In-Game Events and Gatherings

Come back to the forums after a year and all I see is lotteries.
Is this what Eve has become? It seems wrong to me. Maybe I'm just being negative.
Organizers of lotteries in here, what makes you run them?

What do you think ppl?

Never been much of a gambler myself. I suppose running a lottery can be fun to do though (not that I will ever be likely inclined to).

Couldn't help but notice the staggering amount of lottery posts on here and wondered if people still actually play eve or simply gamble with their iskies hoping to strike big one day while never leaving Jita.

Anyway, best of luck gambling people!

Peace out.

Your missing some things. There are 3.4b in prizes.
The main dice is being rolled 10 times for 10 T3 hulls or 200m each= 2b
3 T3 hulls for top ticket buyers =600m
4 T3 Hulls on 4 more random Dice rolls =800m

17 Hulls @ 200m ea = 3.4b. Costs 50m to host it plus free tickets meaning my profit will be 500m or less.

A lot of these lotteries however I'm not entirely convinced are as random as publicised. It would be easy for the lottery operators to pick and chose certain winners, and with the ability to have so many alts, it's not even like it would look obvious to any observers.
When a lottery operator Bob pays prize money to John, how do outsiders know that Bob and John are not one and the same? Especially when its a massive single prize lottery, things like this you could pull off once in a while and remain undetected.

Yeah, I've always kind of felt like In-Game Events and Gatherings was a weird place to put lotteries, myself. A separate forum category would likely be best for this sort of thing so-as not to clutter up the sell orders or in-game events categories. Not sure that'll ever happen, though.



As BOHC says, Chribba's Dice overcomes this risk. Yes, there is obviously still a chance that the lottery organizer has a number of their own characters which they purchase tickets with, but if they're using Chribba's Dice or a third party rolling system (like myEVElotto's internal system), they can't control the result and their characters have just as likely a chance to win as anyone else. So yeah, while it's stupid to do it, they're not really "rigging" the system since they can still lose.

That being said, you are definitely right to be suspicious of any lottery that does -not- use a third party dice rolling system, as that is certainly one that has the potential to be rigged. Hence the point of third party rolling systems: if the dice creator has no stake in the game, there is no reason to rig the dice.

I host a lottery website which allows people to create their own lotteries. I do not host lotteries (aside from private ones for my corp members for fun) nor do I take part in lotteries specifically because if I were to do so, it would create a conflict of interest in my website. This allows the myEVElotto rolling system to remain third-party and a safe method as I have no stake in any lottery that is run on my website. I also allow a link to a third-party rolling method (like Chibbra Dice) on hosted lotteries, though, since I know a lot of people trust that rolling method.

In response to the OP: even though I don't really run lotteries, persay, I created a website to allow other people to run them primarily to fill a hole that was left behind by the closure of eve-lotteries.com. I know that people enjoy running them, and I wanted to give them the ability to do so without having to code their own system (a number of people did since the closure, which is great, but not everyone has the resources or technical know-how). I've hosted a couple for corp members just for fun and with 0 profit, and I will say that there's a pretty good feeling when you send a bunch of ISK to someone and make their day, so I can see that being a potential driving factor for some people.

Yeah, I'm not sure how I've ever felt about randomized ticket numbers, honestly. It's currently not an option in myEVElotto, though there is a request for it to be available. I have my reservations, but I'll be implementing the option anyway as I seek to deliver a product to my customers.

That being said, my reservations are much the same as your own. If it's random, it's harder to spot a phony lottery since you can't tell if the winning number was simply assigned by the system or assigned after the winner is determined. At least with myEVElotto, you'll know it's the former over the latter, but still, it seems suspicious (or at least potentially) to me.

That all being said, your math is a bit off in your example.

So, we have 10 lotteries worth 10b ISK. We'll assume that it takes in 10.5b in order to let the host make 500m (since the payout must still be 10b, not 9.5b). 100 tickets sold for a nice, even number is 105m per ticket. 10% of those tickets is 1.05b ISK.

So, if the host buys 10% of 10 lotteries expecting to win one, they have spent 10.5b ISK. Assuming that they win one, they have now spent .5b ISK. If they win more than one, yup, they're ahead. But there's also the chance they win none and are down 10.5b ISK.

Statistically average, the host loses .5b ISK, which indeed goes to themselves since it's due to ticket purchases...but what was the point? Perhaps I'm missing something, but if a host is buying their own tickets, they're really not achieving anything since they have as much of a chance to win as any other participant, and just as much of a chance to lose. And if they win, averaged out like that, they really aren't winning anything since the payout is as much as they spent.

I can, however, see that it would be advantageous because if they're closing out lotteries faster, it means they are making more of those 5% cuts on lotteries they host, but again it's a false 5% if they're buying their own tickets since they aren't actually having any income.

I'd be far more concerned about rigging outcomes than hosts buying their own tickets. It just doesn't seem profitable/beneficial for a host to buy their own tickets knowing that the result is random.

Well it's because they don't actually need to pay themselves the isk. A lot of these lotteries have trillions of isk sitting around in peoples pots. Like a bank in real life, they can use that pot to make high risk investments. Since they are investing in themselves, they don't need to actually shift any isk, they can simply invent it on the system. From the number of people that leave their pots unclaimed they can cover any withdrawals. They'd only get found out should they run out of isk to make payments, in which case, their unnamed alt is still in the clear.

Straight up rigging is a simple way to directly take money from others, but essentially "inventing credit" is a way to do the same with a randomised system. In theory if you use the right methods you could even detect where you can deduct credit without anyone noticing to make up the diff.

Essentially to problem comes from a self regulated system. Without a trusted third party running the books, you can do whatever you want to them.

you got it wrong, people do not deserve cool events, you people get what you deserve and its hours of repetitive mining, ratting, and stupid lotto where you can loose everything again... all that **** is for you