Quote from: AcePuppy on December 24, 2014, 02:23:30 AM

One thing I hate is that bots CONTINUE to win the progressive jackpots that are high and this is very well known, that I have seen the last 3 happen when the bots come in, it gets hit and all leave. It's really unfair and should be stopped. If you can't do that in a real casino, why are you able to cheat the jackpot online?

But you can do this is a real casino; any machine with a progressive pot will become +EV at some point, and there are players known as "advantage players" who will wait for that to happen, and only play machines where the progressive pot is big enough to give them a positive expectation.

They will keep playing until they hit the jackpot, or until someone else does - and then wait for it to build up again.

Is this fair? That's hard to say. The advantage players make a profit over time. And that profit doesn't come at the house's expense. The house makes a profit over time too. So who is paying for the advantage players' profit? It's the regular players. The ones who play the machines when it's -EV to do so. The suckers who fill the progressive pot to make it worth the advantage players playing.

It's funny - I was just talking to someone earlier today in the Just-Dice chat about this, and then I heard about the drama over in this thread. The guy in the JD chat was suggesting that we should offer some kind of progressive pot. I said I didn't think it was a good idea, because it would cause exactly these kinds of problems. The "smart" players wouldn't play until the pot got big, and then they'd play until they won it. The net effect is a bunch of coins passing from the regular players to the advantage players.

So what's the answer?

My answer is not to offer any progressive pot games.

The problem is that people like them. They like to see a huge jackpot available for winning, even if they have to fund it themselves bit by bit over time.

I don't think that bot-detection is the answer. The bot authors will find ways to avoid detection. You'll be setting yourself up for a never-ending arms race where you try to prevent people from playing on your site and they find ways to play anyway - when people playing on your site is exactly what you DO want.

From what I remember of BVC(*) (it's been a while since I had time to play), players have an option of whether to contribute to the progressive pots or not - so the solution is already in place. If you don't like the bots sweeping in to pick up the big pots, don't feed them by filling the pots for them. Play without contributing to the progressive pot and the problem goes away.

Edit:

Quote from: BitcoinVideoPoker on January 26, 2015, 05:38:31 AM

Quote from: bitboy1x on January 26, 2015, 05:33:09 AM

You add towards the bonus even from people who don't play the bonus game?

Correct, we add 0.1% of all bets towards the jackpot. If a user is paying 1 credit to play the bonus game, we add 37.1% of that side bet towards the progressive jackpot.

(*) So I was wrong above - you can't opt out of funding the jackpot (and hence the bots).

Maybe you should be able to.

Quote from: bitboy1x on January 26, 2015, 06:44:12 AM

Where does it say that you lose both bets when you double down and the dealer has blackjack?
Where does it say that you lose all split aces that are 10A (KA etc) vs a dealer blackjack?

Are more rules listed somewhere else?

It's absolutely standard that a ten-value card dealt on a split ace (or vice versa) is a "soft 21" and not a "natural", and so it follows that a natural blackjack beats the KA you got from splitting.

The rules they list are the ones which aren't the same everywhere. They don't list that 21 beats 20 either, because it's standard.

Quote from: BitcoinVideoPoker on January 29, 2015, 06:23:39 AM

When we decided to build this site, everyone agreed that each game should have a progressive jackpot that all bets contribute towards it, and we are going to stick with that decision.

I think that decision may be the single root cause of the problems you're having with bots. Whenever you offer +EV games people will bot them. Hell, they even bot the -EV games!

Quote from: AcePuppy on February 13, 2015, 05:23:00 PM

All I see is.. blablabla.. not even attempting to answer his question of implementing away at stopping the bots. Blablabla, we aren't doing anything to win the jackpots, blablabla we understand your frustration, blablabla we are only worried about our site getting hits and wont change a progressive structure... blablabla F YOU to the regular player. Yup..

There's nothing they can do, not really.

* They can limit the number of bets per second an account can make. The bot will just use multiple accounts.
* They can limit the number of bets per second an IP address can make. The bot will just use multiple IP addresses.
* They can make you solve CAPTCHAs occasionally. The bot will just ask its owner to solve the CAPTCHAs for it.
* They can try to detect "bot-like" behaviour. The bot will just act more randomly, to try to appear human.

It would be a never-ending arms race. The bot would win, because it has a human author who is able to provide whatever "human-ness" is required of it.

The solution is to only offer -EV games. Then the bots don't have any reason to play, and even if they do, nobody cares. Or at least offer -EV-only games to those who hate the bots. Then they have a way of playing that doesn't fund the bots' profits.

Quote from: AcePuppy on February 15, 2015, 12:41:20 AM

Quote from: B945 on February 14, 2015, 08:16:10 PM

I've been playing on BVC for a while now, [...] Other peoples bets don't effect your chances of hitting it.

Other peoples bets don't effect your chances of hitting it. You really can't be that F'ing dumb right?

He probably meant per-spin. Obviously if the bot is playing faster than you it has a better chance of winning the progressing pot than you do.