[pookybear223]

granted, the article says the bug lasted about a week, making $23,000 on the bug, and refunding all players before any intervention.

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

[maxbond]

Re: how could they have handled this better, they could've caught this on the first or second day.

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.

[utmostvanilla]

I used to work on these sort of games and one would play a few rounds to get a feel that everything was working correctly and to see things like the transition to win states etc. Obviously, we wouldn’t be spending our own real money to do this: we would be playing against a dev server that produced the results. I find it hard to believe there would be zero QA before launch so I can only assume there was a mismatch between the dev and release versions of the backend.

[JoshuaDavid]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like, on the dev server

    SLOT_GAME_WIN_FRACTION=0.95

and then

    $win_fraction = (float) getenv('SLOT_GAME_WIN_FRACTION');

and then nobody bothered to set the environment variable on prod.

[justinclift]

> but im not sure how they could have handled this better.

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. :)

[pookybear223]

yes, the lack of transparency seems to me to be the largest problem. i think their lack of transparency is a cover up in this case!

[crote]

Sure, but what about their other games? And can they guarantee that this game is now "bug"-free?

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?

[pushupentry1219]

> 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

Well... just rig the machines again to give out $23,000 to the players over a handful of games!