Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

CCP Has Learned From The T20 Scandal

Back in the day a CCP dev, going by the name of T20, was caught secretly handing out items of great value to an in-game pal. Band of Brothers, specifically. The result of the scandal was the formation of the CSM, a player-watchdog organization, of sorts, to make sure that this sort of thing never happened again. CCP also created their Internal Affairs department, to audit employees for game-related misconduct. And for many years, everything was cool. Internal Affairs even caught a dev last summer handing out information to in-game pals. All good things must end, I suppose.

What has CCP learned since the T20 scandal? Well, be above board with the favouritism. Put it right out in the open.

Today, CCP announced that they will be giving away super-rare ships, and they'll be distributed via Somer Blink, a player-run, for-profit, gambling website. Basically, by letting Somer Blink handle the disbursement of these items, Somer Blink stands to earn hundreds of billions more in revenue due to increased traffic from folks hoping to win one of these rare ships. The Gold Magnate, for example, only two of which are being given away, only two of which will exist in game, will be worth between 250B-500B ISK right out of the box.

Why did CCP choose Somer Blink over, let's say, The Big Lottery? The Big Lottery has been an EVE institution for a much longer period of time. So why choose one over the other? CCP says it is because Somer Blink is sponsoring EVE Vegas. That sponsorship extends to a couple tens of billions ISK in prizes for the EVE Vegas PvP tournament. Considering Somer Blink's activity is up 400% since the lottery for these new ships was announced, seems like a fair trade to me. Earn a few hundred billion ISK in increased revenue, give away 10% of that to EVE Vegas in prizes.

CCP can't even confirm that Somer Blink won't scam the prizes for themselves. When asked specifically, CCP Navigator had this to say:

Q6, So how can you be assured that SOMER Blink won?t just make sure all of this goes to their alts?

A6, I can?t.

Bear in mind too that Somer Blink is not without controversy and there is evidence that they don't run an entirely clean operation. For instance, a character on the gambling site with a history of winnings and achievements going back to 2011, yet the character has only existed in EVE Online since 2012. (The character has been biomassed since the allegations came to light.)

Is Princess Darknight A Somer Blink Shill Account?

Bear in mind too that CCP has stated that it is important to them that the player-run initiatives they get involved with be open to the entire playerbase. They put this into action when they stepped away from a couple of player-run roleplaying channels, and set-up their own more open channels. The reason? Because the players running those roleplay channels were banning other players from participating.

Somer Blink has banned hundreds of players from using their service. Thus shutting out many people from the opportunity of winning these ships. Apparently some forms of player-dictated exclusion are okay with CCP whereas other forms are not.

Thankfully our CSM is on the matter. Mynnna, Trebor, and Ripard have all come out very strongly against this most obvious favouritism by CCP towards Somer Blink.

The CSM was not consulted about this lottery, and if we had been, we would have had concerns similar to those raised by many in this thread.

We hope to arrange a meeting with the relevant CCP staff members to discuss the matter in the near future, and will keep the community as informed as possible.

The big win here for CCP is that this diverts attention from the recent TOS debate. Because if there's anything CCP knows best, it is that players can't concentrate on multiple scandals simultaneously.

Here are some threadnaughts to read:

Somer Blink Advertisement Thread (starts at post 1766)
CCP reintroducing the Gold Magate and adding in new Guardian-Vexors through Somer Blink
DEVSWARM OP: CCP Should Give Goonswarm Trillions Of Isk Worth of Crap

All of this just reinforces my decision not renew accounts. Good job, CCP.

EDIT: CCP has announced that the Gold Magnates and Guardian-Vexors will no longer be prizes, instead replaced with a super-rare SoE ship (only three will ever exist) and all-expense paid trips to Iceland for Fanfest 2014. In trying to keep the ship from sinking, CCP has only rearranged the deck chairs.
Source: CCP Has Learned From The T20 Scandal