While Bagehi already broke the news which had been making rounds in certain channels, here’s the official Somer.Blink statement:
Somer.Blink official Statement.
Two days ago, an individual used a security loophole to redirect a small percentage of people browsing to our site to a fishing site. This fishing site would copy down the Blink cookie of those who visited it. The security hole was plugged almost immediately, and no harm to the site or any accounts was managed.
We love running Blink, and the community around it, but the one real downside is “Gamblers Regret.” A few days before the shenanigans started, this person deposited 1.5b over the course of a day.
He lost a few and won a few, but was so caught up in the excitement that he kept exchanging all of his wins for more credit until the only thing he successfully cashed out was a Tengu. As in most cases of Gambler’s Regret, he chose to blame us for his decision to gamble that all away, and created an imposture corporation to try and scam deposits.
When that was removed by GMs, he even went so far as to break state and federal laws trying (and partially succeeding) to “hack” the site. Now that that security hole is plugged, he’s fishing for any other outlet that will join him in his outrage that he chose to send us isk and chose to gamble even his winnings away.
We’ve done our best to create a site that is fun, fair, and exciting to use – and for some people, they would rather try to scream and rage at and about us, instead of admitting that they chose to gamble more than they should have, or didn’t walk away from the table when they could have.
- Somerset Mahn
Further conversations with Somer.Blink’s admins made sure to dispell any doubts over their impartialness:
The cookies from the phishing site mentioned in the last mail were how he was able to get the password hash for that character. As to it being a “shill,” – that’s the claim most often leveled against anyone someone loses against. REDACTED did indeed try to register and play Blink with alts (as do many people – it’s very tempting to try and get an extra ticket on the hundreds of billions in ISK of promos per day during celebration events.) The alts were banned, as per our rules. The account’s blink account was left open, and has played normally since. He does appear to have a win percentage in the 30% range – but in that his normal gambling strategy looks to be purchasing 3-4 out of 8 tickets on the Blinks he plays, that’s not at all surprising.
Sometimes, a person (or group of people) wins several in a row because they buy a larger number of tickets to a specific blink. “Buying better odds” essentially.
Sometimes, a person wins several in a row just due to sheer blind luck.
But with over 1,968,392 prizes given away (not counting the 17,339 free promo giveaways), we’d need a a lot of alts to perpetuate a scam on the scale he’s suggesting. :p
And, as many others have pointed out over the months, every legitimately closed blink nets us a bit of profit. We’d be terminally stupid to rig the system in any way, as it would be the one sure-fire way to kill our business forever. After nearly two years in business (3 if you include Somer’s third party and lotto securing service before Blink), we’re much happier taking the long view.
We’ve always tried to be as transparent as we can about how the site works, so people can make their own decisions on playing. The code we use to get the number is cogdev.net/blink/roll_winner.php – As you can see, we draw it from random.org. You can find their real-time statistics at www.random.org/statistics/ and several peer-reviewed papers on the quality of their random-generator at www.random.org/media/
This particular person even badgered the random.org administrators until they confirmed we do use random.org, though he could have just checked our quota with their site at www.random.org/quota/?ip=+108.59.4.73
Somer.Blink is an Eve News24 sponsor.
But…but….but.. Now what can I use this tinfoil for?
save it for tomarrow
Wrap some potatoes in it and bake them.
Nicely done, good transparent explanation by Blink. Kudos, team.
to keep mah bitterness… i mean… my conspiracy theories… i mean… the facts fresh!
TL;DR: BLINK has got holes and tries to draw away attention.
Everybody's got holes.
Some are fun, some stink and some post on EN24.
Can the blink folk please explicitly state they do not use shills, and there is no "luck bit" like the hacker accused blink of? Because this article emphatically does not do either of those things.
A; Even if they told you flat out you would still believe whatever you feel like.
B: I don't require politicians to explicitly say they don't eat Jewish babies for lunch.
The whole innocent until at least some tiny shred of proof is supplied is rather assumed.
You assume innocent until proven guilty while playing eve? I have some excellent Malices and Raven State Issues I would be willing to sell you at a remarkable price!
Point A is valid, but only because it's true they could just lie through their teeth.
I'm not saying they do those things; indeed I trust them enough to play blink with some chump change, but I'd expect a more reassuring official statement in a situation like this, from an organization like that.
Sure, no problem
We explicitly do not use "shills," there is no modifier on any player or ticket, and every ticket has exactly the same odds as any other ticket
The code bit posted above shows how winners are chosen, but for the non-technically minded – When a blink ends, we poke random.org and say "Hai, number between 1 and X please?" where X is the number of tickets on a blink, and random.org says "Ohai! Shore, Y is now winrar!"
thanks! I know it's silly but makes me feel a bit better.
While I've got your attention, can you add a statistic for % of blink tickets bought that won? Right now the % of blinks won is meaningless unless you always buy the same number of tickets per blink.
class DumbWinner
attr_accessor :you_dumb
has_many :wins
def initialize
self.you_dumb = true
end
def wins_in_hour?
self.wins.where("created_at BETWEEN ? AND ?", 1.hour.ago, Time.now).count >= 3
end
def winning_ticket(ticket_number, winning_number)
chance = Rand.new(1..10)
if chance == ticket_number
self.wins_in_hour? ? ('you lost'; chance = ticket_number + 1) : 'YOU WIN!'
end
end
end
a = DumbWinner.new
a.winning_ticket(5, 5)
Yeah bro, you dumb.
I could past code all day long about what is in an application but there is no way to know that for sure. The proof you're providing is like… well not proof. Release the whole source and maybe ill take a stab at believing you.
OMG – You're gambling and you are bitching like its your right! HTFU – its gambling! Deal with it!
Wait, im in china? I really dont have the right to bitch. Btw good job using "gambling" as an automatic opt out to tell someone that there proof isnt really proof. Bro your argument != sense.
lol your a moron even if it was a scam ITS EVE GET OVER IT, if you don't like it don't use it
It's spelled "you're", please call me a moron.
except there are bots which run for the house, and you know it,
which actually changes the odds of a "real" player winning
And that changes any individual player's chance exactly by… how?
random.org determines the winner before the blink starts.
the first ticket sold is a shill.
I barely trust goverment regulated betting in real life, why on earth would I trust an eve betting site that legally can scam the fuck out of you lol
:: installs Tinfoil hat ::
Somewhere, somehow, Goons are involved, I just know it.
While I don't really know all the facts here… and I mean I haven't even looked at any of the stuff that's been published here, I'm not sure what is in these screenshots or transaction logs… I do say that I have numerous strong reservations about SOMER blink's business practices and truthfulness.
Here's the thing: I recall that originally they were using Chribba Dice, a service on which you could reserve an ID for a dice roll which would be securely revealed after the fact. This means that the only person that could actually game the dice rolls was Chribba himself. Why they changed from this service to Random.org is a mystery, but a bit of a suspicious one in my mind.
Yes, they certainly do use Random.org now, quite a lot of numbers for it… but there is basically no way at all for us at home to tell HOW those numbers are used. They go into SOMER's black box, and after that we entirely lose track of them. For all we know, they are being used extremely selectively, or not being used at all.
Now, before you get up in arms about that, I'd like to comment that blink's use of random.org is neither here nor there. Maybe they tweak it, maybe they don't. They certainly don't publish enough information about how many of what kind of lotteries are won with how many tickets; all they actually tell you is the number of blinks won, their win ratio, what their most common items are, and what numbers they like to choose. They don't tell you how many tickets are bought on average, what the win percentages are on different items, nothing.
Again, all that aside. If they wanted to deploy shills, it would be the easiest thing in the world. It needn't be anything nearly so complicated. As it is, their system is already a massive ripoff: approximately between 20 and 35 percent of every single lottery goes directly to the owners of the site. If you factor in the ten percent bonus to blink credit returned (a terrible option that you should never ever choose) and factor in the (according to the site) 72 percent of the auctions that choose this option for their winnings, they make about 15 or 20% profit on every single auction that is won. Every time you play a blink, money is swirling down the drain… whether it's yours or someone else's. Winning against the house is long, long odds that just get longer the more you play. All SOMER blink needs to do to introduce shills is… play with their own money. That's it. Whatever money gets paid off to the organizers of the site, it doesn't really matter who or how, gets played back into the system and they keep the earnings win or lose. There doesn't need to be any kind of visible shenanigans: the whole site could be completely aboveboard with all their statistics and the shills would appear to be the same regular joes losing billions and billions of isk along with the rest of them. They can keep the site moving during quiet hours, keep people playing, and keep volume of played blinks up as high as they please (which, even if all the winnings are otherwise fair, is still more money for them). All introducing an element of cheating to this would do is give them a slightly higher collection rate.
The genius of SOMER blink is that they manage to make something that's such a blatant black hole of money so delicious for people to play. The number of psychological elements that they include to entice you to continue playing is absolutely staggering. Free blink credit, blink credit received for hundreds of different achievements… a quick, pretty, and engaging auction format, all beautifully designed to suck you in as much as possible. They enjoy incredible success as they are rapidly increasing in popularity, almost without advertising (or at least they certainly appear to).
It would actually take a highly in-depth investigation by CCP themselves, or an utterly impractical level of up-front openness from an incredibly wide variety of people, to prove that SOMER isn't shilling. You have to actually go out there and PROVE that they aren't giving money to certain people in return for the simple condition that most or all the money is played back in the system until it is lost. That is all it takes.
Whichever way you tend to think of this issue — whether you think SOMER is shilling or not — the fact remains that playing into the system at all is a really horrible idea, a terrible proposition that will never get you far. Not only is it dangerously addictive in its format, but it really doesn't take a great head with math to notice that to guarantee a win you have to pay out quite a lot more "blink credit" than you actually get back in ISK, and some very basic knowledge of probability that in the long run it is never, ever going to get any better than that.
Your argument applies to most online gambling sites, though.
While that's certainly true, most of what I am responding to is SOMER blink's official statements and the information they have released. They are simply pointing out some bland public statistics that everyone already knew and dressing them up as some imaginary ironshod case against any sort of nefarious deeds they are doing. For example, the Random.org thing… sure, they're using those numbers. Great. Why aren't they using a secure service that actually provides roll authentication? They used to, and then they stopped.
Nothing they've said really answers any of the accusations that have been laid out, is my reason for writing.
Er. We've never used chribba's dice for normal Blinks, not once in the last two years. We still do use it for Bonks, the weekly "Big prize" drawing. They were used in the year before Blink, when it was just Somer running forum lottos.
But there is no way to hook Blink into Dice automatically, short of having someone creating Dice manually for each Blink created, and unlocking them manually for each Blink completed.
End of the day: Some people will never trust any 3rd party site with their isk. And that's cool, we get that, it's Eve. If you don't feel we're trustworthy, we're perfectly okay with that, and not trying to convert you.
You'll notice, we don't spam local (or allow our players to do it). We don't run aggressive "Join now and get X free!" campaigns. We're perfectly okay with people who know us and think a bit of gambling would be fun being the customer base. We are not trying to make every Eve player a Blinker – and frankly, I doubt our sanity could survive if we tried.
We're cool with the 51,000 people who already play, who consider us trustworthy people. The code isn't linked as a "proof" that it's the code we're using. Neither is some guy randomly emailing EN24 a list of password phished from cookies proof that we're not. It's "This is what Somer says" vs "This is what an anonymous person who emailed EN24" says. If people are inclined towards distrust, they're probably going to believe any claim leveled against our trust, no matter what we say.
Regular code audits? No way to prove the code didnt revert when that person wasn't looking. Also, given that there are curently (at my last count) 27 sites who attempted to directly copy us, and another 6 who designed their own site in the same idea as ours, releasing code isn't something that would ever happen.
Manually create and unlock Dice links for each and every Blink completed? If folks need that level of reassurance, we're okay with them not playing.
Yes, we could be pulling the same number of bits from random.org as blinks completed, then discarding or manipulating them. Yes, we could simultaniously be running a complicated system of alt recycling that marginally increases net isk profit.
But, seriously? There is so much more work that would be involved in that nonsense, for marginally more isk (isk which we already give away hand-over-fist to RVB, EACS, Agony U, Eve Uni, RedFrog, Push, etc etc etc), and a sure fire way to kill the business model at that.
There's just a certain crowd of people who -want- Blink to be a scam. Some, because they over gambled and want someone else to blame. Some, because they know that's what they'd do if they had the opportunity.
Most? Probably just because they thing it would be more "sensational"
You don't need to play noble with your "we don't advertise" shtick, everyone knows you don't NEED to advertise because your market is already essentially saturated and you've become a 'household' name.
What I'm saying is, you may as well just be up front with the fact that yes, you could be scamming a few extra percent out of everyone and it would be almost impossible to tell. With the volume you guys go through in a day, that's a lot of at whatever scale you operate. Maybe you just think of it as an extra bonus for the way you keep the front page rolling in quieter hours, never mind that it's technically dishonest. You could say, sure, with the way things are right now you have no assurances WHATSOEVER that we aren't doing this kind of thing, and right now it's our word against everyone else's… and more importantly, you could actually TRY to take steps to mitigate that, instead of perpetually deflecting and being such a goddamn politician about it.
If Chribba's Dice service doesn't allow you to automatically reserve rolls, why don't you ask him to create an API for you guys to use? He's a smart guy, I'm sure he could work something out for you in not a very long amount of time. Given what I've seen from the information that's been released though, you guys aren't too creative or competent on the technical front and wouldn't know what to do with a publicly signed roll if it bit you in the eye.
Note that I'm not even asking you to post your code. That would be silly. There are plenty of other ways for you to try to be transparent on your site, about how much money goes in and how much goes out… these things can be inferred, and I've done some rough math, but my guess is you'll never do it because if you were to begin to make the most rudimentary steps towards transparency — actually paint a clear and explicit picture to people of what your accounting looks like and just how much of their money never leaves SOMER's black hole again — it would put a serious damper on many's desire to play.
Sure there are people who want blink to be a scam. Most of them just don't realize the extent to which their wish has already been granted, before anything nefarious has taken place.
To reitterate in reply to every point: "If folks need that level of reassurance, we're okay with them not playing."
We could add and address everything you suggest. We could go above and beyond that, to obscene levels of transparency. Being Eve, there would always be one more person saying "If you only do X more, more people would play!"
If you need all of that – we're totally okay with you not playing, and wish you happy pretend spaceships elsewhere.
lol i find it funny that people are basing somer… somer doesn't make you play, if you think its a scam DONT F*CKING PLAY!
Its funny that Somer & and admin's only response now it "Dont play, if you think its a scam" well what makes you think that we do play? At least if we did, we don't anymore, we like seeing more of your victims finally realize that its a scam, that is all.
"Sometimes, a person (or group of people) wins several in a row because they buy a larger number of tickets to a specific blink. “Buying better odds” essentially."
so you are saying players a countering somer's odd-lowering by his house-bots?
Dude, it doesn't matter if everyone else in that website were bots. You'd still have exactly the same chance of winning as you now have. Are you an idiot or what?
Of course, because programming the site to give better odds to certain players still gives everyone the same odd. How dumb of me.
You dont "get"it at all, do you.
No, but i like to "POST" like I "GET" it all, next maybe ill "PUT" more thought into it.
Hopefully they don't "DELETE" my account for this.
Anything else?
No.
Players are countering the fact that each ticket only conveys a 12.5% chance to win (8 tickets per blink for most items, only 1 can win) by buying more than one ticket. With 4 tickets that's 4 x 12.5 = 50% chance to win, for example. I'm guessing Somer measures statistics as "Number of blinks a player has won" rather than "Number of winning tickets a player has bought vs total number of tickets a player has bought" so if you buy 4 out of 8 tickets and one of them wins it gives you 100% win rate (Because you won the one blink you participated in) rather than 25% (because 1 of your 4 tickets bought was a winning one).
*IF* there are not only shill accounts (which TBH I always kind of expected) but shill accounts that have the odds biased in their favour (which I'll admit I did not expect) then buying more tickets will make no difference, aside from potentially locking a shill account out of your blink entirely.
Honestly i don't think Blink needs to scam from the standpoint they make quite a lot of ISK from the sheer number of players playing it. and to risk both there reputation and there free isk.
To make a comparison if you have a store and sell Cookies for 5$ each packet and you have a profit for the cookies of 1$ and you sell allot of them. now you figure out that if you repack the cookies making the carton only half full and selling em for same price you will have 6$ revenue. on paper it looks good until your customer stops buying the cookies.
From my own perpective
I have total invested 500M in to Blink
I have won 2 promo blinks (1 Recon ship, 1 faction module) worth 200-300m
I have won ships worth 800M (cashed out only counted)
I have won modules worth 250M (cashed out only counted)
my win % is 16.xx % abit high (over the 12,5% i expected but thats because i won a strategic cruiser not long ago)
You "expected" to win in a gambling site that creates profits to those who run it?
Whoa.
Well ya becaus ehe knows how to play his odds, its gambling, it can go wrong,but if you play the numbers properly you can win, i'm probably up about 10% at blink, but the issue is most people get up and never withdraw there money, there idiots.
Good flipping grief, you can't really mean that.
If there are really people that think these things, who think they can legitimately keep winning at Blink through some kind of skilled method, well good on you Somer for finding such an incredibly stupid subset of the population to perpetually scam. I know you've certainly done well for yourself.
It is sometimes (and I cannot stress the word *sometimes* hard enough) possible to "win" at Blink.
Basically, Blink update their estimated values periodically, probably from eve-central or some other market aggregation site. If the market price for something has a dramatic upwards trend in between updates (I'm mostly thinking of when OTEC formed and T2 prices spiked) then even factoring in Blink's house cut (the difference between the price for all 8 tickets for a blink and the estimated value of that blink item) it can be cheaper to pay ISK to blink and gamble for a ship than to simply buy it off the market.
Obviously luck still plays a huge part – there's no guarantee that you'll win within however many blinks you can spend to get the item under market price. On the other hand the odds are slightly more in your favour than the house's when you've got, say, 10 shots at a 1-in-8 prize before you've sunk more ISK than you'll recover.
All that having been typed, it *does* require a large shift in EVE market values that Blink hasn't caught up with yet, which is very rare, and I suspect they've started updating their prices more frequently than they used to a few months back to avoid this kind of situation.
I expected to cash out some of my free ISK from buying timecodes through one of their partners, back when I still bought timecodes to play my accounts.
I was right.
Horah for those like myself who don't gamble, although i do go on the somerBlink website every so often because the blue and yellow header attracts me like a bee to a flower =/
I think somer would do himself a favor if he would stop waving around with that stupid roll_winner.php file….
- If you already trust somer, there is no need for him to show you any code.
- If you don't trust somer you will realize that there is no way (short of frequent independent audits of the blink production code) to verify that this code is actually run.
Just as there is no way to verify that the results of Blink's calls to random.org are actually used (and e.g. not selectively discarded).
So what is left is an attempt to impress the gullible and technically illiterate.
Regarding "shills" – Somer Blink is fun because the Blinks fill quickly, i.e. because many people play Somer Blink.
Competitors' sites on which the micro lotteries take hours or even days to fill are much less engaging and as a result attract less users.
So any new Blink-style microlottery site is facing a chicken/egg problem – as long as you don't have many users, you won't attract many users and "shills" are the natural way to jumpstart your business and break out of that evil cycle.
A famous example for this sort of shenanigans is the reddit founders using fake profiles to make their site look alive to early users: arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/reddit-fo…
I am interested for more info on this.
However I have come out profitable from this site(6billion) so I suppose I am not too worried.
"break state and federal laws"
Are you sure he is a US citizen? Because if not then not a single fuck was given that day
25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2ofxcs48f1r559…
fuck those gambling sites , teyre all scams like the one in real life
really thing you get the ods tey say , stup being stupid pls then
I notice it's usually more often than not the same people that win their "celebrations".
I so hope for botters to discover BLINK. It might finally rid EVE of bots.
Been explained dozens of times in the Blink thread on forums.
The blink accounts are tied to a single character, ISK is transferred from that char to Blink to get blink credit and for payouts.
So when a player decided to sell that character, or biomass it, or let that EVE account go inactive, they contact Blink and they have the account transferred to a different character, resulting in the Blink character having potentially apparently won lotteries before the char was created.
Heyo,
There's a few dozen Blink accounts that are older than the character they're registered to
Our rules only allow one Blink account per individual. When someone wants to change which char they blink with, we transfer the Blink account to the character of their chosing – which is, indeed, sometimes younger than the Blink account itself.
What are you talking about? this looks like a totally different character then the one you're talking about. This one has > 37% win rate, > 2800 lotteries and > 190 Billion in isk deposits? really? who is that retarded.
this is eve… lots of people just ask the fucking idiots that fly around in iteron V's with 60 plex's in the cargo
You had a point, so how can i be like them and sign up to blink with having a boost nearly 40% win ratio with >2800 blinks. Also please, let me know when i can deposit 190 Billion isk into blink, this would convert from some $6400 RL dollars.