Unregulated Gamling in SL is a problem

Case in point:
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Had there been some sort of commission to oversee that tables are regulated, code inspected, and some public verification system were in place, scams like that wouldn't happen.

For that matter, how do you know the odds of the casino game you're playing in SL isn't rigged? How about slightly rigged, so in the long run no one really notices but the casino still takes more than a "fair" share? You have to trust the casino and the scripter, is how.

Discuss.

Unregulated lobbying is a problem

Gambling = the odds are ALWAYS in favor of the house.

Don't gamble.

I don't trust tables, i don't trust devices. I slightly suspect such things as lotteries and raffles.

Funny thing, though, is if i see a device such as a slot or a roulette which catches my eye, i'll play it. And i almost always win that first try.

Who would spend their time regulating these machines? How could you script them to always play fair?

and please stay far away from the 21 tables some are very naughty indeed.

This is why I haven't and won't gamble in SL...

This is why it's called gambling.

Sure it's a problem, but like most things LL will put their fingers in their
ears and go lalalalala, so they don't have to do anything.

And how would U define fair? It's a foregone conclusion that in RL the odds lay w/ the 'house', soooo, one could say the same could be expected here.

Fair COULD be 50/50 but that's NOT really fair is it? Not when we're talking gambling.

"Fair" in a slot machine could mean anything. But in many games "fair" means that the cards or dice fall with even odds. It is the structure of the game that gives the house the edge. The owner shouldn't have to cheat by messing with the laws of chance. If I play one of those games I'd want to know that it was "fair" in that sense. Then I can know exactly what the odds are that I'm playing against.

It's not gambling. It's entertainment.

People who put in a lot of money into and try to win lots of money should not be on SL.

Gambling is an addiction and we really don't need to feed it. If you play, you should play with fun money only.. and have fun!

One thing I would like to see is the ability to set a limit for llRequestPermissions(PERMISSION_DEBIT). I am always nervous when I use an item that I didn't script when it asks me for permissions to debit my account. I would love to be able to give permission to debit only a certain amount from my account. This would give a certain amount of protection to people using money related scripts made by others.

Get an alt, and store most of your money in it.

There is no way I'd give the right to take money out of my account to any machine in SL, not without being able to look at the code, even if I "own" the machine.

I haven't done any gambling in SL, but I would have thought it would work like RL: you put your own bets down, and you're never at risk for more than you have "on the table" even if the house is crooked.

Well, OK, I've never been much of a gambler and I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's ways to gamble with direct deposit now. But that's daft too.

Ok, that made me laugh



I agree it does make your nerves spin a bit.. It has to be used in a lot of vending machines so if someone pays the wrong amount, it refunds.. So I'd advise only to buy vending machines someone else has tried and reccomended.. I highly reccomend Moopf Murrays Vendopf machine.. Very easy to use too..

I used to game L$10s and L$20s in my first couple of months.. I used Jack Digeridoo's casino type thing in blue, or Chaos Theory Gaming, because, the games were fun.. And I still do on occasion, if I find a low stakes game that looks fun.. I never think of them as a chance to make money (altho I've found the odds at Jacks and Chaos much much better than anywhere else), I thought of them as a fun game for a small amount of L$..

I'm not sure if they're still there even, but if you HAVE to gamble, I'd reccomend them

Hiro, I'm not sure why you think the linked post has anything to do with gambling or how it is a case for regulating gambling. It is a post about a deception, perpetrated using a blackjack table, which could have easily been any other kind of object that requests debit permission. The only thing that seems to suggest is that there needs to be recourse for people who have been taken in by a scam object that requests account debit permission.

Mind you, I am not disagreeing with your viewpoint that gambling should be regulated. I think people would feel a lot more confident in gambling if that were the case. Then again, I could say the same thing about land sales, clothing sales, vehicle sales and virtually any other business in SL where the customer is expecting to get something for their money. I doubt LL will ever want to get into the business of doing any regulation of business, however, so we're back to the trust discussion.

So how do you know who to trust and who not to trust? What can be done if you trust someone but then are deceived by that person and lose money as a result? Is it LL's responsibility to exact justice?

Yes this is how it works for players. I'm talking about objects you own. I would have a difficult time running a casino of any kind in SL unless I wrote the code myself.

Still it would be nice to be able to gamble in SL on something. I think that's why voluntary pot games are so popular, I guess it's like gambling, but you are clearly competing against other players under fair conditions. And in most cases you are not required to contribute to the pot to play. I didn't touch Tringo for a while because I assumed it was more like gambling than it actually is.

And I do have a vendor system. I use JEVN and I'm very happy with it. But even there I had to take a leap of faith that there isn't some back door in the vendor code that one day someone could come along and snag my money.

This inability to trust scripts from other players is an important impediment to business.

I'll give you an example. There was a great HUD P2P system. And you could set up a server so that you could advertise on the system. Whenever someone used the system to teleport to your shop, you paid the creator 1L.

I thought it was a great idea, but when I plunked down that machine, I suddenly got nervous. I didn't really think the guy who made it would cheat me, but what about some griefer who decided to TP to my shop 1000 times one day. I would have loved to set up some kind of limit to how much that object could debit from me. As it turned out, I didn't set up my shop as a destination for this TP system for that reason, and the creator didn't get my business because of it.

Loss limits for debit permissions would be a great and needed addition to make transactions of all types in SL safer and more secure.

No-one should ever be able to get away with the rewards of a monetary crime in SL because the lindens can see every transaction inside the system unless you managed to sell the money to another resident before the lindens get on to you, even then you'd be extremely limited in how you can sell it without leaving a trail (International bank transfer maybe) but then it would have just been easier just to do common fraud and not steal the L in the first place.

It would be practically impossible to profit from it and so long as LL deals with it seriously a victim should always get their money back.

.

We need more friendster type functionality.

Open for your votes: Prop: 801 - Loss limits for debit permissions

I may be a heartless bitch but I don't have a lot of sympathy for the original poster there. Somebody comes up and says "let's gamble, give me unlimited access to your bank account first" and you say "okay"?

Perhaps in a more general sense, there could be a body of "responsible coders" to whom honest casinos could submit their scripts to have them checked out - on a volunteer basis of course, otherwise there are all sorts of problems. I don't care for gambling much myself but some people do, and if I were them I'd be much more willing to trust a system that had been verified by one of SL's Superstar Scripters (TM).

hmmm my gramps always tells me "Gambling is for those with poor math skills"

What about a library of open source gambling scripts for SL? The only thing would be, how would someone be able to verifty that the code running in a particular machine was the same as the open source version that is available for checking?