Could you please address your site's stance on using bots to play your games? Particularly bots playing the games only when the progressive makes it a positive play?
Sure!
Bitcoin Video Casino has an API that anybody can use to make their own creations. This can include things such as building a new UI to play the games, creating mobile versions, trying out different AI strategies, etc. We have nothing against people creating bots to play the games. This is essentially what autoplay does already.
What we do have a problem with is people using the API to create bots that play the games too quickly. It's not fair to the other users if the bots can flood the server with too many games per second, especially when the jackpot is +EV. If we detect a user playing, for example, 100 games per second, we flag that as a malicious bot and disable the account.
The problem is that we can't detect users that split the bots over multiple accounts and multiple IP addresses. As far as we can tell, each single account is playing the games at a normal rate. All accounts on Bitcoin Video Casino are anonymous already, so there isn't anything to make these accounts stand out. It would be terrible if we started flagging real human accounts as bots just because they happened to be playing at the same time as the bots.
Some people have suggested extreme measures like forcing regular captchas on all users, but I believe that something like this will make the site less enjoyable for most users. We are still looking for a better solution to detecting malicious bots.
Bitcoin Video Casino absolutely does not operate any bots. We just run an honest site with 0.5% house edge and that's good enough for us.
Yeah, after last night I'm pretty much done with BVC until the bot issue is better addressed. A captcha needs entered plus better filtering. I'll roll 20-30 Bitcoin only because of the hopes of winning it back, but when the bots log on and knock it out in seconds it really leaves a shitty taste in my mouth. Not the fact that I lost the money, it's the fact that I felt like they had an unfair advantage and just are snakes.
Honestly,
the main problem might even be the progressive itself. It may just need taken out and the jackpots need hard coded in. The progressives are only benefiting the bot players and it also tends to look really bad on the site owners.
Also what stops the site owners from simply playing against the house when the progressive is up? They know the server seed... It wouldn't make sense for the house to play against itself if all the jackpots were simply flat rate.
The main problem is that you also cannot prove you aren't playing against yourself and robbing us when we are building up the progressives. Without the progressive jackpot then the house percentage and chance to win is heavily skewed.
Yes you are probably correct that part of the problem lies in the progressive jackpots themselves. When the jackpot has a positive expected return, there is an incentive for bot operators to quickly play games since in the long run they should come out ahead.
When we created the site, we believed that adding progressive jackpots would be a fun way to make our site stand out from all the others. The jackpots are always changing size, so it serves as an incentive to come back to the site and see how big they are. It also lets some lucky players win big prizes. Therefore, we designed all our games around having progressive jackpots in addition to a low 0.5% house edge. We'd like to think that there are plenty of users that enjoy the jackpots – they probably just aren't as vocal on this forum.
We are worried that if we remove progressive jackpots and use some kind of fixed jackpot system, we will disappoint other users. As far as we can tell, most users come to the site and have a good time. If we start changing things around, that may no longer be the case.
For what it's worth, the most recent 37.048 BTC slots jackpot was won by a player that was playing at a rate of 2 games/second. As far as we can tell, this was a regular user that won the jackpot. Regular users do still win the jackpots. We do also sometimes see that a jackpot is +EV, but nobody is currently playing.
We only ever play the games on the site when testing something out. We never try to win the jackpots. We know that in the long run, with our 0.5% house edge, we will come out ahead, so we don't need to cheat. From a business perspective, it would be devastating to our site if we got caught cheating, so we simply refuse to do it. There are a lot of questionable Bitcoin businesses out there, but we are not one of them.
