How dare you catch me and have security measures on your site to make sure rules are adhered to!

Could someone tell me why filthy rich ppl always win bonks and minibonks?
I always see those players that are generally throwing billions and trillions of isk on Blink.
Im not surprised but shouldnt there be a random draw. Give others a chance to win that cant afford to buy 10000 tickets or more.

[quote=AssassinationsdoneWrong]

Hi!

The "heightened levels of play" around events like 1 Quadrillion actually bankrupt us pretty hard :P

With the Quad Bonus turned on, we lost staggering amounts of ISK. The total cost of the 1 Quadrillion celebration, for example, was approximately 680 billion ISK. Not 680 billion cost and then X profit-- 680 billion ISK net loss after everything. The Quadbonk broke almost even in and of itself-- that's because slightly under 10% of the players bought about 55% of the tickets. Without them, Blink goes broke pretty quickly. That 10% of the players did not represent 55% of the winners, either, since we only allowed one win per person. If we cap the number of tickets at some low amount, the Bonk top prize would be like a pirate battleship or something.

We also drew 40 winners from one-ticket-per-person ticket lists as runners-up in the Quadbonk, for 4 PLEX apiece. I'd say it is pretty difficult to make the argument that you can't win with just a few tickets.

Each event, not just the giant celebrations has a significant number of people who:
-- bought a ton of tickets and won nothing, or
-- bought just a couple tickets and won something, or
-- won something without spending anything at all (singing contests, shoot Andrev, promos, etc)

These just aren't as visible as the "well-known" names that you see with a higher regularity because they do play with a higher frequency.

Believe me, if we were running this to try to eke out super profit, we wouldn't run Bonks like the "125% Bonk" that is literally guaranteed to lose money, we wouldn't have 100b of minibonks that we give away literally for free every week, and we wouldn't run promos at a token apiece to allow literally thousands of people to never actually play the site except for free promos.

We do put a lot of thought into ways to create as many winners as possible and to make things as fun as possible. It's not something that we disregard.

I played Blinks. I'd never done any Blinking before and I didn't know Bonks existed until I figured I had free points which could be put into things that were not Blinks. CCP Navigator's post didn't mention Bonks and even said:

(emphasis mine)

So I played pretty much every Blink I could get into for a few hours, spending my ISK to get 'free' tickets for the Gold Magnate lottery.
I'd much rather have had the option of dumping 16B in exchange for (for example) 16000 tickets, but that was not an option. I had to play Blinks to participate. First requiring me to play Blinks to enter a lottery for a Gold Magnate and then later saying "you played Blinks so you got what you paid for" when I complain I couldn't actually win a Gold Magnate, that doesn't fly. It was not my decision to set up the lottery that way.


Edit to add:

It's only 'easily exploitable' if you make a habit of requiring Blink being played for participation in a lottery and changing the prizes for that lottery. It is not exploitable at all if you stick to what you promised you'd do.

Edit: just now realised you said "take every seat". How would that give me a better return? I wanted as many tickets for the Gold Magnate as possible, the optimal strategy for that was to take 1 ticket in every Blink.



I did win some stuff, but I am not interested in that stuff. I have offered to return everything I won in exchange for the refund of my 16B.

It was 1 ticket for participating in a Blink, a few more for winning a Blink (but not enough more to warrant buying all the tickets).

Actually winning a large Blink is 8 times the tickets I think on a Blast so fail maths there.



No. My "winnings" are worth slightly less than 70% of what I put in. That valuation is according to the website and does not take into account any costs, time and effort required to liquidate a wide variety of items.

As for your claim that I should have bought every ticket in every major blink, it would have reduced the number of free tickets I would have gotten for the Gold Magnate lottery.

Okay.

You deposited 16 Billion, with the goal of winning a Golden Mandate through the promotion.
You proceeded to gamble with all of that money, as required to gain as many tickets as you could with that money.
You won around 70% of that 16 Billion back in prizes (a pretty good return rate given your buying of 1 ticket per blink).
The Golden Mandate prize was switched for another, of less value or desirability to you.

Sorry, but I don't know of any gambling establishment that would offer you even a partial refund under these circumstances. I don't know if SOMER has a legal section that states this anywhere, but usually with these things prizes are subject to change.

Had you deposited 16 Billion ISK, and then used the tokens to gamble on promos, never winning any and never actually spending any cash - I can see SOMER stretching to refund the cash as a sign of good faith when the prizes changed. I can't see anywhere refunding anything given your actual circumstances, though.