Gargling Ginsberg's Gaming commission

As per garlings request im setting up a discussion on this thread in employment ops which is turning into a discussion:- /invalid_link.html <--please read this thread before posting

As per my last post in the above. ive not realy given it much consideration how the information collection should go, the question should be how trusting are you of people. one way to pay would be per hour but whos to say it actually took that person x ammount of time to collect the data. probably the best way would be to pay for x ammount of data collected, with data being the complete machine details etc as required

Pay is a tough one, dont know what the normaly accepted pay is in this game as ive not been round very long, but L$ 1 or 2 per machine would probably be about right, but thats comming from somebody whos got next to nothing in their account.

Hope this is the right place to post this...

I decided to "close" my payment offers until I can decide on a better way to organize this. Shakaar, since you already put time into it, I'll still pay you of course. Just post your report here.

Based on your previous comments, I'm considering putting up a wiki style site, and maybe the fact that the casinos get "free advertising" will convince some of them to add information. I don't want this run by the casinos (as that defeats the purpose), but acknowledging that this may actually be _useful_ to the casino owners as well shouldn't be ignored I guess.

I'll see what I can do.

Bleh, I've been up all night. But I got the bare bones of a wiki site put together to allow this project to get off the ground.

Read the statement of purpose on the main page and let me know what you think:
http://www.slcasinoreview.com

That's awesome Gargling! I'd like to interview you about this for SLNN. Casino regulation and lack thereof is a topic of interest for me.

I'll IM you in-world and we can set up some time to talk about this.

I would definitely be interested in discussing casino regulation issues with you (there are many bizarre and interesting issue about this in second life). I feel that a community site like this is a reasonable option for in-world casino regulation, and therefore think it would be best for everyone if this site has a bit of time to be fleshed out before a news article was written.

So check back in a week and we'll see how things are going. Sound good?

In the mean time, here are some bizarre problems facing casino regulation in SL for you to think about:
- probably the strangest is that not only is there no way for a customer to verify the machine is honest, but even the casino owners themselves can't verify the odds ... an amazing amount of trust on both sides must start with the scripter
- the whole reason the gaming industry is allowed in SL is that Linden Lab's official stance is that L$ have no real value, and thus this is purely entertainment. Besides the sheer irony of this stance (Linden Lab sells L$ for real money), this also means that scamming, while against the terms of service, is not actually a crime.
- add on top of this that identities are hidden, there is little accountability.

For a permanent presence in gaming industry, of course establishments need to be honest, and the majority of them are. My attempts at a "gaming commission" here are just to increase this accountability by increasing the rate at which bad reputations can flow through the community as well as rewarding the good reputations (as pointing out a good reputation will most likely increase business).

There are other options as well, but this seemed the most straight forward to implement (and most importantly, doesn't require casinos' participation to work).

Garling might also be interested in showing weather or not the casinos who offer odds of winning such as 90% payout actually pay out at those odds, i tried a few bets on one 90% machine and it didnt pay out once

Forgot to post this
If you need any assistance with your comission give me a shout, mmm maybe not necessarily with data collection but ill do anything for a few L$

Name Archies Bunker - Casino and weapons
Owner Schwanson Schl
Machine: Circus Janus 131,169/CandyKing Janus 142.167/ LadiesNight Janus 138,168 / PiratesGold Janus 138,169- Slots type
Creator: Moonshine Herbs
Minimum L$1 max on pay screen L$20 machine does not specify min or max bet

Machine: Orb of fortune 2.6 - Double your money
Creator: Flyingoc Chung
1@ Bet L$2 to L$50
1@ Bet L$10 to 100

Machine: Deluxe Blackjack V1.0-1 - Blackjack
Creator Flyingroc Chung
Bet L$10 - 100

Machine VGi Double sevens / VGI Flaming Crates / Fruit Smoothie - Slots type
Creator: Jason Foo
Bet L$10 - With Jackpot shown

Machine Black Jack Wall 2.0 - X2 Black jack
Creator Chance Small
Bet L$5 - 500

Machine: 3-5-7 Higher/Lower 1.3 full copy - Higher/Lower Cards
Creator Moonshine Herbs
Bet L$10

Machine: Video Craps v1.2 Copy - Video
Creator Kenny Jackson
Bet unknown Machine shutdown waitng for owner

Machine: Crashing Mania! - Type unknown (chance?)
Ming CHen
Bet L$7 - 10 - With pot size shown

Machine Video Poker v1.0- Same
Creator Flyingroc Chung
Bet L$10

Machine Big Six Wheel of Fortune Janus
Creator Moonshine Herbs
Various bets
pays 1X bet + bet back 3 - 10
pays 2x bet + bet back 2 - 10
pays 5x bet + bet back 1 - 10
pays 10x bet + bet back 1 - 10
pays 20x bet + bet back 1 - 10
pays 40x bet + bet back 1 - 10

no machines displaying visable odds of any kind
performance in this area wasnt too bad after all the content had been downloaded, lag is usually slightly noticable during peak times

You have to remember that those odds are over the long run. You could in theory pull the lever 90000 straight times and win nothing. And then the next 10000 pulls win something minimal and still be considered a 90% payout.

No matter if you win or lose in the short term, in the long term, the casinos will always win! How do you think they can afford to build what they build in Las Vegas?

Casinos = Entertainment.

Never go with the expectation of winning or getting rich.

Pablo

I tried looking into stuff like that. Several creators were willing to share some details of the calculations, but in the end you still need to trust them. If you find a very suspicious game, I may look into it... but usually it just requires too much "charity" participation from the creators. If the game is cheap though, I can always buy it and try it out.


While I agree with your sentiment ("play for fun, not for money", I don't really agree with your statements here. In fact, it is thoughts like that ("in the long term casinos will always win" that has probably led to several "scam" casinos here.

The fact is, you need a fairly serious bankroll to stay afloat as a casino. My friend has ran into a couple in SL that don't realize this. (I'm a low stakes man and haven't ran into it yet myself.) For example, video poker is close to 100% payout. For the customer playing many hands, the risk is nice and steady ... risk XXX per bet. However, for the casino, the payouts are varied and come in large spikes. If you have more money than the casino, and the casino is only stocking like 20x's your bet ... it is not unreasonable for you to be able to empty the casino's bank. My friend actually used this to "extract revenge" on the casino that didn't pay out, and drained their account twice. I still don't think they've learned their lesson, and refuse to pay off big winnings. (BTW, this was Misty's Casino ... I'd suggest never gambling there. I considered it shocking because the place was large and appeared well designed / care given to layout, with plenty of campers to feed money into the system. I tacitly used such indications to decide which places would be more trustworthy, using the notion that "they couldn't get big if they didn't play it straight, right?". Apparrently not. Discussions over this, and how casinos could be "successful" with such horrid policies, led to more indepth discussions of casino regulation in Sl ... and in a sense, led to this project. (Although, I was asking for verification of odds/fairness from casino owners and script writers much before that. But the more frequent discussion spurred by that event definitely helped solidify things.)

As with all business, there is a kind of tradeoff ... the better payout, the more popular the machines ... but the more risk you take as well. Apparrently, some are too conservative on calculating the bank roll required. (Or for the really pessimistic, those casinos purposely set the bank low so they never have to pay out on large hands. One can never prove intentions though, so I'll try to ignore that nagging thought.)



On a side, note, several real life casino games do pay out more than 100%. One is blackjack if you card count, but they will boot you. The only others I know of is certain video poker machines. I don't really understand the economics behind it. Maybe they are just banking on "people are idiots" (probably a good bet) and will not make the correct choices every single time over the thousands of bets required to actually avarage ahead? Who knows.

Or maybe it is just to bring people into the casino? Is so, there are SL equivalents - For example the "higher/lower guess a number" games that pay you for playing. Or even worse, the annoying camping chairs (but of course, that has a whole different economic push behind it).

Its worth mentioning that many games involve some kind of skill or decision making that affects the payout. A good blackjack player can reduce the house advantage to less than .5% with strategy, but if you are playing with lousy or no strategy, then the house advantage goes way up. Same for video poker, etc... And yes, its true that some variants of video poker pay better than 100% -- if (and only if) you follow a (very complex) perfect strategy to the letter. Again, if you aren't playing that exact strategy for that exact variant of the game (with no strategy errors), then the average payout dips below 100%, and furthermore, you have to play for a loooong time and be prepared to weather some really deep losing streaks to really cash in on it. Then still, there's no guarantees. That's why its gambling.

For any game that does not involve skill (i.e. slots), you still need a very large sample to be able to make any kind of assertion about the average odds that a game pays out. I always do extensive testing on my games, and I have run 10 copies of the same game for a week straight. Some wind up paying out more, some less, and a (very) few are right on. That's why its an average.

re: card counting... There is nothing I can do to tell if someone is counting cards, so that's why my blackjack game shuffles the deck every hand. If I let people play through a whole 7-deck shoe, the counters could kill me almost every time. As a concession to that, my blackjack table only uses 2 decks of cards, which makes for substantially better player odds than other SL blackjack games which use 5 or 7 or more decks.

If you are collecting info/features/game specs please let me know, I'd be happy to contribute some info about my games.

jl