Is there a reason why the Lottery Winners' prizes amount became less than what it was a year ago? In contrary, the lottery ticket price was doubled (because of the current BTC price).
If I'm not mistaken, last 2017, winners number 1 & 2's prizes were at least 1.5BTC and 1.0BTC respectively; even #1 can't barely reach 1BTC even though Bitcoin's price is still at ~3k range.
Yeah, last year we had lots of bots exploiting the lottery. Someone figured out they could open tens of thousands of accounts and deposit and buy lottery tickets. This gave them free BTC bonus and enough tickets from free-rolls to win ~8 out 10 prizes each week which made it a +EV game for them.
If you look through the old results you'll see a very sharp drop in tickets after round 168 when we stopped paying out to them.