SomerGate

Everybody is probably tired to hear about the most recent drama in the world of Eve, but I will blog about it, albeit a little late, anyway. If only so I can read it back it later on ! I have been collecting interesting links or interesting opinions, so I will include those as well. In case you haven’t seen enough about it.

In my opinion this all started (in hindsight) with the Community spotlight on Markee Dragon. Why there was a spotlight on someone who hardly played Eve and ‘only’ seemed to sell Timecodes, where there are dozens of other players and player organisation that deserve such a spotlight more was very odd. In case you don’t know, MD is the ETC code seller on Somer Blink.

Then the first oproar started once CCP announced a lottery held by Somer featuring rare ships. The rewards were changed to other unique ships due to players like Chribba who said it wasn’t right  to rerelease these old ships.

Links:

Forum post by @EVEAndski

Akely on twitter loosing faith in CCP

The ancient gaming noob posted a very interested link

Then this happened: a private mail leaked in which it was revealed that all members of Somer Blink had received Special Edition Scorpions. This very much resembled the T20 incident, years ago. Which led to the CSM and an Internal Affairs institution. Somehow this apparently passed by the IA. CSM wasn’t consulted at all. CCP does not seem to consult the CSM in things that matter, we have seen this before.

so it’s just a relationship that we wanted to explore and which we will continue exploring – CCP_Guard

It took quite a while before an official response was posted. Due to vacation of half the CCP staff apparently. Once the response did come, it was in my opinion very underwhelming. You can read my response and one of my questions was answered in the thread, but I didn’t find it very satisfactory. Even worse, CCP apparently want to keep on exploring these ‘relationships’. For now these giveaways are on hold. I just read that as ‘once this blows over, we’ll continue what we have been doing’.

This whole situation is all about trust. CCP mingling in our sandbox. The PR department supporting a shady Eve gambling site that makes (IRL) money by commissioning ETC sales. You can read about that in this excellent forum post. I know this situation doesn’t affect my game play directly, but it leaves a very foul taste in my mouth and it makes me slowly loose faith in CCP and the direction they’re heading.

Some more links:

Crossing Zebras -  Conflict of interest

Forum post – Baron VonDoom

Icelandic law regarding supporting gambling

DNSblack’s article on Eve24