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[Silver Night]

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).

[kalaratiri]

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.

[Samira Kernher]

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.

[Aedre Lafisques]

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)

[Karmilla Strife]

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.

[DeadRow]

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.

[Esna Pitoojee]

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.

[Norrin Ellis]

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.

[Lyn Farel]

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 ?

[Aedre Lafisques]

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.

[Odelya]

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.

[Esna Pitoojee]

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).

[Jace]

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. 

[Samira Kernher]

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.

[Lyn Farel]

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. 

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 ?   

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.