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General Discussion => General Non-RP EVE Discussion => Topic started by: Esna Pitoojee on 20 Aug 2014, 20:37
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So, for those of you who haven't seen this, it's been glorious rage, tears, rejoicing, and :smug: all rolled into one.
SOMERblink was a gambling service largely based on the IGB. The idea was, in short, that you deposit ISK and then use that to buy tickets in fast-paced lotteries ("blinks") for ships, PLEXes, etc. It was very smoothly coded, with players able to spawn new blinks for particular ships or items they wanted if one wasn't up; in general it was thought of as one of the most addicting attention-sinks in the game, and was wildly popular with tons of ISK being handled on a regular basis.
Back in October of 2013, SOMER got into some drama when they offered a program in which players who bought PLEX through their affiliate - granting SOMER a RLcash reward for the referral - were given a bonus Blink credit. It was argued that this largely amounted to RMT, with SOMER converting their ISK into RLcash. CCP agreed, and shut down the program... though not before SOMER thumbed their nose at CCP by offering a HUGE bonus to Blink credit in reward for PLEX purchases in the final days of the program.
Now, up to the current date. SOMER recently introduced a program in which players who purchased a PLEX from an affiliate - again granting SOMER a RLcash reward - could redeem their PLEX with SOMER for ISK. The catch was, SOMER guaranteed a purchase price 45m above the going market price. So, for instance, if the Jita price was 790m, SOMER would purchase it for 835m ISK. Additionally, SOMER posted a message stating that this was "approved by CCP". Again the outcries of rage went up.
CCP was not amused. It turned out that the outline which SOMER had given CCP for approval stated that buyers would not receive any additional reward for buying a PLEX through SOMER - but, they were getting the 45m-above-market bonus, a seeming clear violation of this. CCP went into full-on investigation mode, SOMER got hissy, and the outrage rose.
TL;DR - Banhammer'd for numerous TOS violations (https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=367505).
Longer version: While they refused to comment on any charges of RMTing, CCP said that the program "could be used" for RMT purposes; they were also upset by the "CCP approved this" message (which they felt was inaccurately describing SOMER as a trusted CCP affiliate, an idea they were keen to shake off after earlier accusations of CCP favoritism towards SOMER) and were also upset that - in an act of apparent frustration with CCP - SOMER had published logs of a conversation between a CCP representative and himself, a violation of the TOS rule against doing so.
Result was a ban across all accounts for Somerseht Mahm, the creator of SOMERblink. Action against anyone who just played Blinks or worked for them will not be taken. It comes a bit late, though, because Somerseht had - in a "you can't fire me, I quit!" kind of thing - already announced the closure of SOMERblink. His parting message was really quite amusing; it had lots of "but CCP said so, you guys are being mean!" vibes coming off it.
I dunno. What is it about piles of ISK that makes people think they can blatantly RMT freely?
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If there's a system, someone somewhere will try to game the system. Some people are really good at it. Some people are really bad at it. Some are gracious losers when caught. Others are...well, like Somerseht Mahm.
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Humanity remains as such.
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The people setting it up do not surprise me, but for some silly reason I still find it a little surprising that there are so many customers. Same for the ISK poker sites that rig the tables and allow collaboration. I just do not get why people participate.
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I only sunk about 2 and a half bil into it over the course of a few years, and haven't logged in since like, December.
I'm having a nice moment of schadenfreude over the whole thing, really.
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The people setting it up do not surprise me, but for some silly reason I still find it a little surprising that there are so many customers. Same for the ISK poker sites that rig the tables and allow collaboration. I just do not get why people participate.
Gambling. The potential of winning, however small, produces a great enough high to overshadow the fear of losing, however big. I think some describe it as a disease.
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I made quite a bit off of SomerBlink for how little I put in, and I found it a rather entertaining past time. Kind of sad that it's shut down, since it was a very nicely designed and very functional website.
Oh well.
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Gambling. The potential of winning, however small, produces a great enough high to overshadow the fear of losing, however big. I think some describe it as a disease.
I understand gambling as a whole, it is just gambling on sites that have no regulation that confuses me. It is guaranteed to be even more rigged than regular gambling. Somer's site had been shown to release as winnings an amount of ISK abysmally small compared to what it brought in - a number nowhere near how many winnings he claimed it had given away. And some of the poker sites have been shown to have rigged tables. But what would you expect from random sites put up by third parties that have no regulation whatsoever?
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Gambling. The potential of winning, however small, produces a great enough high to overshadow the fear of losing, however big. I think some describe it as a disease.
I understand gambling as a whole, it is just gambling on sites that have no regulation that confuses me. It is guaranteed to be even more rigged than regular gambling. Somer's site had been shown to release as winnings an amount of ISK abysmally small compared to what it brought in - a number nowhere near how many winnings he claimed it had given away. And some of the poker sites have been shown to have rigged tables. But what would you expect from random sites put up by third parties that have no regulation whatsoever?
The emotions, especially those relating to the anticipation of winning, still applies on gambling sites. It is known that under the influence of strong emotions, people do stupid things. What you feel can overpower what you know, and you end up doing things you should had known better not to do.
Some people are more vulnerable to feeling such emotion and reacting to it. These are the guys who lose big on Somerblink or casino even though the slightest knowledge about probability would had told them that the chance of winning is abysmal. Some people are far less vulnerable and would quit the table before losing their life's savings.
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I'm having a nice moment of schadenfreude over the whole thing, really.
On a related note, I'm hoping the guilty party releases some kind of grocery list of unique items that they have incidentally purged from the game. I assume it's too late for something verifiable like an API'd asset list, but damn, I am curious.
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Well, there goes my last remaining method of making ISK.
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supposedly, somer has hired people to ddos ccp's servers.
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Would not doubt it.
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That would explain all of the forum problems over the last couple days. Posts getting eaten, huge delays in anything happening.
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Well, there goes my last remaining method of making ISK.
How the hell do you do money in a lottery ? It's mathematically skewed towards the organizer, or he would lose money.
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I think I made, overall, a bit. Mostly be severely limiting how much I played regular blinks, and being very lucky for a while on Promos. Basically, most of my time on Blink I played it as if Promos were the only game (facilitated by an early 1b blink credit promo win. At one point I was a solid 1/150 for promo wins, which is pretty good). Certainly the regular blinks were terrible odds, even as gambling goes (certainly quite a bit worse than most games at something like a RL casino).
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Well, there goes my last remaining method of making ISK.
How the hell do you do money in a lottery ? It's mathematically skewed towards the organizer, or he would lose money.
Luck.
I know people in RvB who've made hundreds of billions through paying 12m for a ticket and winning a faction battleship when the draw came through. Sure, you will lose (on average) more than you win, but it was certainly possible to make money through SOMER if you already had a decent amount of isk to start with.
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What Silver said. Play just enough low budget normal blinks to build up tokens and then just watch dilligently for promos. Just getting lucky once or twice gets you several hundred million, which quickly makes up for what you spent on the normal blinks if you avoided any of the big items.
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I was fascinated by Blink, it was a great idea - gambling, yes - the house always wins, but that's the brilliant part really. It's not really scamming in that sense (a socially recognized, RL use of money). However, there seems to have been additional shenanigans, so no sympathy there - that part's not so brilliant.
I made some money off it - I was really sure to keep track... Gamed tokens and promos some - I came out on top out of sheer determination, I guess as these sorts of things go. Walking away is important at a certain point.
And when you have a lot of money (:/) it can be fun to throw it around for 'fun' and see what you get, so I get that, too. The blink system itself was fast and well thought out. I'm actually disappointed they're gone, and couldn't keep their hands out of grey-er business. I guess that goes to show why so many shady movies are set in casinos. (laugh)
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It was pretty much luck. For the normal blinks you had a 12.5% chance of winning. I was lucky enough to have a 13.56% chance and over time that translated to 5.5billion isk of net profit.
Well, there goes my last remaining method of making ISK.
How the hell do you do money in a lottery ? It's mathematically skewed towards the organizer, or he would lose money.
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I think I was up around 17bil from Blink before I stopped playing for good (bar promos that are free).
The whole drama was, as ever, a bunch of people whining loudly until something gets done. And it worked, again.
RIP.
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I think Aedre summed up my personal thoughts on the matter. I never begrudged Somerseht Mahn's brilliant success in running a smooth and effective gambling site. People went in fully knowing it was a gamble, and any losses were no ones fault but their own. It was a smooth site with very well-thought-out operation and a nice front end. I also approved of his more philanthropic ventures, particularly sponsoring some of the player tournament-style things (which, of course, was probably the point of his doing that). So yes, I will be rather sad that it is gone (and hope that a more responsible party pops up to take their place).
At the same time, Somer got a bingo on the "things you don't do and stay unbanned" board; his behavior as the investigation went on did not help one bit either. So, I can't really say that I'm upset he got banned; for all the things I've seen people get whacked for, this is one of the ones I can say largely deserved it.
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As a minion for another gambling service, I was never terribly bothered by Blink's legitimate successes. I was only really bothered when CCP gave them rare items in secret, as if they knew it was a bad idea and really didn't want the community at large to find out. When the end was nigh, I can't say that I was particularly impressed with Somer's attitude, either, which seems to have been "if I can't monetize this, I'll just shut it down."
I never actually played there. I considered the house's take to be set excessively high (generally in excess of 30%). To my knowledge, Blink was one of the most expensive services in the EVE gambling industry. That said, plenty of my friends loved it and had a great time there, and oddly enough, every single one of them seems to have come up positive at Blink (which raises a red flag for me because I'm EVE paranoid). Once again, the apparent attitude that it was only worthwhile for Somer to the extent that it could be monetized is rather contemptible, as though having a successful in-game business that really made a lot of players happy (and earned Somer more ISK than probably anyone in EVE) just wasn't good enough.
On the bright side, that huge void will eventually be filled by someone (or several someones). Anyone with the talent and resources to do something similar will be scrambling to be the next Blink precisely because Somer had more ISK than God. History shows that EVE players will line up to gamble their hard-earned ISK for a shot at quick, easy winnings, even if the cost of service is quite high.
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Yeah everyone seems to magically say that they do positive with them, and that since it started something like 6 years ago already. Where is the silent majority that loses ?
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I'm gonna guess nobody wants to admit they're the guy that lost at gambling - and the vocal ones are probably the ones that wrote articles about how Somer was a scam because of the 30% thing and the fact that it was 'rigged' for the house to win, calls for CCP to shut it down for abusing them and all that. People who win at it will usually say so probably because it's actually kinda hard to 'win' at gambling and we're all kinda proud of ourselves for managing it - it feels a lot like dodging a bullet :p It's another story to tell! It just goes to show how much we expected to lose, and did it anyway.
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When they had a promo a long time ago, I received some credits and won a few Cynabals. But I also lost what I gained in subsequent tries to maximise my luck. I am not fond of gambling. Now they are gone, and I don’t care.
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Oh, I'll freely admit I never got a cent out of Blink - but then, I only put in 100m and stretched that credit out for a long time (I think I still had ~50m when he shut down) by making particular 'safe' bets and taking advantage of every bonus they offered, ever. Considering 100m is less than the cost of a welp battleship these days, I can't say I'm terrifically upset at not seeing it again.
That said, I think the reasons we're not seeing more people admitting losses is that most of those who lost money were people who came in, put some small value in (perhaps similar to my 100m) and quickly gambled it own to 0 with no wins. Faced with that disappointing showing, they simply quit and never came back; the people who did stick around were those who either won something back quickly or like myself learned to stretch their deposit for a long time. They are more likely to view Blink as a reasonable risk, and so we don't hear them moaning about losses because they either understood the risk or got something back out of it (even if just the enjoyment of gambling).
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There were entire websites dedicated to keeping track of the "scam" of Blink. The loud losers were definitely there. Once he unwisely made public a live tracker of how much ISK had been won on the site and it was nowhere near what the site claimed on the front page, you started getting the loud detractors that never stopped. Because, obviously, false advertising is a new thing on the internet and is equal to scamming. :roll:
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It's really based on how much you put in. The site is designed around giving players a lot of free credit from easy achievements to rope them in, then cutting off the free credit so that the players are forced to infuse their own money to keep playing. Ideally they've gotten the 'addiction' by then and want more.
For me personally, I played only so long as I had free credit. I put in enough to complete all the easy, early achievements, which gave me enough credit to keep playing for awhile more. I just converted most blinks I won into more credit so I wouldn't have to put in any more of my personal funds. Once I lost all my free credit, I largely stopped playing aside from a cheap 2m infusion every 48 hours to keep being able to participate in the promos.
The bigger gain for me came from promos, where I got rather lucky early on as I won two within my first five. Due to the free credit, you gain quite a lot of tokens to use on promos early on. Again, once you finish all the easy achievements those easy tokens dry up, so continuing to play after that point will result in a much higher investment.
The people who lose more are probably the people who play over a longer period of time, when they are actually forced to put in a significant amount of their own money. The idiom, "quit while you're ahead," is a very wise one to have when engaged in these kind of games.
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There were entire websites dedicated to keeping track of the "scam" of Blink. The loud losers were definitely there. Once he unwisely made public a live tracker of how much ISK had been won on the site and it was nowhere near what the site claimed on the front page, you started getting the loud detractors that never stopped. Because, obviously, false advertising is a new thing on the internet and is equal to scamming. :roll:
What is ridiculous is not loud losers crying for false advertising since it's legitimate to do so, what is ridiculous are their motives hidden behind 'noble ideals'.
But heh, what were the expecting out of an unregulated site, and even more, in Eve ? :roll:
I have always found Eve interesting as a social experiment, how clueless some people can be, while others prove to be perfectly unethical because they can. That's dystopian alright.
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I think that could just be considered 'life.'
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I was a patron of blink. I had to pay for gametime since I didn't earn enough in ISK to PLEX my way into a sub, so I thought, "why not get something extra with your GTC?" I took the credit and wagered only on T2 frig hulls. It worked out.
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I think that could just be considered 'life.'
In life you have law.
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In life you have law.
(http://i.imgur.com/86Q1xjL.jpg)
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(http://images.cryhavok.org/d/2855-1/Motivator+-+Confusion.jpg)
:D
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(http://i.imgur.com/86Q1xjL.jpg)
The one in the middle looks so fucking happy about having that thing on its head. :lol:
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I dunno. What is it about piles of ISK that makes people think they can blatantly RMT freely?
I dunno. People paying their mortgages with it? ;)
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I dunno. What is it about piles of ISK that makes people think they can blatantly RMT freely?
I dunno. People paying their mortgages with it? ;)
Hah, I remember that. I guess the urge to cash out on that scale and instantly I can (sort of) understand - greed is powerful, after all. SOMER's kind of thing, though, I still don't - there's no conceivable way he wasn't going to be noticed before he could make much.
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Sometimes it migth not even be greed, but necessity - and maybe not for mortgage volumes.
I mean, duh, look at me. If I wasn't so lazy in EVe, and also and possessing a sense of morality (and having dealign with it so long as a GM on several game servers fighting it) RMT would put food on my table and clothes on my back that disability money doesn't. Not everyone breaks a TOS just for buying yachts. ;)
Not to say that some don't buy yachts though. but if youre suddenly in a RL tight spot one day, take the chance and get away with it, the ease of success would erode any moral qualms as time goes on.
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Heh, actually wondered just a few days ago if Blink was still running. I stopped playing early march and since then have had virtually no contact with EVE.
I played alot on that site and lost alot. Then later i worked for them as a hauler, The payouts from that in addition to some large wins just before i started hauling for them put me decently in profit in the end. Good times...sigh...