Tuesday 19 August 2014

Somergate 2014

Somerblink and their disreputable RMT "money laundering" partner Marquee Dragon are at it again.

Predictably the community is once again in an uproar. There's plenty of coverage elsewhere on exactly what they're doing this time and everyone's probably heard it by now so I won't bother going into that.

Instead I'll go into some conjecture on what could happen if CCP decides this scheme is ok.

Let's all get rich!

Will anyone else who wants to do the same thing be allowed to?

I currently have am worth over 700 billion ISK and make about 50 billion per month. If I were to more than double Somer's "incentive" paying 100 million over the usual price for PLEX provided the PLEX were purchased from my affiliate link, I'd be paying out 1 billion for every 10 PLEX. And making 8 or 9 dollars per billion.

At 8 dollars per billion with 700 billion that comes out to about 5600 dollars. Not a bad deal for any player with a fair amount of ISK looking to cash out.

Or I could just sell 50 billion ISK a month and sustain that indefinitely. 400 bucks a month, 4,800 per year, that's a pretty decent little real life income supplement. Heck if I could double that I could quit my job and live entirely on officially sanctioned RMT plus my pension.

I suppose I could live with that.

And I'm not even all that rich, there are many players as rich as I am and quite a few that make me look like a pauper. And then there are the big cartels, alliances and corporations.

Let's get even richer!

Or here's some food for thought. What if an ETC reseller sets up a program selling PLEX for 30 dollars each with the referrer buying back the PLEX for ISK at double the usual rate and gives the entire extra 10 dollars to the referrer?

That'd be a pretty good "incentive" to buy from that particular setup. The referrer would be making about 12 dollars per billion (considering he gets half the ISK paid out back by reselling the PLEX) and while the ETC seller wouldn't be making any more per PLEX sold he'd almost certainly be doing more volume.

It's a slippery slope, where does it stop?

The final nail in Somer's coffin

Finally there's one point nobody seems to have considered yet. What if the ETC seller buys the PLEX back from the ISK buyer for real money?

Then it becomes a vicious circle with the same PLEX being sold repeatedly by the ETC seller and cutting CCP out of the loop.

I don't think there can be much doubt about what CCP will do once they finally figure that out. And this time around while they're dealing with Somer I hope they don't forget to shut down Marqee too.

5 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Why go the whole plex route? If you allowed to give people out of game credits which entitle them to ingame above market prices....

    Forget isk doubling, Play the only BILLION-FOR-TRIT game in Jita! I will pay 1 BILLION isk for a single trit if you contract it to me with a valid BILLION-FOR-TRIT token. If your token is invalid I will keep your 1 trit. All you risk is 1 trit. Play today.

    For those trying to guess a valid token, the token is a sequence of 56 characters including upper and lower case and digits. Valid tokens can be bought on e-bay, here is the link.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Is there any reason to suspect Markee was involved in this setup at all? I won't comment on the odds or likelyhood but we don't know the details. No executions without trial please.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sure there is,

      1. Markee is a notorious RMTer from way back.
      2. He was the enabler in both of Somer's RMT schemes.

      With Markee's past he had to know the Somer incidents were RMT yet he still got involved in it. That makes him at the very least an accomplice (though it wouldn't surprise me one bit if he was the brains behind it all along).

      Guilty as charged!

      Delete
    2. The really surprising thing isn't that Markee is still breaking the rules and RMTing, it's that CCP was stupid enough to ever let him get involved with the official reseller program in the first place.

      It's like if the US Government had decided to let Al Capone open a bank (financially backed by Mob owned and operated Casinos no less!) just because he swore he reformed, wasn't laundering money or killing people anymore. And it was just a wild coincidence all his financial backing came from mobsters, he did not know those Casinos were owned by the Mob.

      Delete