Macphisto Angelus

Well, in the pic I posted you will see the machine. That is the only ones I can find that say expressly that they do not pay out in the S bucks. And there is a L symbol on the dollar amount.

Now, if we know about this place and lots of others know about it then I am quite sure LL is well aware of it. So, I figure they better get busy or someone else will step in for them. LL seems to be the biggest gamblers of them all the way they let this crap skirt the line and turn a blind eye to it.

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Mabb Dilweg

Sorry I dont have time to read all of this thread so forgive me if this has already been mentioned....

Flip that is almost how some of the new sploders work and they are DEADLY.

You put in a bet, then the next person does, and a next person and so on... at some point that I havent quite worked out, the sploder announces that Person A will win the pot in X seconds unless someone adds to it, and it starts counting down, exhorting new bets every 10 seonds. As soon as a new bet is added, the countdown stops and then restarts. And yes, they use the term bet.

This is all fun (except for the damned chat-spam from the thing!) when the pot is a few hundred linden, but I've seen pots of 100k. How much money did they put into it each to get it so high? At a certain point the mind numbs and you have to keep going because you've put so much into it you cant back out...

I watched a friend clear out her (RL!) bank balance in a 2+ hours battle with (mostly) one other person, only to run out of money to buy lindens - and lose it all. It was like watching one of those chicken car races where two cars are hurtling towards a cliff and neither will veer off before the other one does. They were STILL GOING when my DJ shift ended after 2 hours, even tho everyone else left. My friend messaged me later to tell me she'd lost and why... she was devastated, and I know for a fact that she has never been a "gambler" before this.

I'm sorry, because it was at a place I DJ and run by good friends of mine... but I hate those things. They are worse than slots and my respect dims for a club owner who has one of these things and allows the pot to run up so high. And if you cant control it, then dont have them because you are ripping off your clientele. I'm seeing black, white and red on these damned things and its not often I am like that about anything. I have now become the Grumpy Old Fart in the Australians group because every time someone messages the group with some astronomical pot on their club's sploder, I make a remark about how I think they're evil incarnate and should be banned.

I am seriously considering how I can report/complain about them to the Lindens. I'll go search JIRA when I have time, I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels like this, however my gut feel is that they are allowed under the TOS and specific gambling rules so therefore nothing can be done about them. I'm also going to check them out for myself to see if there is a way to limit the total pot size, or to close a cycle arbitrarily.

I am not in favour of the Nanny State, and of course most people are level-headed about these things... maybe. People should be allowed to make their own mistakes and to be responsible and bear the consequences of their own actions... It just has a really bad smell because this kind of thing is so obviously designed to take advantage of people with certain personal traits (just like poker/slot machines are) and I really find the operation of them at such high stakes, to be quite unethical.

I suspect in the end, my only avenue of protest will be to boycott clubs that have these things AND do not manage their use to a reasonable extent.

That's probably going to lose me some friends, and work too. The irony is that these same friends were recently ripped off with their Mastermind game by a group of people who came in and exploted some vulnerability in the game to completely clean out the Linden balance of the account (about 10k I believe) that supports the games there...



Mxxx

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Colette Meiji

sounds like gambling to me.

Gigs

My Tetris (GinT) game is a game of skill that you can wager on, 1 on 1 with another player in real time. Also my copycat game which is like Simon. The simon one was a contract job which I purchased the right to back from the customer. Simon has a networked jackpot on the game of skill. Neither are very popular.

(BTW GinT needs to be recompiled for Mono, it runs like 100 times better in mono. I'll work on getting a mono version out pretty soon here, at the latest right after SLCC)

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Aargle Zymurgy

obee kaybee... got an avatar.

Dunno how much a part of this community I am. I'm an on-and-off poster to SLX already. I only arrived here when one of my customers said "you should read the garbage posted in SL Universe about you." Yet another friend said she was adjusting her buying habits based on what she read here. She didn't elaborate; I didn't ask.

Aargle Zymurgy

Woot! Here's your Z$!

oh, no, wait... you gotta get it from Johnathon

Macphisto Angelus

These are the kind of comments that always make me glad I don't sell anything anymore.

Welcome.. and nice avatar.

Colette Meiji

Can i still trade my Z$ Joshua owes me for a L$?

otherwise what good is it?

Aargle Zymurgy

Yes, no, sorta, maybe not.

I stopped by and the skill games were gone with a note essentially saying "we're trying to work this out."

Bicky's beans is also closed as of Saturday. Those involved are crying foul as they have asserted they have already tested such things RL and met court/lawyer reviews. I have a laywer RL who doesn't know gaming law, and one SL who does, and with the latter, I swap technical advice for legal. The lawyer in SL is of the general opinion that the Lindens either don't have very good lawyers, or don't listen to the ones they have.

When I consulted with the Lindens, I asked repeatedly to be careful with judging this, adding that it wasn't going to be small. I was right, and they apparently weren't careful.

Fortunately, in the aftermath of the mess, we were able to return L$ to players and make equitable swaps of products with customers on my own part. Other game makers followed my lead. The only thing resembling customer dissatisfaction came from non-customers in this forum and from our customers furious with LL over the mess.

Aargle Zymurgy

Well, Z$1 + US$15 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Maybe cheaper if you use S*.

Aargle Zymurgy

Thanks. And, despite bad blood between us, I have to admit I like your avatars. Check my bot, Radar Blinker.

Colette Meiji

Thats okay -

I balance them out -

I am completely annoyed LL would risk everything playing around against the spirit of the internet gambling Ban for the sake of the wannabe "gaming industry" in SL.

Gigs

Aargle,

People have come back from worse. One person made a pyramid scheme that was widely hated and widely spammed (and Linden Lab said it was OK at the time), and he eventually made a name for himself in spite of it.

How you deal with the fallout of a deal gone bad is as important as anything else.

Aargle Zymurgy

TBH, we didn't originate what the Lindens deemed legal. When we (meaning my partners and I) examined the existing systems, and contacted the powers that be, we concluded we could provide what people were asking for on a larger scale. Nothing more or less than that. I'm well enough known to the LL staff that the notion that we'd be casually approved by the lawyers never occurred to any of us. As for the various systems that LL reversed themselves on, I think they aren't so much acting as re-acting.

Colette Meiji

Are you claiming you do not think your system violated the spirit of the internet gambling ban?

Aargle Zymurgy

Thanks. Good advice.

After all was closed down, I was honestly suprised to find nobody blaming me (or my partners). I loved the movie "Silverado" and I always liked this line: "I always figure you might as well approach life like everybody's your friend or nobody is." I trusted, and got shot down. That reflects better on me than the alternative.

Aargle Zymurgy

hmm.... ok, I don't think that question is a simple as you like to make it out to be.

First of all, the law is more like computer programming than preaching. It's more about the letter than the spirit.

Secondly, the "spirit" of the law in question is protectionism, pure and simple. "We are the corporate casinos; thou shalt not compete."

Finally, our position was (and still is) that you can engage in a legitimate skill contest (from mental, like chess, to physical, like a footrace) and win a random amount. Whether that amount was determined from random numbers of entrants, to playing games of chance to alter that amount, is irrelevant.

OK, fair enough to say that that's mere semantics. But, where law is concerned, "mere" is irrelvant.

Bottom line: it's not court tested. The Lindens saw the logic of that initially (or of the sweepstakes systems), then later panicked. I see their point, though. If you error, error to the side of the lowest risk.

Macphisto Angelus

Heh, I think you are thinking of Joshua. He makes the robot avatars.

And yes, we had bad blood, but I hope we can move on. Despite all that happened you strike me as a pretty friendly person with a good sense of humor. I may have went to a mini battle with you over the gambling stuff but I hear tale that I can be nice and easy to get along with too.

I treat these threads on a standalone basis these days. My opinions were expressed towards the gambling stuff in here, but in other threads I will talk to you as if we never had this thread.

Good luck.

Gigs

Yes and no. Judges use the duck test for most things. And your system sure failed the duck test badly.

If the skill game involved any real skill or risk, you might even have an argument. It didn't. If you lost, you just tried again with your Z$ balance intact.

It involved about as much skill as walking to the window in a casino and cashing out chips in real life.

Colette Meiji

"Protectionism" could be a reason the law was passed.

It has nothing to do with the spirit of the law.

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The spirit of the law was to stop internet gambling in the US..

The complexity was them trying to define internet gambling well enough that they could enforce the ban.

Expecting Linden Lab/Second Life to be the test case for this law is ludicrous.

Get some site with a hell of a lot less to lose to be the test case.

Aodhan McDunnough

There's spirit, there's letter, there's one more factor: purpose.

AFAIK the purpose behind the law is to combat money laundering. As such the letter and spirit take a back seat to the fact that US banks are not permitted to interact online with offshore gambling. It's not the gambling, it's the money transfer that is the crux.

Colette Meiji

In the US, the purpose of the law is not what you are going to get in trouble for.

Basically if you break the spirit of the law, they will try to get the letter to apply to you.

Aodhan McDunnough

But it will be the purpose of the law that will trigger the actions.

It's because they don't want money laundering that they will stop all cross-border transactions involving gambling whether or not money laundering is happening. Using the law they will use both the spirit and letter to get you.

Colette Meiji

Not just cross border.

Aodhan McDunnough

Oh? How much farther inward does it go?