SOMER Blink - RMT Scandal and Permaban

SOMER Blink - RMT Scandal and Permaban

SOMER Blink ran for four years as one of EVE's most popular third-party gambling sites: rapid-fire micro-lotteries that turned over in minutes, paying out ships and ISK to players who bought "blinks" with in-game currency. The business model that drew CCP's eye wasn't the lottery itself - it was the affiliate program. Players who bought GTCs (game time codes - effectively two PLEX) through SOMER's affiliate link received 200 million ISK in site credit. With PLEX going for roughly 600 million ISK each at the time, that was a meaningful real-money-to-ISK gradient, and critics argued it functionally made SOMER an RMT operation that simply routed CCP's cut through the GTC sale.

The scandal had two distinct waves. The first, in September-October 2013, was about favouritism: CCP announced the re-issue of several extinct rare ships - including the iconic Gold Magnate - and was discovered to have given a batch of those ships directly to SOMER Blink to use as lottery prizes. The optics were terrible. CCP eventually walked back the arrangement, and CCP Falcon issued a public response acknowledging mistakes had been made on CCP's side of the relationship. The Bonus offer that triggered the broader EULA review was discontinued. SOMER survived that wave bruised but operational.

The second, terminal wave hit in August 2014. SOMER advertised a new promotion that CCP determined violated EULA boundaries, and - when CCP raised concerns privately - the site's founder published the private CCP correspondence publicly, which itself was a separate EULA violation. On 20 August 2014, after consultation with CSM9, CCP Falcon announced the permanent ban of SOMER Blink's founder across all accounts, with immediate effect. The lottery site went into a "temporary, perhaps permanent" hiatus that turned out to be permanent.

The story didn't end there. The vacuum SOMER left in the third-party-gambling scene was filled by larger casinos - most notably IWantISK and EVE-Bet - whose ISK reserves grew to staggering scale over the following two years. When CCP banned all real-money in-game gambling in 2016, those casinos cashed out into the war effort that became the Casino War / WWB1. SOMER was the dress rehearsal; the Casino War was the headline act. Many veterans treat the SOMER ban as the moment CCP finally decided that "third-party site profits via in-game economy" was a category they were going to police hard, and it set the precedent for everything that followed.