That $19,000 fine is sure gonna hurt their $1.1 billion profit.
it is a bit sketchy they did not inform any players of the reason for the refund, but im not sure how they could have handled this better. what are your thoughts
Gambling is already bad enough when it is done fairly. It's essentially a license to scam people. But it's absolutely disgusting that it is even possible to turn that into outright stealing. Why is not not mandatory for them to publish full reports on all rolls so that it can be verified whether it matches their advertised odds?
No one should need to tell you that an easily measurable and obviously critical metric is wrong. You should have alerting in place for that. A difference of 95% to 0% should light up like a Christmas tree.
If you release a game that's impossible to win, you didn't do a meaningful amount of testing or QA when it hit production. I assume a dev played at least one game as a sanity check, but they didn't sit there and play until they won. A QA person wouldn't sign off on something if they only observed 1 of the 2 states it should reach.
SLOT_GAME_WIN_FRACTION=0.95
$win_fraction = (float) getenv('SLOT_GAME_WIN_FRACTION');
Immediately alert the relevant oversight body, and notify the players about the problem when issuing the refunds. Providing adequate detail in both cases.
At least, that sounds like the right approach to me though I'm just guessing. :)
Well... just rig the machines again to give out $23,000 to the players over a handful of games!
It _sounds_ like the fine is a result of them failing to inform users of why the refund was issued (honestly it seems like saying "hey, we found an issue, we've refunded your gambling" seems like a better bet from a customer appreciation PoV, but maybe they were concerned about lawsuits or something? but going a step further and saying "hey we found a bug, so we've refunded your bets because the bug means the game was unfair[1], and here's $50 credit on your account" seems like it would do much better, and be functionally free because it would encourage more gambling)
[1] Gambling like this is fundamentally unfair, but there's a weird pretense of fairness that gambling companies are allowed to present to the world for some reason.