Now That The Boys of Somer Have Gone

At the weekend, the brown smelly stuff hit the fan. SomerBlink, the Eve Online 3rd party lottery site started offering a deal. If you bought a Eve Time Code from a specific reseller they would buy that PLEX off you for ISK. Not a problem, but.... and its a massive but....

.....they would give you more ISK than it was worth in-game.

Basically this was seen as Real Money Trading (RMT) by many parts of the community and many of the CSM. There appears to be some confusion over if this is RMT with many players saying "Its just the same as buying a PLEX from CCP and selling it on the market".

Its not, but it does get very complicated. If you really want to read the ins-and-outs try here or here or here.

Basically Somer was giving ISK and receiving RL money in return, and this is what upset many players and broke the rules. You can legally 'buy' ISK within the specific rules (buy PLEX from CCP or authorised ETC reseller, put PLEX on in-game market), but you can never 'sell' ISK which is what Somer was doing in a roundabout way.

CCP is looking into it, with CCP Falcon living on ProPlus tablets and Red Bull I'm guessing given the hours he'd been pulling this week! 

However, it appears SomerBlink have thrown the teddies from the pram and are closing down the site before any final decision is reached. Relax, it appears they will be refunding players wallets and honouring ships you still have left to claim etc.

What this does do is bring the monetisation of Eve into the spotlight. Many people make money from Eve and I guess, sort of, I am one. As an official Fansite I get a free account and usually a free Fanfest ticket. OK I'm not actually receiving "payment" officially but I am getting stuffz for free that I would normally pay for. Therefore I am better off running this blog than not.

Take the Mittani.com. As I recall they get 300,000 visits a month. With the adverts they run I'm sure Mittens can afford a luxury Dr Evil chair or two in his Man Cave for plotting hideous plans for the residents of New Eden.

However these are all within the rules. Selling ISK isn't even if you do it in a very roundabout way.

Of course this isn't the first time Somer has been embroiled in controversy. Last year there were calls of favouritism when CCP gave something like 30 Ishukone Watch Scorpions to Somer.

I think Poetic Stanziel put it best. "Its like the local casino sponsoring the football team and then City Hall giving their staff a free car to say thank you."

Approximately one year later and here we are again.

Now what does the future hold?

To be honest I never used Somer. I'm not a big gambling man. I work with statistics so to me gambling is just a bit silly. If you have the odd flutter you could walk away with more than you put in. However, if you use it all the time then in the end the law of statistics means you will lose more than you put in. Thats how all lotteries and casinos work. Not everyone can be a winner and over time you will end up with the house rate.

I guess we'll see either Somer back or a new Somer-like service run by others. There is no doubting that Somer was successful and made a stupid amount of ISK. As long as the new site doesn't try to convert that ISK to Dollars, Pounds, Euros or gold bullion they should do very well.