The lottery has (~completely unexpectedly~) received zero donations in the first 5 days of the round, so I'm going to call it. The lottery page will stay up, for now, but the cronjobs have been disabled and there will be no further updates.
This means that I'll have to go back to making actual eve related posts, what a shame. As it happens, though, I have something prepared.
Since I no longer stand to profit from it, I thought I'd clear up the 'obvious scam' issue -- it wasn't. Kelleris is not my alt, and I have made precisely zero isk from this venture.
That over with, I'm counting this as a win. I never expected it to go seven rounds, much less for one of them to have hundreds of millions of isk in it. I got to make and then play with a neat toy, somebody won hundreds of millions of isk, and all the other players learned that gambling is a bad investment.
Anyway, since the lottery is shutting down I'm releasing it to the internets. It's basically a morass of ugly, poorly documented code and inconsistent file schemes, but it works.
You can download a copy of the production system's lottery directory (less my character names and wallet API url from config.txt). This could, theoretically, allow you to run your own lottery. Check out readme.txt.
You can also read the script that picks a winner and does some other things, and read the script that generates the lottery.html page every hour.
I'm really sorry that I ran this lottery into the ground. I saw it as an investment opportunity, much like a group in Massachusetts did with a particular lottery their state held. Unfortunately, I should have sat out a few rounds, so I didn't smother the baby in the cradle, but I got greedy. Winning is addictive.
ReplyDeleteMy suggestion to anyone else who runs the lottery is to take a cut. Seriously. In my real life business dealing I like to know how people are making their money. That gives me an insight into their motivation. Altruism makes people suspicious. Also with no rake in the pot, if you are at 200M from everyone else and you drop 800M in, you now have an 80% chance of winning 1B. Obviously it is a gamble and you would want to vary your exposure, but over then long term it is a winning bet.