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EVE Online lottery site SOMER Blink shutting down [Updated]
Fans of popular EVE Online lottery site SOMER Blink received some bad news yesterday. After four years of operation, the site is going inactive, with a shutdown that its front page calls a temporary and perhaps permanent hiatus. All players with prizes waiting will be able to claim those prizes, and all ISK in the system will be returned to players over the next several months, starting with those players who had over 5 million ISK in their accounts. What led to this shutdown? The site administrators claim that CCP created a toxic environment and reversed previous statements without warning, resulting in a situation which made the site no longer enjoyable to work with. CCP has issued its own statement, expressing regret at the loss of a community site while stating that the promotion that caused the controversy "was not representative of the original proposal that was brought to CCP." The community team will provide further information soon, although there will be no interference in the refund process. [Thank to Dab for the tip!] [Update: CCP has today commented in detail on the situation. We've included CCP Falcon's full statement below.]
The Soapbox: There is no gamer community
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Some of our younger readers may not remember this, but a time existed when video games were not ubiquitous. Having a game console in your house was somewhat unusual, having a computer that could run games was also not a given, and being someone who played games meant you were part of a group. Sure, there were people who just played an occasional video game, but by and large, we were a single community. We were gamers. That was then, however, a world that existed in the wake of the '83 crash, one that thrived on limited technology and divided groups. I think in the years since then, we've witnessed the very idea dissolve, to the point that we don't currently have a gamer community. And I'd even go so far as to say that part of the bitterness between various groups of gamers is due to the fact that the community no longer exists.
