Fraudlent Legallinden sploders NON payment

To be quite honest I'm not really all that familiar with how these things are used in practice. Certainly with a five-click paying out cycle, in an environment where lots of people are clicking at once it is going to be effectively random. If people only click every few seconds, perhaps with an enforced delay to limit this, that makes it much more based on counting and a reasonable level of reaction speed.

In practice, while it might or might not technically be gambling, I would give good odds (not in SL obviously) that any investigation will kill off many, many other "not gambling honest guv look it's linden approved" products first. This sort of product would be quite a way down the list.

Absolutely. This just makes a convenient proof of "Linden legal" subterfuge.

I have to give credit to the creators of these devices for being very creative in their attempts to skirt the rules. But that's all this is.

I think you are missing the point.

Here's basically gambling in a nutshell:

1) Pay into a pot
2) Use some sort of ordering scheme to determine "winners"
3) Pay out the "jackpot" to said "winners"

If the ordering scheme is deterministic on a macro scale, then the same person, in theory, could win every time, which would make the game no fun, because it amounts to everyone just giving their money to that person. That goes against the spirit of the game, since the premise is that everyone has the same "chance" to win as anyone else who plays. As such, it behooves the game creator to make the ordering mechanism as fair as possible. The most fair ordering mechanism is a truly random selection. However, given that is 1) impractical, and 2) makes the baby Lindens cry, something which pretty much does the same thing for 1, and avoids 2, at least at face value, is necessary.

Even still, it doesn't get away from the nature of what the game is about. PAYING money in, participating in some "fair" ordering scheme with a /chance/ at being paid MORE money out. In such a system, everyone is saying "I want to win!", but there can only be one (or a small subset of the players) who wins. So, if it is a "fair" mechanism, it *MUST* use some form of randomness or unpredictability; otherwise, it cannot be "fair", and people will stop playing.

The question then becomes one of "fairness" vs "function". If it is fair, people will play it. If not, then they won't. THAT is what makes it "gambling".

In my opinion, it is not gambling per se, according to the policy, and that is all that counts for now. Linden policy outlaws games that require a wager and determine the winner by some element of chance. Until Linden Lab outlaws entering any non-freeplay scheme where you can get back more than you put in, this is what we are dealing with.


and



Is this not a physical skill game? Hand-eye coordination & an individual's timing are the predominant factors to determine the winner, not any randomness created by the game.

I've already stipulated in a previous post in this very thread that what LL decides is what LL decides, whether it follows their own rules, or any other rules outside of them, or not.

My issue is with the description of the activity as "not gambling", for the sole sake of avoiding the Linden banhammer, when it clearly is, by any real definition of the word.



Except that, as has been shown, they /AREN'T/ the predominant factors to determine the winner, in this case. The game may be coded according to a perfect "skill" paradigm, but any coder worth his salt knows that the actual function is FAR from that paradigm. It is intended solely as a dodge to the rule, since no one is going to play a "gambling" game where there is no chance for them to win. The creator knows it is still a fair selection mechanism, because he also knows that there is enough uncertainty to the event to make it so.

Anyone who believes that residents don't see something called a "sploder" as a gambling device needs a remedial course in psychology and game theory.

Also, note what the Lindens say:



Emphasis on the *MAY* part is mine. I think even this kind of gambling device is about as far from PURE skill as one can get. I'm not even sure how to quantify "pure physical skill" in a virtual world anyway. That's kind of an oxymoron.

IS it an element of chance? The last one I looked at closely (the one in our club **ahem**) pays out the big prize to the LAST person to pay in before it times out. Being the last person in is, IMO, a matter of skill, not chance.

On first glance, one would think it would depend on whether the sploder indicated when it was going to "'splode" or not, but either way, it is actually a matter of chance. Hence:

If the 'sploder picks a random amount of time before it "'splodes", or if it is a fixed amount of time but, either way, does not announce it, it is a weighted random chance for any one person to win, since it amounts to nothing more than a guess. The weighting comes from the notion that the longer you wait, the better your odds, at the risk of losing more from someone else guessing longer than you, and missing out if you wait too long.

If the 'sploder announces when it "'splodes", then we are back with the same thing that has been discussed already, just in a mirror image. Instead of dealing with the randomness of lag and latency to be first, we simply deal with it to be last "in before the wire".

No matter what, it doesn't change the nature of the activity. i.e., it is still "gambling", by definition.

People are *sooo* clutching at straws.

Maybe instead of "ZOMG, I found a *legal* way to gamble," some should consider:

http://www.gamblersanonymous.org/

http://www.gam-anon.org/

http://www.nongambler.com/?gclid=CMXVwNajwpQCFQfNIgod-WyOGA

Not everyone who goes to a casino is a gambling addict.

The desperation for it seems to border a tad on the unhealthy, though.

I don't perceive it as desperation. Most of us don't mind, and wouldn't mind going every once in a while, like normal people. And obviously game makers would like that income stream back, so if anything those folks are desperate, but not as addicts.

Having never been in a casino, I can't speak to the attraction myself, though I have played gambling games before.

The amount of addiction varies depending on the individual. I've seen people who I know are on fixed means dump every Linden they have into a 'sploder, then go and buy more several times to continue to play. Are they the norm? I suppose it depends on the venue. Casinos seem to attract more of the hard-core addicted types than your average club, because they are designed to cater to that type of mentality.

One has to remember, the US Internet Gambling Law isn't for the "majority" (I put it in quotes because I don't know if we really are the majority or not) of us who are "casual gamblers". IE, the ones who simply put entertainment dollars into the pot and know well when to quit, and do so without even looking twice. It is for those who don't know when to stop until they have put themselves so far into hock that the only solution is financial ruin or bankruptcy. Now, while that *COULD* happen in SL, I find it very hard to believe that it WAS happening. However, the Lindens have to obey the Law (and the mandates of their credit card processor(s)), so they applied it to SL. So, regardless of whether we are all "good little gamblers" or not, we have to live with the Law imposed upon us. It sucks, but then it also sucks when a friendly card game at somebody's house is broken up by the cops because of a dumb ordinance against gambling.

I'm all for personal responsibility, myself, but if something is verboten, playing the "semantics game" with the letter of the rules is more than likely going to do nothing more than get people burned in the end.

If every single person in the room clicked on the sploder at the same time, say 00:00, not every single click would register with the LL server at the same time. By 00:00.001, Sally's click has arrived because she uses Cox Cable and lives in San Francisco. By 00:00.002, Sam's click has arrived because he's got Super Cable and lives in Minnesota. By 00:00.005, Gertrude's click arrives, because she lives right next door to Sally, has Cox Cable, but has a crappy connection. It stands to reason that anyone living outside the US will always end up at the tail end of the click list according to LL. And who knows, at any one time, which server the sim is using? Could be one in Dallas, could be one in San Fran. From what I understand, there is much shifting about of sim information between machines. In other words, it probably IS random, if you account for interwebs travel time.

Never mind the reset scripts button LOL