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.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?
