop by the owners of the game.

Edited my post for you....also, just because I own an eve lotto site, doesn't make me biased. I am a fully grown human capable of changing my views based on intelligent discussion and reasoning. Calling one biased means I will never change my opinion. This is not the case, and as I have said, If CCP asks, or the EULA changes I will fully comply with the new rules.

That's the only explanation I can see for why you'd be satisfied with his response of basically "shut up and go away"

You missed the satire in his response

Good one... lets keep it civil shall we?


Im not a journalist....and I did edit my original post for you.



As I stated multiple times previously... I AGREE THE LANGUAGE COULD BE MORE CLEAR...

As it stands now... I don't sell isk for money.... I don't even sell time codes. I point users to a certified reseller that does, in turn I receive a small percentage of each time code sold, which doesn't even cover my costs.

As an incentive to get my users to purchase through the certified reseller of my choice, I offer them credits that are good for playing games on my website. Playing the games is not a guarantee of ISK, it is possible (however unlikely) that a user could purchase 1 ticket per day and not win anything.

I think if I was actually the Reseller AND I gave ACTUAL ISK bonuses to players that bought time codes from me, then there would be a EULA violation. However, this is not the case.

Once again, If the language changes...and the program is deemed a violation, I would comply with the new changes.

I would love for you to explain exactly what it was in my post that in any way said "shut up and go away". If that is what you read from it, then you are so blinded with rage that nothing I say will get through your perceptual filters.

I merely pointed out that repeated angry posts saying the same thing were counterproductive. Nobody likes being yelled at.

I'm going to take my own advice and not belabor this particular point any further. Instead, I will devote my time to answering the concerns of the constructive posters in this thread, such as Frying Doom.

We are planning on doing two surveys so that each can focus on one aspect of the can of worms that has been opened. Also so we do not create some monstrous 45 minute wall of text nobody has the endurance for.

The surveys will likely be posted or linked in the forums but CCP may also choose to run a parallel one similar to customer surveys they do, now and again, to get opinions from beyond the forums. This is a good idea because a self selected sample for a survey always makes the results questionable although at times such methodology is unavoidable.

There will be 'grey area' choices because not everything is black and white.

I do look forward to seeing both the survey and your opinions on it.

m

Moving your thread is not endorsement, it's making sure that it's in the correct forum for the topic.

Discussion is still ongoing internally regarding this kind of practice.

Reference to any endorsement of this by CCP Staff have been removed until an decision is made regarding it rather than misinformation.

Don't put words in my mouth in future.

DarkDecay, I know, however there are additional rules regarding Character sale when compared to any other type. That's my point and if CCP so chooses, they could use those additional rules to justify wielding their mighty pork sword. hence why I said it's a shame that dns didn't do it with an iScorp and not a character as that pitches players into the potential "legal" rmt.

Unfortunately, there's a very good chance that the people who bought these characters (assuming this isn't a massive joke based off the EULA) that CCP is going to ban these characters almost immediately. Part of the TOS is that your account/characters can be banned at any time, for any reason or no reason at all.

EDIT:

However, my law professor who specializes in contractual law pointed out something about this: I won't go into specifics, but she mentioned that there is already an issue with legality in the United States concerning this, as well as in South Korea. In essence, the issue stems from transactions between both real-world currency and virtual currency. Second, assuming the people who have the accounts banned can prove that it was due to an inability to understand the EULA--which, I might add, is very plausible given the fact CCP can't simplify it for us in a ******* month--then there's a breach of contract on CCP's part for refusing to adequately and fairly, in an impartial manner, execute compliance with the contract.

Long story short: if CCP does this, someone (or some people!) are going to make far more than $2,500 in a court of law.

Unfortunately, there's a very good chance that the people who bought these characters (assuming this isn't a massive joke based off the EULA) that CCP is going to ban these characters almost immediately. Part of the TOS is that your account/characters can be banned at any time, for any reason or no reason at all.

EDIT:

However, my law professor who specializes in contractual law pointed out something about this: I won't go into specifics, but she mentioned that there is already an issue with legality in the United States concerning this, as well as in South Korea. In essence, the issue stems from transactions between both real-world currency and virtual currency. Second, assuming the people who have the accounts banned can prove that it was due to an inability to understand the EULA--which, I might add, is very plausible given the fact CCP can't simplify it for us in a ******* month--then there's a breach of contract on CCP's part for refusing to adequately and fairly, in an impartial manner, execute compliance with the contract.

Long story short: if CCP does this, someone (or some people!) are going to make far more than $2,500 in a court of law.

A bit off topic, but relevant I think given we have been talking about of conflicts of interest:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3787658#post3787658

Not sure that devs posting in and bumping recruitment threads is exactly the best idea. First, the simple act of dev-tagging one of these threads is like a bit of an endorsement (in fact I don't think I've ever seen one dev tagged before). Second, the dev pretty much reveals himsel to be a member of the corp in question. And there is the simple fact he violates the forum rules, not that it doesn't happen in that forum, just not usually with a dev tag.

Minor in the grand scheme of things - almost entertaining - but it certainly made me roll my eyes. Just goes to show you that training your folks in conflicts of interest is important stuff.