I was asked to make a post about some stories within the Casino grounds so I thought I'd share. I have many so I'll do my best to pick the better ones.
Some back information: I've been a Casino Dealer for 11 years, I've been a supervisor for five years, and I've been a Surveillance Operator for one year. I've worked at three properties, none of which are connected or owned by the same company. I've worked on : Government/Private/Native American owned casinos.

From Hero to Zero.

At my first Casino, I was one of the first group of people who were trained to deal Roulette . After 4 weeks of working 6PM-3AM then doing roulette training from 3AM-8AM (Not paid) , I actually really enjoyed the game and after about six months I became extremely quick at the number game and the pace of the action was steady with very low margin of errors. Young man walks in, cashes in for $500. He buys in for $2 chips and just loads the board. After a few spins and pretty decent hits, he then changes his chips from $2 to 5$ then to $10 and racks his winnings up to $10,000. It was then, five spins in a row, he loaded the board with some pretty gross bets, and every spin I would hit the ONE number with either NO CHIPS on it, or maybe 1 chip , He lost all $10,000 in a matter of minutes. He leaves , and I go on break. After my break I was going back to the same table and wouldn't you know it, the same young man walks in and cashes in another $500. He tells me he just sold his car outside and this is all that he had left. So we do the same deal, buys in for $2 chips, then slowly starts betting $5 chips, $10, $25...and he makes $10,000 AGAIN. Within the next 25 minutes it was straight agony. Every spin, same thing, he would bet $2500 in chips, and win only $250, $400, and after about a half hour he lost it all . Never saw the guy again.
2) Man down
At this property, we are 24 hours for table games. It's currently 5AM , and I'm dealing some $25 Blackjack to this guy. He's probably early thirties , heavy guy. He's sober as can be, but right away I can tell he's been losing. We know how much you've bought in for, how much your down, or up, and I could see he was down $2000+. After about twenty minutes of pure losing, his temper starts to flare.At this point I now have two other guests at my table. Drinking coffee, not saying a word, just losing their money. After losing hand, after hand, this guy looks me straight in the eye, seized up, starts shaking, he can't move. He tries to punch towards me and smashes his stack of chips all over the place and falls backwards to the floor. I call for security, we cannot touch him due to liability . I can't move from my table because, well, liability / casino cash property, all I can do is try to talk to him. As I'm doing so, these other two woman who are sitting at my table just look at me and one says "OK, dealer, cmon lets go " as she taps the table telling me to start dealing and forget about the guy having a stroke on the floor. As security takes him to the ambulance out front, I had to stay behind for a couple minutes and give a statement. I go on break. I come back, and 45 minutes later, he comes right back in with a oxygen tank and keeps gambling for the remainder of the morning.
3) You get a dildo, and YOU get a dildo!
On a late summer Saturday night, we had a large event for these massive muscle guys/strongman competition type thing. After their show, I'm at the roulette table , and five of these boys come over to play. They were absolutely hilarious. They were feeling pretty good, cashed in somewhat large amounts and I could tell this was going to be a fun time. After about a hour of dealing to these guys, it's almost midnight, everybody is pretty hammered , I spin the ball, and all five of these guys take out these god damn (what I can only tell was) two feet purple dildos from inside their pants, and wiping them around in the air. The ladies were just loving it, one of the dildos landed in the roulette wheel and we had to shut the table down to re-calibrate the wheel to make sure nothing had been changed. I just remember that night was so much damn fun, I couldn't believe what I was seeing and I would never forget it.
4) Full Moon
On this day, I was actually training dealers / supervising them on small games like Three Card poker. We opened the table at 10AM, and this older man came and sat down . He played all day. The jackpot was $21,000 and that was pretty high for this table. He played, and played and played. He's one of the players where you know he's wearing a diaper because he's been drinking coffee/pop all day and hasn't moved in eight hours. As the day went on, this man never moved from his chair. Getting closer to midnight, he was aggravated and said "I need to go have a smoke, I'm getting killed in here". He left, and the very next hand, the lady beside him was dealt the jackpot . He didn't say much, but you could just tell he just hated life at that very moment because had he not gotten up, it would of been his hand. The man calmly took his cane , his hat, jacket, coffee, and left. The next morning I found out when he did leave he drove his car straight through his bank and was arrested.
5) Slick Robber
I actually give props to people who can actually pull this off. This story may confuse you so I'll try and explain things as best as possible. A lot of casinos have machines as soon as you walk through the front doors. A man walks up to one of these machines and sticks in HIS $100 bill. He doesn't gamble it, instead he hits the cash out button and gets a $100 TITO ticket where he then takes the ticket to the ATM machine to get his $100. Now remember, his Original $100 is in the slot machine. He then takes the $100 from the ATM and goes back to the same machine, and repeats this process over a hundred times. Essentially he's taking money from the ATM, and loading up the Slot Machine . Now he knows he can't do it too much because if the slot machine gets full of money, the machine will shut down and the slow attendant will have to take all the cash out. So he deposits over $10,000 , then has a small crowbar, he cracks the machine open and makes a run out the front door. To my knowledge he was never caught . But damn, that was pretty smart .
EDIT:
6) Mental Health is a thing.
10PM man walks in to play some high limit BlackJack. This guy knows the game and played well. Dressed nice, drank juice/tea , a little bit of a attitude, cashed in over $10,000. When this man was half way down his buy in, he said something a long the lines of "If I don't win here tonight, I'm going to go set myself on fire." I wasn't sure if he was serious because when people are down, they tend to say a lot of nonsense. I actually left early that night, and from a third party was told he did exactly that in the parking lot. The next day it was clear something terrible had gone wrong in the parking lot .
EDIT:
7) Nothing good happens after midnight
After a busy Saturday night, I was dealing a mix of games, and during this story I was in the middle of Blackjack. I had one young kid (probably 19) sitting in the middle, one older male probably in his later 40's sitting beside him on his right, and I had a really nice couple in their 20's sitting together at the other side. This young kid wasn't playing just sort of watching, and ever time the old man won he would give this young guy some of his winnings. The older man, was a wine drinker, and he had black between all of his teeth, I'll never forget. He's a little drunk but nothing terrible. As the night goes on, the older man goes and uses the washroom, at which point the couple asked the young guy "Oh was that your dad?" and the young guy says "Hah, no I wish!". The couple and I just looked at each other. This old guy, was in complete control over this kid. Absolutely disgusting. The night ends, and I find out the couple called a few of their friends, and they all waited outside by this old mans truck and beat the living hell out of him. 40 years old, sleeping with a 19 year old, completely brain washed . Very weird.
8) That one co-worker where you just wish they would quit.
One of our co-workers, nice guy but had a very big ego and we as employees just sorta left him alone. One day he had enough of the atmosphere and quit. Now usually when you quit, you cannot come back until you paperwork is finalized. How ever, HR was in that day, and he was given the paperwork the very next day. He came in, cashed in $1000, and made $50,000 in about a hour at the Baccarat table. My manager, was extremely annoyed, because now this guy is just mocking the casino and having the time of his life (Thanks for the big tip by the way :) ) and so he decides to call it quits. He wants to ban himself and he wants $50,000 in cash. The casino says Nope, we are going to give you a cheque. Now here's the thing, most business people will take the cheque, how ever you CANT CASH the cheque until the following monday because it's on that day where the funds are available. The casino on the other hand will cash their own check in anytime , because they want you to play. So this guy pretty much said go to hell I want my cash, and he called the police. Police show up, and management promptly gave him the cash.I though it was absolutely hilarious .

9) No good deed goes un punished
I was dealing Three Card Poker, and the jackpot was around $17,000. This old man (a regular) was sitting there all day grinding it out. Super nice guy, always a pleasure to deal to. Well, after hours of playing, he stands up and says "Hey john!, can you come here for a minute?" so his buddy John comes over. He says to John "I need to go take a piss real quick, can you play my card until I get back?" John agrees . John takes the chips and I stop him and explain he can't play his friends chips, he needs to cash in and play his own. And he does. Welp, second hand out and bam, doesn't he win it. The old man comes back and is so happy, he can't believe it. John, took his $17,000, didn't say a word to his "buddy" and walked away. I never felt so much hatred in all my life. Didn't give him a dollar, not a thank you, nothing. The old man sits back down again, the progressive resets to $2500, and he sat there grinding away again.
10) The Top Knot
I had this player , young guy, who was born into a fortune. One of his relatives passed away and left him a pretty big sizable amount of money, so he played poker every single day for the rest of his days. I will add, he IS a good player. I did not enjoy his company just because of the "Know-it-All" attitude, but he was good. We'll call him John. John is 5'10, and well build, with muscle. John also decided today was the day to show off his Top Knot. (google top knot if you're not sure what I mean) So he sits down, and he's absolutely KILLING the table. Every hand, after hand, after hand. And because he's in such a good mood, he's playing any two cards, calling any $500 bet, and he's just dominating. This one guy at the table decided he had enough. He got up, without saying a word and left. A moment later, he comes back in, walks behind John, and takes a pair of scissors , and cuts off his Top Knot. I for one couldn't believe it, dying laughing inside, and it just turned into one big brawl. That was a good day.
11) That one bad seed
One of my best friends who I haven't seen in YEARS ended up being part of the crew. Was kind of nice to catch up. We never really got along as we grew up because he has a very high picture of himself . He wanted that 10/10 woman. A mansion, and a new Corvette. So every month or so we would all go up to the other casino to play. I myself would bring no more than $500, but I couldn't understand how this guy (we'll call him Kyle) was spending THOUSANDS of dollars at the tables. So this wen on for a few months. Well, one day, as we're closing the casino, he and I are in the High Limit room and we're getting ready to close the tables. We are told to take the chips out, count them, put them back, sign this piece of paper and that's it. Well as the supervisor was locking the tray, the piece of paper fell to the floor, so she asked Kyle to grab the piece of paper. As he bends over, a great big $500 chip falls right out of his sock. Kyle was fired immediately , but it all made sense. They offered Kyle a deal where if he replaced all the stolen chips they would not make it public. Not sure how that turned out.
12) If I ever decide to write a book, this will be the last chapter: <3
After working at my first Casino for five years, I met a Indian woman who was visiting from another part of the country. During this time I was explaining a game to her, which honestly I don't think she even cared. She explained she was visiting and sight seeing , and that was that.Well, two years later I ended up moving to the other side of the country and transferred casinos, and low and behold she worked there as a Dealer. We got married , and it's been 5 years.
13) The Tip
One of our tables that we've had for a couple years had a progressive jackpot that had reached $100,000. The dealer at the table was sitting pretty lonely. Nobody really played the game because people knew it was extremely difficult to win the jackpot. My memory is a tad foggy, but you somehow needed to flop the royal flush. This young guy sits down and says to the dealer, we'll call him John. "John, if you pay me that jackpot, I will tip you $10,000" Well John started dealing, and about a half hour into his shift, he F*cking did it. He dealt him the royal. And you know something?This young lad, kept his word, and he made sure there was a audience, and he tipped exactly $10,000. That was a moment right there. That pay cheque was real nice. I think we all got about $500 more than usual. The moment that jackpot was awarded they got rid of the table because the money it was making was not near what the casino wanted. I'm sure there have been bigger tips at other casinos, but that was something special .
14) The Lawsuit
Now this story I'm going to have to beat around the bush a bit due to the nature of what happened. I can't won't answer any questions that you may have on this topic other than what I have to say because it had a lot of publicity . The waitresses at this casino had to wear very thin sexy clothes. Not borderline legal, but it was noticed. One day they called all the waitresses to come in and explained they were changing their outfit to something even more sexier. Now these new dresses were very very borderline legal . The staff said No way. We're not wearing that.So , friday night comes, and the staff work their whole shift, then at the end of their shift were called into a meeting and were all fired. Welp, one of those ladies father was a pretty big time lawyer. Brough the casino to court and won. They won big. Good for them. We had no waitresses for a couple days haha.
Thanks for reading along, I have many more I can add as the day goes on, those were just some off the top of my head. Feel free to ask any questions of the Casino industry. I don't really have many stories about the surveillance department because that's the one area where I can't really say a whole lot due to its privacy and contracts I was and still am under.

You can feel it, that buzz. That vibration humming through the sub. Every other post is about him. Every question on the Help Thread is about him. He's almost single-handedly (or True Doublehandedly?) made folks retire the Gungnirs, at least for a week or two.
The Hyoh Hype machine is getting up to speed. And yeah, it's exciting. Some meta-defining sh*t is about to drop. Hoards are about to be un-hoarded. Loads will be blown. Salt shakers will be shook.
But we've seen this before. And it can be dangerous.
Hype makes you play stupid. Break promises to yourself. Spend beyond your means. We've all read the depressed, angry, or tearful posts and comments that invariably follow a hyped banner. "Dropped 50K lapis, 80 tickets, and only got one A2. Wanted 2B, fml." "Cloud is my favorite FF character ever, $500 later no Cloud, feel like throwing my phone."
So I figured, before Hyoh arrives, we could lay out a few suggestions for taking care of your financial and mental health when he gets here.
1) Take your time. The banner will be up for two weeks. Banner rainbows from dailies actually exist, ask my GLS. Banner rainbows from random single tickets are a thing. Not every rainbow pulled is from a mass dumping of resources or a mass emptying of wallets.
And speaking of resources, hey hoarders: you've carefully and painfully denied yourselves the pleasure of pulling for weeks or months. There's no need to blow it all in one sitting. You want to run the step-up banner? Cool. Maybe limit yourself to one or two steps a day. You have 100 tickets saved? Good work. Now slow down and enjoy using them. It's supposed to be fun.
2) No rage pulling, no drunk pulling. We've all been there. Nothing makes you want to pull harder than a shitty pull. And there's a reason casinos give out free drinks. If your pulls are crap, put the phone down. Take a walk. Play a different game. If you're drinking and playing, don't pull. If you have to, lock your Google Play/iOS/Amazon account behind a painfully elaborate password for a little while.
3) Sometimes friends are your worst enemies, especially when they're luckier than you. I've got an IRL friend and coworker who plays and he has the best damn luck pulling rainbows. I finally asked him to stop texting me his rainbow screenshots because every time I saw one, it made me want to go pull. If you have a Discord/TwitteFacebook (ugh) group that you're a part of where people post their rainbows, maybe put a little breathing space between you and them.
4) You could never pull Hyoh and you'd still be fine. You'd still beat content, you'd still have other awesome units, you'd still have fun. I'm 573 consecutive days playing and I've never pulled an Orlandeau. For some of the newer players, that might not mean much. But people who've played as long or longer than me know - Orlandeau was the hype unit for a long time.
So for me, Hyoh is cool and all. But OK was my first good rainbow and he's getting his 7* next week. And he'll be hitting around 1700ATK at maxed cap with two free materia slots. That's what I'm excited about. Maybe get excited about what you already have too.
I'll wrap it up here. If anyone has any other suggestions for staying cool-headed during a hyped banner, please share. Any horror stories that we can learn a lesson from? Share those too.
Good luck, pull rainbows, pull Hyohs, but please, pull smart.
And like DefiantHermit used to say, "If you're not a whale and you pulled a rainbow, YAY!"
EDIT: Well, we've got a few happy and unhappy pulling stories rolling in. For anyone who's had a bad experience - take a few days to process what happened. You may discover that need to pull Hyoh goes away. There are still tickets and dailies. The story event will put some lapis in your pocket. And all your other stuff is still there - your rainbows, your awesome Item World weapons, all the rewards you've fought for and earned.
And I've learned that any thread up at the time a new banner drops will become a Pulling Thread. Even a thread warning people to take it easy. XD
Be kind to yourselves and your bank accounts. Don't be the homeless guy with the cellphone pulling wifi from the alley off the coffeeshop. It's all just ones and zeroes.

We all know that MLMs are predatory and manipulative businesses that convince their "employees" to effectively work for free at best or destroy their finances and personal relationships at worst. But that being said, do you think any MLM in particular rises above the rest and stands out as especially abhorrent in the sea of awful?
Personally, I think there are three companies vying for the title of worst MLM.

Essential Oils (YL/Doterra): Ok technically this is two companies but they are basically the same so I'm counting them as one. These stand out as being particularly terrible because they encourage this dangerous, anti-intellectual idea that oils are healthy or basically even medicine and doctors are liars and scammers. So while most MLMs will only hurt those who get sucked into them, the EO MLMs are arguably dangerous to society at large. Some brainwashed Hun puts a few drops of "thieves" (LMAO they actually named it thieves) on her son who has the chicken pox instead of taking him to the doctor, now that poor kid is gonna go spread it to the other kids in school and whatnot. The essential oil crowd is akin to the anti-vaccination crowd, and I bet there's a lot of overlap. Plus, this is the closest to literal snake oil salespeople.
LuLaRoe: It's often said that "loot boxes" in video games should be banned because they are essentially disguised gambling for kids, utilizing the same psychological tricks as slot machines (operant conditioning, random positive reward schedule) to get kids addicted and spending more and more money. Well if loot boxes are gambling for kids, LuLaRoe is disguised gambling for middle age women. The artificial scarcity of certain popular designs (the so-called unicorns) and the inability of the consultants to select specific items for their inventory make every new LuLaRoe order a pull of the slot machine lever or spin of the roulette wheel, hoping the next one will finally be the jackpot. I would wager that some LLR consultants are literally addicted to it in the formal, medical sense of the word. Side note, I think there's a lot of parallels between the manipulative practices and psychological hooks of casinos/gambling, video game loot boxes, MLMs, and proper cults, so it's no surprise that LLR seems like some terrible amalgamation of them all.
Amway: Arguably the father of all MLMs, two things I think make them extra repugnant. First, they are probably closest to a literal pyramid scheme because in addition to selling some actual products, they push this whole abstract "plan" for generating passive income and becoming financially independent (or whatever the buzzwords of the day are) that completely lack any useful information or substance but rather serve to collect more money for the top of the pyramid. Second, they are notorious for hiding their identity when pitching to potential victims and being extremely vague until it's already too late. They know full well what they are doing and that a quick Google search will lead to thousands of articles explaining how Amway is a scam, so they use these insidious tactics to trick people and skirt their awful reputation.

What do you think, agree or disagree? Any others you think are even worse than ones I've mentioned?

We are presented with a loot box system, the fundamental question at hand is: what is the eventual price of the obtaining a merchandise? And that is the question I seek to answer.
This post will be long. The key info is as follows:

You can skip down to see how to compute average price from rate per box.
You can use the chart used in the variance section (titled Caveat 1) to check how likely it is for you need to spend above average price.
There is some budget guidance for both single-tier and WG's current two-tier loot box systems.

imho, knowing how to budget against loot box system is the most important thing before participating in one.

There is a summary section. Although by themselves the summary points seem too common sense. You may be inclined to forget them in practice. I forget about them myself in other games until writing down this post. So I recommend going through the math. The advice in this post is completely based on math. The possible adverse consequences implied here are cold-bloodedly real.

Let's begin.

1 From rate to price

1.1 Some background

Let's start from ground up. Loot boxes have a certain chance of yielding a merchandise or a group of useful merchandises. Let's call a box that yields something useful as a "successful" box or a successful opening. An x% chance of success -- when implemented correctly and fairly -- means that when the number of loot boxes among all players opened approaches infinity, the portion of successful opening out of the total number of boxes opened is x%. There are various ways to implement loot box opening that gives that x%. One way to implement a fair loot box system would be to make the opening of different boxes (statistically) independent of each other and as uncorrelated as possible. Using any of the newer uniformly distributed random number generators, aka RNG, with careful re-seeding should do.

Every box can possibly be a successful opening. Just like a lottery, one good way to participate is to just get one box. Sometimes, you get lucky and you get the prize with minimal input.

1.2 Formulating the question

Before buying anything, it is fair and prudent for the buyer to know the price. Asking about the price of a merchandise behind loot boxes is the same as asking: how many boxes do I need to open in order to get ... tank?
The number is not fixed but has a distribution, which comes its average and variance. Average and variance are what we can use to gauge the eventual price and thus budget accordingly.

1.3 Price (ie. number of boxes opened) distribution

So first, given a success rate of p, we ask: what is the distribution of the number of boxes, N, required to obtain a successful opening?
Quite simply, succeeding at nth box means failing the previous (n-1) boxes. Thus the probability is failing (n-1) boxes first and then succeeding with 1 box next:

P(N=n) = (n-1)^p * p

The exact behavior of the distribution is not directly relevant to the questions in this post. We are only interested in the bulk behaviors. Nevertheless, I must clarify a few things. Follow the link to see P(N=n) looks: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+(n-1%2Fp)%5E2+*+(1-p)%5En*p+from+n%3D1+to+infty -- it is an exponential decay on n. For example, say p = 3% in a fair system as described in Section 1.1. Suppose an "infinite" number of players buy loot boxes until they get their first successful opening. Then 3% of the players will get their first success on their first box. 3%*(1-3%)=2.91% of players will get first success on their second box. 3%*(1-3%)^2=2.8227% of players will get first success on their third box. So on and so forth. But for any individual player, in a fair system with no particular quirks, the chance of success for first, second, third box is always 3%.

1.4 Average price (ie. number of boxes opened)

Consequently, the average number of boxes required is

= sum n * P(N=n) = sum n * (n-1)^p * p from n=1 to infty = 1/p

Feel free to verify the sum of the above arithmetico-geometric series

In other words, the average number of boxes needed to get a successful opening is inversely proportional to the success rate per box. That makes intuitive sense.
For example, Boxes of Vanilla Candy has a 3% chance to yield a Lucky Ticket. Thus the average number of Boxes of Vanilla Candy required to obtain a single Lucky Ticket is

100 / 3% ~~ 33

In other words, it costs in average around

33 x 1350 = 44550 ~~ 45k gold to get one Lucky Ticket if you purchase Boxes of Vanilla Candy.

Note that, in reality, if you haven't gotten any Lucky Ticket or haven't received any real prize in with the Lucky Tickets you get from 30 boxes, you are going to buy another 10 boxes to continue -- not just 3.

Now let's review what average means with an example. Suppose every participating player keeps buying Boxes of Vanilla Candy until he acquires 1 Lucky Ticket -- and for now, assume every single Lucky Ticket will get something -- then WG will end up selling Lucky Tickets at 45k gold each in average, ie. total gold spent divided by total number of participating players is 45k. But as we already went over, people will get wrecked if they actually keep buying until getting a Ticket. So some people will walk away without receiving any Tickets but have spent lots -- pushing the average price up.
What happens to players who buy more than 1 Lucky Tickets, you ask? In terms of average price, you can treat purchases from the point of any previous Lucky Ticket as purchases by a new player.

2 Variance and Caveats

2.1 Variance in price (ie. number of boxes opened)

But the average does not tell the whole story. A distribution could be so skewed that relatively few players would experience the average or something close. To see how well the average represents majority experience, we can examine standard deviation and the cumulative probability within a range.
The variance in the number of boxes required, N, is

Var (N) = sum (n - )² * P(N=n) = sum (n - 1/p)² * (1-p)ⁿ * p from n=1 to infty = ((1-p)/p)²

The standard deviation is

Std (N) = sqrt(Var (N)) = (1-p)/p

When p is small, approximately,

Std (N) ~~ 1/p

In other words, for small probability loot boxes, the standard deviation is approximately inversely proportional to the individual success rate. This brings us to the first buyer-beware issue of small probability loot boxes. The smaller the per-box success probability, the bigger the variance and thus the more likely your individual experience varies wildly from the average. More on that later.

Note: Standard deviation is the metric you want to use when you compare variability to average as standard deviation has the same dimension (unit) as mean.

To appreciate what standard deviation means in this case, we can look at the cumulative probability within 1 standard deviation. The cumulative probability distribution of N is the familiar Bernoulli trial:

P(N<=n) = 1 - (1-p)ⁿ

Feel free to verify the partial sum of (n-1)^p * p

For example, the probability for the number of Boxes of Vanilla Candy opened before 1 Lucky Ticket is acquired to be at most 30 (slightly less than average but is 3 whole batches) is about 1 - (1-3%)^30 ~~ 59.9%. In other words, a majority of those players who buy Boxes of Vanilla Candy until they acquire their first Lucky Ticket will get it within 3 batches. However, since the probability for the number of Boxes of Vanilla Candy opened before 1 Lucky Ticket is acquired to fall within 1 standard deviation is 1 - (1-3%)^(2/3%) ~~ 86.9%. Over 1 - 86.9% =13.1% of the players who buy Boxes of Vanilla Candy until they acquire their first Lucky Ticket will have spent at least double the average price, which is 90k gold, by then and possibly more.

2.2 Caveat 1

-- and cumulative probability of price (ie. number of boxes opened)

Any of us could be one of those 13.1% that needs to spend at least double the average. This alludes to the most fundamental problem with (small probability) loot boxes. First, more math /*trumpet
The probability up to average, from average to 1 standard deviation and above 1 standard deviation -- again, for small p only -- are as the followings.

P(01/p
P(1/p1/p - (1-p)^2/p
P(N>2/p) = (1-p)^2/p

The relative proportion of probability density over these 3 intervals actually do not change much as p changes from 1% to 50%. (The length of the intervals themselves change. Repeat: the lower the rate per box, the higher the variance.) However, when p is small, the second interval, ie. the probability of above average but below 1 standard deviation is high and this probability drops by quite a bit as p increases. See this chart.
The significant probability over the second and third intervals is why so many players will end up spending above average. Loot boxes with low individual rates exacerbate this problem because -- compared to high rate boxes -- low rate boxes not only have high variance, which would be counter-balanced by correspondingly lower price, the probability over the second interval is higher. Thus with low probability boxes, the chance of you spending above average price is higher. (Caution: Fair loot boxes only -- 'fair' as described in Section 1.1; unfair systems have much more severe problems; more on that later).

2.3 Handling the randomness

In order to avoid runaway spending that will either impact our real life spending (e.g. debt servicing) or the health of our mind, we have to set an upper limit and be prepared to stop right at the limit. That could mean a few things. One is to budget for at least double the average. If the average price is 45k gold, be prepared to spend at least 90k. If you cannot afford double the average -- 90k for 86.9% chance, do not participate. You can use the Bernoulli trial formula to set an acceptable probability for yourself and deduce the corresponding budget.
Also set a soft limit above which you will be in small probability territory. Say 70k -- just conceptually; this precise number is unlikely; remember that boxes come in batches of 10. When it is over 70k and you still haven't gotten your merchandise (Lucky Ticket), tell yourself this round of ~~gambling~~ loot box event is not working for you. Start preparing for a no return exit. And when your hard limit is reached, stop right there and then. Do not come back.
This is a good time to compare merchandises sold behind loot boxes vs merchandises with fixed pricing. When we go a department store, every product has a labelled (fixed) price. We can base our decision of purchase (or not) on the labelled price. Here, we can't budget based on the average price. Instead, we must budget for the low probability scenarios of higher price.
Another way to look at it is that in order to produce value out of existing spending, you are goaded into continuing to spend until you get the merchandise of desire. Thus the variance in loot boxes pushes players into spending more than they wish.
The experience may seem related to gambling at a casino. Except, for many casino visitors -- and I dare to say majority -- the visit itself, the experience of gambling, is where the fun lies. In contrast, with loot-box locked merchandises, there is no value out of your spending until the merchandise is obtained, this is what pushes higher than desired spending. It may be still ok to spend. What you need to do is to avoid the dreaded situation of having spent a lot and past budget yet only to realize much more spending is still required. That's what I wrote this post to help with.
The caveat here does not only apply to WG's Christmas 2018 loot box. It applies to any other loot box systems and the effect is most felt with low probability loot boxes.
I have personal experience on that note and I can attest that I've run into low probability scenarios numerous times (sub 10% frequently and even sub 1% a few times) and spent hundreds of $$$ each time without any good feeling out of it. Low probability event happens!

2.4 Multi-tiered loot boxes

So far, we have talked about the cost to acquire Lucky Ticket. But a single Lucky Ticket does NOT guarantee a tank -- not to mention a tank of high value. (Please search the subreddit for examples.) WG uses a two-tier loot box system to evade App Store policy of disclosing rates. That alone is underhanded. But the problem is much more severe than not knowing the rates. Before that, let's quickly go over how the math works.
With a two tier system, the averages simply multiply. For example, say we use the un-official rates from here, which estimates a 55% chance for obtaining something valuable per Lucky Ticket. (Gravedigger and Tankenstein was recently given out for free. Personally, I would take the rates of Defender and one of Dracula and Helsing off in addition. You can define your own list of valuables.) Thus the average number of Lucky Tickets required before a 'valuable' tank is 1/55% ~~ 1.82. Let's use 2 Tickets as the average. Since each Ticket requires 33 Boxes of Vanilla Candy or 45k gold in average, 2 Tickets requires 2 times that, which is 66 boxes or 90k gold.
The analysis on variance is a bit more complicated. We really need exact rates to make meaningful examples. There is a quick conclusion we can draw here: since the probability of above 1 standard deviation is relatively unchanged at around 12% to 13% as success rate changes, which means majority lies within 1 standard deviation, you can use the uncertainty formula you probably use in your physics class (use the product formula). So earlier we said even though the average price of a Lucky Ticket is 45k gold, budgeting 90k is more sensible. Now that we think 2 Lucky Tickets are required in average, we need to budget for needing 4 Lucky Tickets before a meaningful tank appears. (If rate was indeed around 50%, you can budget for 3 Lucky Tickets instead. A higher rate does mean we are more likely to hit average but let's keep budgeting for double since we have no real rates to play with.) The uncertainty in proportion is sqrt(45k/45k + 2/2) = sqrt(2) ~~ 1.414. So the average is 90k gold for 2 Tickets for a valuable tank and but a sensible budget would be 90k * 1.414 = 127.3k gold. Sometimes it doesn't hurt to repeat. Sensible means if you absolutely do not wish to spend 127.3k gold for one valuable tank, you should NOT participate via Box of Vanilla Candy. Either that, or it is very likely for you to walk away without any tank after spending past your budget.

127.3k is for 86.1% chance (although not precisely because WG does not disclose rates of the final draw). For a different acceptable probability, you can use the Bernoulli trial formula to compute the corresponding number of boxes (and thus gold price). The difference between that and average becomes the 'uncertainty' which you then can plug into the uncertainty formula. The product formula, if you are interested, is derived for normally distributed errors.

2.5 Summary so-far

The above two sections deserves a recap. Before that, let's summary the math as well.

Average number of boxes required before 1st prize is inversely proportional to rate per box
Standard deviation in umber of boxes required before 1st prize is inversely proportional to rate per box for small low rate boxes

Or, more completely, (1-p)/p

This chart tells you how likely it is for your spending to be above average or double.

In order to handle the randomness and the inherent push to spend above our wish by loot boxes, we would be wise to:

1) Understand the average price and the probability (ie. risk) of spending double
2) Check if our own acceptable budget is adequate vis-a-vis average + standard deviation. If our budget is too low, we are more likely to walk away without anything.
3) To avoid run-away spending, set a upper limit of spending. Also set a soft limit ahead of time and compute the associated probabilities. That way, you know you are in low probability scenario when you run into one. Tell yourself your luck is bad this time; accept it; and prepare to exit. Also, track your spending.
4) Before any spending, examine the caveats. As a mere start, loot boxes naturally push buyers to spend more than they wish -- based on math. Do we really wish to tolerate these caveats? Do we really wish to endorse WG's practice?

Ultimately, we make the effort as above so that our spending gets us joy. Failing to clarify the system, we may get dread instead.

2.6 Caveat 2

On top of using an under-handed way of hiding true rates on the part of WG, there is much more severe problems associated with loot box systems without specified rates. I chose this lovely word of 'unspecified' deliberately. Without prior disclosure, players cannot survey to verify rates. (Multi-tier system also makes it hard to verify rates by players, just saying.) The rates do not even have to remain constant. For example, an evil loot box seller can start a loot box event with high rates, which attracts attention and a reputation of good rates, and then gradually lower the rates to extract extra profit from players who enter because they expect a higher rate. Darth_Anonymous Is this Wargaming?
Having unspecified rates is the ultimate way of running an unfair loot box system. But there are more. In the previous sections, we went over the math for loot box systems where successive boxes are statistically independent. The math breaks down if the independentness is taken out. For example, an evil loot box seller can make the rate of your initial few loot boxes low or flat out zero but compensate you by increasing the rates of your later loot boxes. That way, the published rates can still be upheld. But small spenders who rely on ~~luck~~ low probability events would be goaded into spending more. Slot machines in casinos famously employ similar tactics in order to avoid giving out large prizes which through psychological effects shortens gambling sessions (gamblers leave when they feel satisfied from large prizes).
Issues with independentness that can only be measured by logging individual data per try (in order to compute co-variance) is extremely hard to detect for player communities. So that is a general problem with loot boxes as well.

My focus for this guide is how to be efficient with game resources and various financial commitments at various stages of the game, so if someone has a more efficient way for anything, let me know.
Before we get in to what to do, let me make a few things clear from the beginning.
Firstly, summoning is gambling. If you like to gamble and can’t control yourself and can’t play this game like a game rather than a visit to the casino, then stop reading now. Go download a slot machine and spin the reels for free. You will never* get a five star. Oh? You got Noctis, Luneth and Randi from your dailies? Good for you Johnny McLucky Pants. Also, no one cares. If you win the lottery are you going to go tell everyone to go buy a lottery ticket too? You should get a job at state lottery, the next big winner could be you! That 1% rainbow is also 99% broken hopes and dreams. So how can we play the game as a 99%? Read on below.
*yeah I know, odds are you eventually will, but it could be 6+ months and there’s no guarantee so don’t play as is if you will, it only leads to disappointment.
Secondly, as a non-whale, lapis and rare summon tickets are a resource that enable you to expand your play experience so that you don’t feel oppressed during events and story where you might feel stuck. They are not for saving up to obscene amounts and then blowing your load all in one go on the holy of holies, Orlandu (who, if you look at a recently posted JPN Reroll Tierlist anyway, isn’t even that great*, there’s bigger things coming). You want to try and play whale for a day? 100 tickets is still only 63.4% probability for at least one rainbow, then its 50/50 it’s on banner (do you really want to spend all your months of saving resources on basically two coin flips? What if you don’t get your waifu or Orlandu-san, will you commit honourable Sudoku and quit the game? You’ve got no resources left, you may as well move on to another game. Go back and read the first paragraph about gambling.
*ok, he is pretty great, settle down Orlandu fans.
Now that we’ve discouraged the gambler inside you, let me make a third thing clear; nostalgia marketing is a real thing. Nostalgia gives you the feels. This is the other hook for this game. Which series is going to make you ache? For me it was Secret of Mana. The music and characters, bosses… I wasted too many tickets (20, a paltry sum for some, but for the efficient it’s a huge waste for one banner with mediocre units). I’m sure there’s a bunch of people that regardless of if Cloud was the crappiest 5 star unit ever, even if he had 4 star stats, people would still sploosh over him. So watch out and keep your wits about you.
I consider all of these three groups of players (F2P / Minnow / Dolphin) to be in the same category because all of them have extremely low chances of pulling a five star, so all of them should be playing the game in the same way, the small amount of money added just gives more freedom to play the game, decrease grind time etc, it’s not for gambling.
There are also two further sub-categories. TM farmers and non-TM farmers. Within TM farmers there is another sub-category which is those that macro and those that don’t. This is a huge topic and pretty evenly balanced between those that support and oppose both the idea of TM farming in general (it makes the game ‘too easy’ / you need TMs to clear future content) and those that macro (it’s ethically cheating / its allowed so who cares). I don’t care which side of the fence you’re on, whatever you choose, make play choices and adjust accordingly.
Now on to the guide.

Starter

Get all that lapis from levelling up and clearing stories (thanks to update 2.0 it doesn’t matter if you have a goldfish memory you can check during the battle what the requirements are). Save all that lapis! Do not waste it on summons. You’ll want to expand material slots and friend slots to begin with. My friend slots is currently 60 and it’s a bit low, some advocate going up to 100+ because the associated trophy achievements cover the costs and the more you have, the faster you’ll hit those achievements. It takes time to add people so don’t do it all at once. Just add in game or use the megathreads. My materials is currently 155, which isn’t really needed now thanks to 2.0 taking our stacks from 99 to 199. Most stuff its fine to just have one stack of 199, Megacrysts and item creation materials that I use like ore and lumber I let go over 199. Simply keep expanding as you hit your limit until around 90-100.
Work with the story units, they level up 50% faster than normal units and need less materials to awaken, Fina is ok until you draw a better healer with like raise so you don’t have to burn phoenix downs. Although, it’s much easier to get phoenix downs now than when I started, and once you get raise you’ll basically never need them, so feel free to use them. Magic is very strong for a long time in the story once you get some AoE spells, so use any mage unit you might happen to draw, for me it was a Kuja and it was fine, I didn’t get any decent ones until I was already into the mid-end phase.
Towards the mid game you may need some equipment slots and most probably some unit slots (if you go the TM route, this could easily go to 100-200 as you start to hang on to units) and possibly crafting slots (the first slot at least is good value and doubles your output, especially the forge because one hero ring locks you out for 3 days, when I was farming materials I was able to make more than one per 3 days). Due to an event I expanded my Synthesize to 4 slots, and have never gotten value from it since, damnit. Consider, if it’s something you’ll likely do anyway and not going to need the lapis for anything urgent, you may as well do it now and make your life easier earlier on.
Friend point free summons are garbage and only useful for a select few TMs, some people like to level them up and sell them, but this is a bit of an extreme min maxing type thing that’s not really needed. Notable TMs are killers, escape, 10% hp and Sunbeam.
Sending gifts is free and doesn’t consume any resources! I wish the game made this clearer. Not sending gifts is a good way to get yourself removed from high level friends lists, because that’s basically the only thing you’re useful for to them (and if you’re using them for a little extra fp).
Go to menu -> options and scroll down until you see ‘Select party’ Set a specific party for Companion, Colosseum and Arena. This stops your shared leader from constantly changing to random garbage when you swipe through your teams. It doesn’t make a gameplay difference to high level players on your list as they’re not using you to clear content anyway.. but it’s mildly annoying to see the trash and makes it look like you don’t know the game.
Do not waste lapis to continue a story dungeon, ever. Never ever. Suck it up and do it again.
When you enter a town, click on quest report, click on the completed quest and click report to warp directly to the person instead of having to run around.
Don’t yolo all your resources on a banner out of frustration just because you have nothing and need something, wait for a good one and only focus on some good 3 star units that are 6 star capable or an uber TM like dual wield or top tier 3-4 star end game unit.
For quests, there are many quest chains and back tracking required. It’s convoluted and messy and if you try and figure it out in game your head will explode. Use the exvius wiki or combine it with a google doc to keep track and accept as many as you can, to reduce backtracking and the need to waste energy repeating dungeons.
Espers, don’t waste points on boosting their stats, focus on abilities. Esper stats only give 1%, so if you give your esper +100 attack, it only gives your character +1. Use the excellent simulator to map out your points.
Keep two to three (two is fine) Edgars for future chaining shenanigans.

Mid Game

At this stage you’re starting to get comfortable with the game and combat in general, maybe even chaining. During this stage you’re aiming to continue the story to unlock all the Espers and complete important item quests. Your bank roll of tickets is used to aim for good banner 4* units based on TM or your party needs. 4* units have a decent chance of dropping, so if daily pulls aren’t enough for you or you want to conserve lapis for TM farming, this is the time to burn a few tickets, currently there’s enough income of tickets to be able to do this. You’ll probably find that because of this you need to use some lapis to expand your unit slots and equipment slots.
Unless you urgently need a trophy or two, I would recommend leaving low-priority quests until end game. It actually takes a bit of time to map out and efficiently do quests. If you’re not TM farming, this can be a place to use energy instead, but farming materials might be better such as megacrysts for rings or megacites for levelling up your espers.

End game

Story content is cleared All Espers unlocked Clear low priority quests. Max level all the story characters (for future trials). Work on trophies.
Once your level is high enough, lapis goes into energy refreshes for farming TMs and tickets continue to go into chasing good 4* TMs. One redditor made an excellent reference for the ratios based on rank.
If you’re not TM farming, you can farm resources for rings. To be honest, there’s not much else to use energy on at this stage of the game. You can finally disconnect some of the hooks that FFBE has gouged into your body.
From this stage of the game you can run arena with minimal effort for the weekly 30k reward or zero effort (just the daily 5) for the 90k reward

For all stages of the game:

Whenever you have the vortex daily quest, unless there is an event for less than 5 energy, always do 3x Chamber of Awakening – BGN, you break even and I often get a sacred crystal or two. The other choices offer nothing of value.
Put all your limit burst pots into Cecils limit break, try to max farm 3 star and 4 star LB before going to 6 (skip 5). If you don't have Cecil, look for a unit with % in their LB, like Exdeath (check the wiki).
Colosseum has some good gear mixed in, work through it as you party power allows.
The wiki and this subreddit is your major ally in staying on top of everything, also, you can try jumping on discord!

What do I do with my moogles if I don’t TM farm?

Mandatory TM #1 dual wield (Zidane)

The one and only, our f2p lord and saviour. 8 hits with barrage in one turn? Delicious. Everything just went easy mode. Colosseum will be much easier.

Mandatory TM #2 dual cast (Ludmille)

Edit: this is now less of a priority if you future proof towards Y'shtola, a great dual casting support easily obtainable from an event, thanks to CyanJet for pointing that out.
Dualcast can still be useful if you can't hold on until then or as a seconday dual cast for Cecil etc, but you may now consider this equal with #3.
Why do I rate this a fraction above dual wield? It’s very easy to get high level friends (and they all have dual wield) to breeze through all story content and PRO difficulty (people that want to clear content themselves without relying on their friends is a novel, but inefficient idea), giving your support the ability to do two things a turn will help tremendously, you’ve probably found yourself frustrated many times that your support is locked casting curaja every turn and can’t raise or buff, or their curaja isn’t enough to top everyone up to full each turn and your team is eventually dying. No more! I had the option to farm a dual cast over my 2nd dual wield (never had the choice during my first dual wield) and every high level content and trial I tried to clear, I could see every time a situation where if I could dual cast it would have changed the outcome completely. This will have a huge impact on your gameplay experience. You’ve got space for five TMs to farm so both should be happening if you have them anyway.

Mandatory TM #3

From here it depends on what you have. Another dual wield is good. A bis weapon is good (but not as good as a 2nd dual wield). If you’re super future proofing a bis gear like bracer or cowl because if you luck out on a good unit later on you can still use it, but these are less impactful as the stat increase is not as big. Blade Mastery and Sakurafubuki (only if you have both, just one is a bit meh)
If you TM farm, moogles are best used to cap off units that are almost 100% so you don’t waste any .1% while afk.

What do I spent my Mog King event currency on?

Even if the ability materia from a mog king event that boosts stats is only a small upgrade or worse than potential TMs, grab it.
For example; Twinspell (Increase MP (5%) and MAG (10%)) I had more than enough event currency to get all 4, but I thought, eh I’m the ultimate future proofer and I have all these shanttotos I can TM farm for 30% mag, this is a waste of currency. I still have those 5 shantottos at 0%, other TMs popped up that took priority. I regret not grabbing them.
note: As an addendum, only bother with the ones that increase HP, ATK, or MAG PLUS. 10% HP/5% DEF is alright. 15% HP is better. But 10% DEF/5% HP is a pass. You'll get more out of 10% HP from FP summons (courtesy Roboplus/)
Always (oh, controversial) get the 100 cactuars. There’s heaps of stuff to level up. After your main party, level up future six star units and the story units. Why story units? There’s a trial where you have to use them, and some of the story lapis achievement awards need stupid abilities that only they have (like Lid’s ‘Maintenance’. ugh gumi pls)
Sacred crystals, 5* mats and 6* mats are easily obtainable from maze events (6* not so much) and mog king events, don’t waste energy in the pro awakening vortex for crystals and 5* mats.
If you’re patient, there’s enough ‘other’ events that you can skip the expensive 6* mats, just get the cheap ones and use the event currency on something else. Priorities.
Silver keys, scream root, and alacyrst not a high priority in mog events, there aren’t many silver chests worth opening and every mog event so far has had screamroot and you can also get it from enchanted maze events (alacryst can be obtained from ability crafting).
~Have luck and good fun.

FunFair has been up to a lot of things, and thus, the post made a few months ago is quite outdated. I’ve written this just to keep the subreddit updated, and to have a nicely formatted post full of information regarding FunFair for both newcomers and “veterans”. This post will be updated more often than not, and when the time comes for a new one again, it shall be written! Cheers.

What is FunFair?

FunFair is a decentralized gaming technology platform which uses the Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts, and proprietary state channels (Fate Channels) to deliver casino solutions with state of the art games that are fast, fun, and fair.
FunFair is not a casino. Instead, FunFair will license its technology out to casino operators. Being a casino carries with it risks and burdens stemming from statutory and regulatory hurdles. Being a licensing entity instead, provides legal safeguards and will enable a more widely used platform.

Why was FunFair created?

There are many costs, headaches, and complications with online casinos. Briefly, they are the fees associated with operations (servers, infrastructure, large employee-base, fraudulent activity investigations, chargebacks) etc. Attracting players and gaining their trust comes afterwards, which is another issue within itself. There is a blatant trust issue with conventional online gaming that FunFair aims to diminish, while creating a seamless experience for both operator and player.

The Market.

Online gambling is a large market: Currently over 47.1 billion dollars in market volume and projected to continue increasing quite exponentially. FunFair is also attempting to capture a new market of casino operators and players that aren’t currently factored into this estimate.

The Team.

The FunFair team consists of 40+ developers, industry executives, and professionals. They have one of the largest teams in cryptocurrency. Feel free to check them out on their website: https://funfair.io/how-it-works/our-team/
Notably, the first five employee profiles presented on the website are:
Jez San OBE, Founder, CEO
Jez San is a British technology entrepreneur and investor whose pioneering work in the field of real time 3D computer graphics led to being awarded the OBE for services to the computer games industry.
Jez founded Argonaut Software in his teens and designed the first chip used to power 3D games including multi-million-selling Star Fox, Harry Potter and Croc. He also founded 3D online poker room PKR and microprocessor developer Arc International.
Since 2013 Jez has been an active investor in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector. His investments include Google’s DeepMind and online cryptocurrency exchange Kraken.
Jeremy Longley, Founder, CTO
Over 15 years’ experience managing technology teams – from the development of advanced video-game software through to the deployment and operation of enterprise-scale infrastructure.
Oliver Hopton, Founder, Developer
Oliver Hopton is an experience developer and team lead with over 15 years experience building gaming products. He spent 10 years working at online poker room PKR as Software Development Manager working on a huge variety of administration tools and integrations with 3rd party gaming content and providers. Heavily involved in technical compliance for gaming license applications in Guernsey, the UK, France, Italy and Denmark.
He then spent 18 months as CTO of EveryFan, responsible for architecting and building a UK facing sports betting product.
David Greyling, COO
David has more than 20 years’ experience in E-Commerce related organisations. In his role as COO, David is responsible for leading the business development, strategy, operations, finance and corporate functions.
With extensive leadership experience in Digital marketing and E-commerce international companies, David specialises in leading business integration and transformation programmes.
Prior to his current position David was Director of International for William Hill PLC, reporting to the board on market expansion, regulation and strategic change management programs.
Stefan Kovach, Business Strategy and Marketing Consultant
Stef is an industry executive with with a wealth of experience, having headed up the marketing functions of both PokerStars and bwin.party - two of the biggest brands in online gambling.

Career Opportunities

Further, FunFair is looking to expand – and fast. They expect to have a team of 50+ people in the not-so-distant future, as they are currently hiring developers, business and marketing professionals, and so forth. So, if you’re looking for an opportunity to showcase your expertise in these fields, try your shot at securing a position within the company! (https://www.funfair.io/careers) The FunFair team’s base of operations is in London, UK.
Some of the positions currently offered in the United Kingdom, England, London:

C#/Javascript Developer
C#/Javascript Developer - Domain
C#/Javascript Developer - KYC
Community Manager
Senior Business Analyst
UI Developer
Senior Developer - Typescript
VP Product Owner

When did they start the project?

Technically, FunFair started on June 22nd, 2017, because all FUN tokens that will ever exist were created on this day. However, the idea, technology, and product were being developed before the ICO started.

What have they accomplished to date?

FunFair have accomplished a lot since their inception- consistently updating development, business operations, and hiring many new staff. From Sponsoring DevCon 3, receiving awards from the Malta Gaming Awards, excellent showcase updates, and launching their product to the gaming industry at the International Casino Exhibition which boasted over 30,000 industry attendees, they have been on track to their public release. With the release of the closed beta right around the corner, the future is bright for FunFair.

Ok, so what is the technology? What are they developing?

FunFair is building their decentralized platform and protocol on top of Ethereum’s blockchain. FunFair is developing the game technology, and their proprietary, advanced state channel technology which they call Fate Channels. The platform that FunFair has created and continues to develop, will allow anyone to run a casino in just a few clicks, allow third party developers to distribute and integrate their own games to a new, global audience, while creating the ultimate casino experience for end users.
Fate Channels are FunFair’s custom, proprietary version of State Channels. They are superior technology to current State Channels, as they are what support the communication during game sessions between player and casino, while executing entire game logic and random number generation off-chain. They provide a fast, low cost method for RNG, starting game sessions, ending them, and settling with smart contracts on the blockchain. There is only one gas fee needed to start the game session, which solves scalability issues with platforms like Ethereum.
For an in-depth explanation that you won’t be disappointed in reading, please refer to the technical white paper here: https://funfair.io/wp-content/uploads/FunFair-Technical-White-Paper.pdf

What really happens in the Fate Channels?

FunFair’s random number generation is executed within the Fate Channel, and is a commit/reveal scheme that makes it provably fair. There are also a hash chain to prove that the overall sequence is indeed fair.
A player enters a FunFair-powered casino with some FUN tokens in their wallet, and then both the casino and player send FUN tokens from each of their personal wallets into a smart contract which then holds the FUN in escrow via the Fate Channels (off-chain) until the player cashes out/closes the channel.
The player and casino swap random seeds that they have generated locally, and these are then hashed numerous times by both parties in private. The sequence of hashes are stored locally by each party. There could be thousands of hashes, which become the random numbers, and are passed one by one, in reverse order, by the casino to the player and vice versa when the game needs randomness. Since the hashes are in reverse order, a new hash will always hash into the previous one, so that it can be verified that it’s the correct value of the next hash. The first hash is committed in the state channel on the blockchain as it was opened, and this is what will be used later to reveal that the random number generation was correct.
The position that a ball lands on in a roulette spin, for example, is computed this way. The two hashes provided by both player and casino are combined into a random number that neither side could have predicted. It’s provably fair because because it can be shown that they come from the same hash chain in the correct sequence, and it can be shown after the game session is over, using the reveal to show the seed was in fact, committed to the blockchain in advance of the games played.
The random number generation scheme works extremely fast, and is not dependent and waiting on the blockchain for verification every time, yet it is provably fair in both randomness and sequence. It is easy to detect cheating by either side (for instance, the random number generations would go out of sequence). The security of the hash chain is what makes the randomness unpredictable. If it is possible to reverse a hash, you could predict the random number generation. FunFair uses SHA-3 for hash generation, which has not been reversed yet, and is likely to last in strength for some decades.

The platform.

FunFair presents its casino operators and players with a gaming opportunity never seen before:

Decentralized, essentially serverless
Provably fair, blockchain-based
Trust-less outcomes that can be witnessed on verifiable smart contracts
Instant cashouts - casinos do not hold your funds
Accessible through web browser on desktop or mobile
Fun games with an exciting user interface
Casinos feel safer, with no risk of fraudulent charge-backs from player credit cards
Fast gameplay conducted through Fate Channels – the team’s custom version of State Channels.
FunFair is preparing for mass adoption and has a working solution for Ethereum network congestion.

The games.

FunFair is pursuing a full suite of traditional casino games:

Blackjack
Baccarat
Craps
Roulette
Slot machines (many variations)
Let It Ride
Caribbean Stud
5-card Poker
3-card Poker
Many more to come

You can test all of these games, right now at https://showcase.funfair.io . Some are currently testable on the Ethereum test networks.
Regarding mobile functionality: A number of mobile dapp browsers are being built (ciphestatus) – FunFair support these. Their games are built with technology that works in mobile browsers.
FunFair is one of the only projects in the cryptocurrency space that has a working product.

FunFair’s vision for the future- an updated roadmap for 2018:

FunFair’s writeup of the updated roadmap can be found here: https://funfair.io/updated-funfair-roadmap-explained/
The roadmap can be found here: https://funfair.io/latest/roadmap/

Q1: In January, the team submitted to the UK Gambling Commission their application for a Remote Gambling Software License.
February 6th-8th,

Official launch into the gaming industry at the ICE (International Casino Exhibition).

Read FunFair’s written re-cap here: https://funfair.io/ice-2018-round/

Watch FunFair’s video round up here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEjC3_5Q5jA

March 8th-10th,

EthCC Conference.

FunFair CEO Jez San gives a presentation on FunFair platform and protocol to Ethereum community in Paris.

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irpu2iHDiK0

Q2 Goals:

Live Beta on main network.

Announce and start integration of first 3rd party games developer.

Further license applications.

If Beta proves successful, look to go live with first operator.

Continue to attract & retain blockchain talent.

Continue to build FunFair brand.

April 2018

V1 product enhancements and initial stage of Go-Live readiness.

Announce 3rd party game development partner.

Further production quality games released.

May 2018

V1 completes and closed Beta launches

May 15th - 17th,

G2E Asia - launch FunFair brand to Asian gaming market

Website: https://www.g2easia.com/

May 16th - 17th
Consensus and Token Summit in New York

Networking and updating community

Website: http://tokensummit.com/

May 23rd - 24th
Disruptive Online Gambling conference (London)

Exposure to UK gambling industry

Website: http://www.arena-international.com/gambling/

Q3 Goals:

Continue roll out of early operators

Learn, iterate and improve partner integration process

Drive further product improvements & platform features

Q4 and beyond:

Go live with first 3rd party games content

Continue to build FunFair brand

Some Information Regarding Casino Operators:

Casino operators will save significant money on hardware, chargebacks, and operational headcount. The number of physical servers required is reduced as gameplay executes in immutable smart contracts deployed to the ethereum network.
An operator will, at all times, require a reserve of FUN tokens to ensure they are able to accept bets, and cover their liabilities. If, after a period of time, they wish to convert some of their FUN token balance they will have a number of market exchanges which are capable of facilitating this type of transaction.
FunFair is working on the many customization options right now and up until release. You will definitely be able to customize the look and feel. You can add your own graphics, logos, colour schemes, etc. You will also be able to choose which kinds of games are offered, and how they will be laid out.
FunFair fully supports KYC. They’ve built their own KYC technology that’s crypto-friendly. FunFair’s tech will allow each operator to have their own policies on who they exclude and whether they require KYC/AML etc.
A reminder, FunFair isn’t an operator, it’s a technology that operators use, and some will be in countries where they need to do KYC/AML and some will be in countries where they don’t. FunFair’s tech works for all cases and will support the full strength KYC if that operator requires it.
Lots of information can also be found on the website. Here are some excellent links:

Regarding casino operators: https://funfair.io/use-cases/casinos/
Regarding players: https://funfair.io/use-cases/players/
Regarding game developers: https://funfair.io/use-cases/developers/
Regarding affiliates: https://funfair.io/use-cases/affiliates/

The Past, Present, and Future of FunFair..

FunFair has been consistently networking, and the team have been continually attending blockchain conferences and events. From launching their product to the gaming industry at the International Casino Exhibition in early February, launching their product to the Asian market at G2E Asia, and just recently announcing their industry first game development partner; Spike Games, FunFair is advancing very well, on track and ready for industry disruption.
For questions that you may have think I've missed, please refer to this updated FAQ on the FunFair website: https://funfair.io/frequently-asked-questions/#the-fun-token
TL;DR - Read^{the^{whole^thing}}

Ok so today marks a big step for me, if you hadn't have gathered by the title of this post I was (take that word with a pinch of salt for now) a compulsive gambler. For the past 8 years i have spent 75% of my salary in slot machines, online casinos and scratchcards and what do i have to show for it, well i'm a 25 year old guy with a near enough maxed out overdraft, three seperate credit cards all close to their limits and a savings account that currently has 23p. So financially i'm not in the best of shapes...
Other than the gambling i'm a pretty normal guy, university educated, worked all my life, play sport, like to be social, try to keep myself in shape but could always do better, don't smoke (absolutly hate the smell) barely drink and have never done any drugs. So how did this get to gambling, well I had to sit down and think about this, when i just turned 18 i really wanted to do a football accumulator, i'd heard some of the guys at school talking about them and they use to put 1 or 2 quid on 10 teams to win in the hope of winning a grand.
Well that to me was basically like the lottery, yet you had more control, so i started and months went by, every other week i'd go down to my local bookies, do a couple of accumulators and i would be on my way. Except one week it changed, when i went to go down there the machine which takes the coupon slips was broken so he said he would have to do it by hand, I said don't worry as i was only putting on a a couple of quid. Then the bloke next to me at the counter said you've got better chance at winning on one of those (pointing to the FOBT - Fixed Odd Betting Terminal) i smiled but was curious. I had seen people playing them but never gave them a second thought, normally it was roulette and have never been into card/board games of that style. But i walked over 2 quid in hand and put in.
That's when it started, scrolling through the games i found one called Cops and Robbers, opened it, read the rules and pressed spin, first 4 reels turned to the bonus, which would see the robber move round a board collecting different sums of money and a copper chasing him, if the copper caught the robber your bonus was over. Well the copper never did catch the robber, he just kept going 10, 28, 37, 59, 82, 117, this went on all the way to 500GBP the jackpot.
Now the guy at the counter who suggested the machine said that he had never seen any luck that before, well there i was withdrew the winnings went home and couldn't wait to tell my mum showing her the wad of notes now in my wallet. She laughed and we joked about it and she said now your up just never do it again, well sorry mum afraid that advice i din't adhere to.
So here i am now and today marks the day i'm determined to stop, everyone has new years resolutions well mine is simply to pay off all my credit cards, close my overdraft and be in the best financial position i've ever been in. It won't be easy, believe me over the years i've tried many different ways of stopping and the outcomes for each were never really that great, so what were they you may wonder, well:

Cold Turkey - So this was the first option i tried, simple enough just stop doing it, no more online playing, avoid the bookies at all costs and focus on the other activities i do. Verdict? I think i lasted 5 days.
Self Excluding - So the next thing i did was look at where i spent most of my money and this was predominatly online, probably as i could do it in my own environment without anyone watching. Verdict this did work for a time, think about 3 weeks, however, before i knew it i was googling new online casinos and signing myself up to these and taking welcome bonuse after welcome bonus.
Credit Card cut-up - With the first two failing i thought i need to get more drastic, if i can't stop myself signing up online, how about i stop the money supply? Verdict? This again worked for a time, i was confident without the cards i wouldn't be able to deposit however again about 3 weeks in i found myself signing up to yet another new casino and depositing, somehow after typping in the card details so many times i was able to remember the numbers like rainman.
Hypnosis - Ok so this was an interesting one, i have alway been very sceptical about anything that tries to alter your subconcious, but one night i put on a recording in the hope that it would cure my sick illness. Verdict? Well the first time i did it i didn't remember falling asleep, i woke up the next morning and must admit for the first time i had zero desire to gamble, i actually went to the gym in the morning before work as i felt weirdly refreshed. However about 2 weeks later i found myself being able to listen to the whole of a sleep recording and this just agitated me, 3 weeks later i decided to sleep without the recordings and 4 weeks later i was back in the bookies.
Talking to someone - Ok so there are many gambling related services someone can get, GA, gamecare, online forums, chatrooms, you name it there are 000's of people out there like me and they to are needing help and support. Verdict? Well i tried numberous of these methods but listening to other gamblers talk about their problems just wanted to make me gamble... I can't explain why, hearing the stories how people had lst everything, relationships, family, jobs and there was me like sure thanks for that i'm now going to go and do the very thing that has broken your life.
Medication - So yes i went to the doctor, it was on the gamecare website and they spoke about it in the forums, i got prescribed anti-depressants. Verdict? 3 weeks on these pills and i had to stop taking them, i found myself completely flat, my sex drive had gone, food, music, reading, sport all the usual things i enjoyed were now nothing like everything tasted the same, the books were monotonous, the songs were all whinny, etc. So this didn't work as i stopped taking them and to boost me i ended up, guess what, yeah you got it gambling...

So what approach will i be taking this time and what am i going to do differently? Well i am going to combine them all, plus will be doing a few other things as well, you are now able to exclude from bookies so you can't enter them, this i have done. I've informed my banks, they have agreed to stop me making purchases on my credit cards until i've paid of the balances in full and then i will be closing them down and the final thing i will be doing is writing down a blog,
A lot of people have told me that i have nobody to blame, it's an illness i need to stay strong etc etc. Well i'm here to tell those people regardless of what it is it has to stop, over the years besides the money i let down the people who love and care about me including an ex girlfriend who made the absolute right decision in leaving me, family, my mum i've told her and she supported me, but just kept letting her down and myself - the money i have spent gambling, could be a new car, a house deposit, so many constructive things.
So now i invite you to join me on my journey of sobriety. If you are a gambleex-gambler i'd love your thoughts, if your not a gambler but have questions, feel free to ask i'm a very honest and open person so will answer anything you may want to know.
Until next post!

Blizzard is now all in casual gaming after their true gods, activision saw powerful time sinks like Candy Crush (which they recently acquired) bringing tons of dollars for very little investment. So why would anyone think Hearthstone a game that you can play on your tablet to be any different? You know a game that Blizzard admits was intended for casual players yet claims to be an Esport. The contradiction comes from Blizzard's marketing attempt of turning a card game heavily relying on chance into some sort of Esport by making comparisons in skill to Poker (a game played in gambling casinos) so they can justify their HS tournaments. Poker really? Why cause they got tournaments in poker at casinos and somehow makes it a competitive game?
Well guess what?
"In 2012, ....in the Journal of Gambling Studies, which argued that poker isn’t the game of skill that many players make it out to be. In the experiment, 300 participants were divided into “expert” versus “non-expert” groups, depending on whether they had an interest in the game or not. Then, they played 60 hands of Texas Hold’em in which the deals were fixed, so that players could get consistently good, bad or neutral hands. In a nutshell, the researchers found that there wasn’t much difference in the final amounts of money that the experts accrued compared with the non-experts, with the implication that skill level didn’t have much effect on the outcome. In other words, they argued, poker is a game of luck."
https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2015/jan/14/poker-game-skill-luck-cepheus-bot-program
The article continues explaining that the only part of the game that is not pure luck is the human element, you know like sitting across the table and reading tells, bluffs.... The only part which is nonexistent in online card games and why online card games fail in skill.
You sit watch a screen with no human connection play random predetermined shuffles against your opponent that might as well be a bot.
Moreover, while poker gives all players on the table equal chance of winning because they all draw from the SAME DECK, this game disadvantages each player who is dependant on their collection of cards, hence less refined decks means less chance of winning.
So not only do you have to tackle a coin flip chance but you also lowering your chances by your poor collection.
And how do you improve on your collection? By winning! Contrary to every blizzard statement of just enjoying the game and trying wacky failed decks, to increase your collection, you need to acquire gold, and to acquire gold you need to win or pay real dollars. This where PAY TO GAMBLE comes to play. If you want to increase your chances of winning, you would have to pay for packs which in itself is a gamble since paying DOES NOT GUARANTEE improving your collection. The geniuses at blizzard chose instead of going with a deduction mechanic in opening card packs that are NOT in your collection, you also have to deal with duplicate cards which you have no choice but to dust and lose value in your purchase. Of course they carrot stick you thinking you can do this all for free, but unlikely since it's a non deducing pack mechanic, that would take eons to do so. So how did they rig this one to give the illusion of a challenge, avoid alienating their casual players and not feel like bingo night? By rigging RNG of course. All great theatre at its core is behind curtains.
This is how it works. Lower your winrate, RNG is more forgiving and gives you the right cards at the right time. Win lots of games and RNG goes from neutral to penalizing you while doing reverse to your opponent depending on his win rate. If your MMR rate is 60% and your chance of getting the right card to counter opponents hand would be at 40% each turn, same goes for your RNG cards. While your opponent win rate is at lets say 40%, he gets higher chance of getting right cards around 60%. Right cards means washing your opponent at every turn in face value of your working hand. Simple math here.
If your win rate goes too high. You get opponents with near perfect draws and can pull easy combos while you struggle to get the right draws. As added bonus, MM matches your deck with a hard counter decks so that you reevaluate your deck often. In other terms, buy more packs to get more cards and build new decks to counter the deck which you lost to. It's a vicious cycle of reorganizing decks and Blizzard matching you with exact counter of your deck depending if you won too many games or not. This is a way for Blizzard to balance matches, has nothing to do with skill, it's all giving the illusion of "worthy challenge" since there is no way of gauging skill (there is little to none), it has to match games in a balance of chance between someone who was too lucky, too successful with his deck or too unlucky. This why everything in this game like every other Blizzard game is heavily dependant on servers and little is done on client side. One is security, the other is rigged RNG. This is exactly why there are no stats in this game, Blizzard doesn't want its players to figure out the mechanics of MM and tilting games by controlling RNG. For any professional Esport player, this should have been a red flag from the start.
But the tournie players figured this out by third party stat counters, and this why they rotate their decks to circumvent RNG penalty by guessing what decks they might play against when there are limited amount of players in high ranks. They have that luxury since they have almost or if not all the cards in the game and create the most powerful decks to mitigate RNG and play the hard counters if they feel one deck is being play too much over the other. This is also the reason why cheap aggro decks are so successful. Who cares if the "right" draw is at 40% or 70% when your minions all same stats and you winning by numbers. This is a way of circumventing the RNG penalty and why aggro decks work so well and plague the game.
Examples of extreme RNG manipulation: I get matched against a Murloc Paladin Rush RNG doesn't give any of my clearing spells until turn 6 which means I must lose.
As a control warlock, I have 13 control/clearing cards. Pure RNG would have given at least 1 by then if I am life tapping and getting my free draw per turn... right? What the mathematical probability of that? Should I go buy a lottery ticket? Priests who always steal the right cards at the right time. Just last game mindgame's my deathwing at turn 4. In all of my cards, RNG chose the most powerful? On top of being miraculously an aggro priest which is super rare. Of course once you lose several games, RNG goes back to 50% then you become "competitive" again and you once again got flip coin chance of winning. Sometimes I know when RNG is going to penalize me from my starting hand. If I reshuffle my starting cards at least 1-2 of them will be the same cards I didn't want and I still get it back from reshuffle. These are incredible improbabilities.
Or when I know RNG is in my favor, I guess what my next card going to be correctly. Like when opponent has board full of minions, I get my twisting nether clearing card or some other clearing spell. If he puts a big minion next card is a life siphon counter card.
So don't tell me it's random, it's not. Each draw is being manipulated dependant on what cards each player has and what's on the board and depending on your win rate you get higher or lower chance than the median to draw the right counter. This is why by intent most of the time, the turns are a wash to keep the game interesting. How do they know what counters what? It's just pure math and that side log of card history isn't there for fun, Blizzard collects all the meta and the algos do the rest. We already know MM is not RNG in SC2 and Diablo 3 drops are controlled by input. All this luckily was explained by Diablo devs that they wanted a balance of controlled RNG but not enough to make it too easy to get the items you want. Notice each time using kadala or you missing a rare item, if you gamble for it, the likeliness of that type of drops in game from monster is more often. So for instance if you gambling for a specific ring from kadala, RNG will increase the droprate of rings over others when you kill monsters. Ok we can understand why they want to control RNG in SC2 MM and Diablo drops but why Blizzard doesn't want pure randomness in this game? Pure RNG would mean chaos, which means any randomized deck would have chance to climb to legend without any discrimination on player input or deck building. Which means bot heaven and F2Ps easily can easily breakout to top ranks without paying or much time invested. They definitely don't want this because they want you to buy more decks and frustrate you towards 50% win rate and give casual players equal chance of winning and to make you keep buying more packs and adventures and keep the sunk cost fallacy going. It also helps Blizzard focus less resources on balancing cards since algos will balance matches by draw.
Sunk Cost Fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment
So more time and money you invest, more you become committed even though it would be better off not to invest on a losing bet you keep hoping eventually will pay off. This game preys irrational human behavior to bulk up their profits and hence why so many hate this game and yet keep playing in growing numbers. Oh you just made a netdeck...sorry you still losing, maybe open a few more packs and get the right cards needed... you try those and win a few games, oops sorry again, lose 10 games this time... so now you make another deck open few more packs and keep buying packs that do not guarantee improvement and gamble away your money. It's quite genius that Blizzard circumvented state gambling laws by dressing this elaborate slot machine into a casual card game. Obviously, we can't technically call this gambling because your winnings are virtual goods and not considered as currency in any sort of way. So money goes in and NEVER comes out.
This is just an elaborate slot machine that will never pay off and like they say....the house always wins. I am not saying this is good or bad but the truth must be known. I know conformists will be calling me crazy and tin foil hats and all. Just remember how Google and Facebook profit from your free "experiences" and how creepy some of their services are and how well they know you.
Activision-Blizzard wanted a mobile game when Candy Crush and Zynga crap were huge hits. Knowing that the world was moving to mobile and that casual gaming (lack of skill time sink distractions) were becoming dominant. They opted to create the success of MTG with warcraft lore but like Diablo 3 (which many hated direction and design leader got fired) casual gaming was priority so they made this bingo style card game to make everyone feel they are competitive and skilled and not alienate the casual players, if they had made a game on pure skill and omitted all the RNG, they would have lacked the growth and profits they were targeting.
So once you understand the business side, you can understand why they have set up the game this way and why they have done it before. This is nothing conspiratory, we live in 2016, metadata and algos rule the world. Just look at Wall St HFTs and silicon valley with all the unicorn virtual startups. If anyone still doesn't believe Activision/Blizzard focus will be ALL IN casual mobile gaming. Read this, they just finalized acquisition of Candy Crush company. The latest upcoming changes to HS was admitted to be an effort to make entry into HS even easier of subgrouping their old power creep expansions into Standard and Wild format modes. These are hints of massive change in Blizzard's direction which is dumbing down gaming and welcoming the masses. This is NOT exclusive to Blizzard, almost every gaming company is going down this path. Blizzard was one of the few who delayed it until it was acquired, and now it's time for their fans to decide with their wallets.
http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/23/activision-closes-king-acquisition/
Blizzard employee indirectly admits RNG manipulation for their new overwatch game to favor MMR at 50%
http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20742904212#10
Blizzard job section pretty much wants anyone good with aglos and data mining and sharing code among different teams within Blizzard gaming. They even say they want to rehash SIMILAR solutions when appropriate. This is not a company thinking out of the box, it's very clear they want to conform to the masses. "Communicate and collaborate constantly, sharing code, algorithms, research, and ideas to move Blizzard forward. As we work with our teammates towards a superior end result, we keep everybody on the same page, and remain professional, humble, civil and direct throughout. Keep it simple. We code every system with a clear purpose in mind, and we aim to keep them as simple as possible (and no simpler). We don’t create new solutions when appropriate ones already exist."
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/roles/engineering.html
Voting with your wallet is the only way companies listen. I am just trying to make people aware what's going on. As a person at my age with hands that can no longer tolerate high APM, I actually enjoy playing HS, not because I believe there is skill in it, because I find it entertaining and an easy game to waste time on. But make no mistake, just like casino games, HS was built to siphon money off of people who take it seriously and this is why they're baiting you with Esport tournaments and prizes, to make you believe it's very easy to climb the ladder and keep that sunk cost fallacy going.
Disclosure, I never paid to play this game, so I just stick with classic cards 100% F2P, rank 14 this season.

Blizzard is now all in casual gaming after their true gods, activision saw powerful time sinks like Candy Crush (which they recently acquired) bringing tons of dollars for very little investment. So why would anyone think Hearthstone a game that you can play on your tablet to be any different? You know a game that Blizzard admits was intended for casual players yet claims to be an Esport. The contradiction comes from Blizzard's marketing attempt of turning a card game heavily relying on chance into some sort of Esport by making comparisons in skill to Poker (a game played in gambling casinos) to justify their HS tournaments. Well guess what?
"In 2012, ....in the Journal of Gambling Studies, which argued that poker isn’t the game of skill that many players make it out to be. In the experiment, 300 participants were divided into “expert” versus “non-expert” groups, depending on whether they had an interest in the game or not. Then, they played 60 hands of Texas Hold’em in which the deals were fixed, so that players could get consistently good, bad or neutral hands. In a nutshell, the researchers found that there wasn’t much difference in the final amounts of money that the experts accrued compared with the non-experts, with the implication that skill level didn’t have much effect on the outcome. In other words, they argued, poker is a game of luck."
https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2015/jan/14/poker-game-skill-luck-cepheus-bot-program
The article continues explaining that the only part of the game that is not pure luck is the human element, you know like sitting across the table and reading tells, bluffs.... Something that is nonexistent in online card games and they fail in similarity. You sit watch a screen with no human connection play random predetermined shuffles against your opponent that might as well be a bot.
Moreover, while poker gives all players on the table equal chance of winning because they all draw from the SAME DECK, this game disadvantages each player who is dependant on their collection of cards, hence less refined decks means less chance of winning.
So not only do you have to tackle a coin flip chance but you also lowering your chances by your poor collection. And how do you improve on your collection? By winning! Contrary to general statements of just enjoying the game and trying wacky failed decks, to increase your collection, you need to acquire gold, and to acquire gold you need to win or pay real dollars. This where PAY TO GAMBLE comes to play. If you want to increase your chances of winning, you would have to pay for packs which in itself is a gamble since paying DOES NOT GUARANTEE improving your collection. The geniuses at blizzard chose instead of going with a deduction mechanic in opening card packs that are NOT in your collection, you also have to deal with duplicate cards which you have no choice but to dust and lose value in your purchase. Of course they carrot stick you thinking you can do this all for free, but unlikely since it's a non deducing pack mechanic, that would take eons to do so. So how did they rig this one to give the illusion of a challenge, avoid alienating their casual players and not feel like bingo night? By tilting RNG of course. All great theatre at its core is behind curtains.
This is how it works. Lower your winrate, RNG is more forgiving and gives you the right cards at the right time. Win lots of games and RNG goes from neutral to penalizing you while doing reverse to your opponent depending on his win rate. If your MMR rate is 60% and your chance of getting the right card to counter opponents hand would be at 40% each turn, same goes for your RNG cards. While your opponent win rate is at lets say 40%, he gets higher chance of getting right cards around 60%. Right cards means washing your opponent at every turn in face value of your working hand. Simple math here. If your win rate goes too high. You get opponents with near perfect draws and can pull easy combos while you struggle to get the right draws.
As added bonus, MM matches your deck with a hard counter decks so that you reevaluate your deck often. In other terms, buy more packs to get more cards and build new decks to counter the deck which you lost to. It's a vicious cycle of reorganizing decks and Blizzard matching you with exact counter of your deck depending if you won too many games or not. This is a way for Blizzard to balance matches and giving the illusion of "worthy challenge" since there is no way of gauging skill or dare I say lack of it, it has to match games in a balance of chance between someone who was too lucky, too successful with his deck or too unlucky. This why everything in this game like every other Blizzard game is heavily dependant on servers and little is done on client side. One is security, the other is balancing.
But professional players figured this out by third party stat counters, and this why they rotate their decks to circumvent RNG penalty by guessing what decks they might play against when there are limited amount of players in high ranks. They have that luxury since they have almost or if not all the cards in the game and create the most powerful decks to mitigate RNG and play the hard counters if they feel one deck is being play too much over the other. This is also the reason why cheap aggro decks are so successful. Who cares if the "right" draw is at 40% or 70% when your minions all same stats and you winning by numbers. This is a way of circumventing the RNG penalty and why aggro decks work so well and plague the game.
We already incredible work that has been implemented in SC2 to match games perfectly and how Diablo 3 drops are controlled by input. All this luckily was explained by Diablo devs that they wanted a balance of controlled RNG but not enough to make it too easy to get the items you want. Notice each time using kadala or you missing a rare item, if you gamble for it, the likeliness of that type of drops in game from monster is more often. So for instance if you gambling for a specific ring from kadala, RNG will increase the droprate of rings over others when you kill monsters. Ok we can understand why they want to control RNG in SC2 MM and Diablo drops but why Blizzard doesn't want pure randomness in this game? Pure RNG would mean chaos, which means any randomized deck would have chance to climb to legend without any discrimination on player input or deck building. Which means bot heaven and F2Ps easily can easily breakout to top ranks without paying or much time invested.
They definitely don't want this because they want you to buy more decks and keep you towards 50% win rate and give casual players equal chance of winning and to make you keep buying more packs and adventures and keep the sunk cost fallacy going. It also helps Blizzard focus less resources on balancing cards since algos will balance matches by draw.
Sunk Cost Fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment
So more time and money you invest, more you become committed even though it would be better off not to invest on a losing bet you keep hoping eventually will pay off. This game similar to casinos prey on irrational human behavior to bulk up their profits and major component as to why so many get frustrated by this game and yet keep playing in growing numbers. Oh you just made a recipe deck...sorry you still losing, maybe open a few more packs and get the right cards needed... you try those and win a few games, oops sorry again, lose 10 games this time... so now you make another deck open few more packs and keep buying packs that do not guarantee improvement and gamble away your money. It's quite genius that Blizzard circumvented state gambling laws by dressing this elaborate slot machine into a casual card game. Obviously, we can't technically call this gambling because your winnings are virtual goods and not considered as currency in any sort of way. So money goes in and NEVER comes out. This is just an elaborate slot machine that will never pay off and like they say....the house always wins.
Just remember how Google and Facebook is metadata, aglos and ads. Activision-Blizzard wanted a mobile game when Candy Crush and Zynga crap were huge hits. Knowing that the world was moving to mobile and that casual gaming (lack of skill time sink distractions) were becoming dominant. They opted to create the success of MTG with warcraft lore but like Diablo 3 (which many hated direction and design leader got fired) casual gaming was priority so they made this bingo style card game to make everyone feel they are competitive and skilled and not alienate the casual players. If they had made a game on pure skill like chess and omitted all the RNG, they would have lacked the growth and profits they were targeting. So once you understand the business side, you can understand why they have set up the game this way and why they have done it before. We live in 2016, metadata and algos rule the world. Just look at Wall St HFTs and silicon valley with all the unicorn virtual startups. If anyone still doesn't believe Activision/Blizzard focus will be ALL IN casual mobile gaming. Read this, they just finalized acquisition of Candy Crush company. The latest upcoming changes to HS was admitted to be an effort to make entry into HS even easier of subgrouping their old power creep expansions into Standard and Wild format modes.
These are hints of massive change in Blizzard's direction which is dumbing down gaming and welcoming the masses. This is NOT exclusive to Blizzard, almost every gaming company is going down this path. Blizzard was one of the few who delayed it until it was acquired, and now it's time for their fans to decide with their wallets.
http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/23/activision-closes-king-acquisition/
Blizzard employee indirectly admits RNG manipulation for their new overwatch game to favor MMR at 50% http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20742904212#10
Blizzard job section pretty much wants anyone good with algos and data mining and sharing code among different teams within Blizzard gaming. They even say they want to rehash SIMILAR solutions when appropriate, that means sharing algo code among its games.
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/roles/engineering.html
MIT claims random is not possible with conventional computers. http://engineering.mit.edu/ask/can-computer-generate-truly-random-number

Period: 363.60 days

	Submissions	Comments
Total	1000	9907
Rate (per day)	2.75	27.16
Unique Redditors	373	987
Combined Score	8058	18836

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1. Tutta Internet, 1973 (25 points, 6 comments)
2. E' siciliano il genio del web che fa "girare"i colossi della Rete (23 points, 4 comments)
3. Guardare prima di incollare. (23 points, 16 comments)
4. Repetita non Juvant (user support) (22 points, 16 comments)
5. Com'è strutturato il DBMS di Wikipedia e perché non serve NoSQL. [ENG] (18 points, 6 comments)
6. Linux: Identificare l'HW installato senza guardare sotto il cofano. (17 points, 5 comments)
7. Il nuovo CIO della Casa Bianca (15 points, 2 comments)
8. "Il progettone" Seconda stagione. (14 points, 5 comments)
9. PACKT: tutto a 5$ per Natale. (14 points, 2 comments)
10. Project lives! (un post in forma di standard) (14 points, 23 comments)
293 points, 41 submissions: KarlFiabeschi
1. Rtv: Browse Reddit from your terminal (17 points, 11 comments)
2. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (14 points, 3 comments)
3. Interactive Vim tutorial (13 points, 3 comments)
4. AMD to consider Coreboot/Libreboot support. Contact AMD!!! Let them know there is demand. (x-post linux) (12 points, 2 comments)
5. flameshot - screenshot tool (11 points, 7 comments)
6. Pi-Hole - a black hole for internet adv (10 points, 16 comments)
7. “Quello che odio di Google”. Le critiche dei dipendenti. Attuali o ex (10 points, 4 comments)
8. A programmer wrote scripts to secretly automate a lot of his job — and email his wife and make a latte (9 points, 3 comments)
9. Commandline Challenge [da linux] (9 points, 1 comment)
10. KDE - Plasma 5.9 Beta Kicks off 2017 in Style. (9 points, 0 comments)
293 points, 22 submissions: vitalijzad
1. Definizione di backup (91 points, 5 comments)
2. Mickey Mouse Hacks a Military Computer (25 points, 3 comments)
3. Quando ti mettono fretta prima di fare un rilascio in produzione (25 points, 16 comments)
4. Ubuntu 18.04 sarà basato su Gnome e non Unity (22 points, 10 comments)
5. We' waglio', vuoi venire a lavorare nella mia startup? (21 points, 5 comments)
6. Kotlin è ora ufficialmente supportato su Android come linguaggio di programmazione (16 points, 25 comments)
7. L'Olivetti Elea 9003 è un capolavoro dell'ingegneria informatica italiana (10 points, 2 comments)
8. Incontro Haskell-ITA Inverno 2017 a Milano il 25 febbraio (9 points, 4 comments)
9. P101 – Quando l’Italia inventò il personal computer. (9 points, 2 comments)
10. Traduttore di codice morse in Haskell (9 points, 0 comments)
204 points, 30 submissions: cybertex1969
1. [Annuncio] Domani, Venerdì 21, AMA con Salvatore Sanfilippo, AKA Antirez. Dalle 09.00 in poi. (17 points, 3 comments)
2. Google Brain Cleans Up Low-Res Photos by Turning Everyone Into a Glitched Out Monster (12 points, 1 comment)
3. "The first half of my MacBook Pro has arrived" (11 points, 4 comments)
4. Dennis Ritchie, Father of C and Co-Developer of Unix, Dies (11 points, 6 comments)
5. Watch Malware Steal Data From Air Gapped PC With Blinking Lights and a Drone (11 points, 3 comments)
6. Come funziona un computer quantistico (9 points, 1 comment)
7. USB Condom (9 points, 4 comments)
8. Database NoSQL e miti da sfatare (8 points, 17 comments)
9. Decapitata Avalanche: le botnet non sono imbattibili (8 points, 3 comments)
10. [AskII] Controllo / blocco remoto del telefono (8 points, 9 comments)
202 points, 15 submissions: Jianlucah
1. [denvit, blackdev1l, CapacitorSet] L’ascesa di Mastodon, il social network FOSS e decentralizzato (26 points, 11 comments)
2. TL;DR inizia così (21 points, 20 comments)
3. Dopo qualche giorno di lavoro posso finalmente dirlo: è nato /ItalyGames! (18 points, 20 comments)
4. [GTKplusplus] La stampa 3D in ambito consumer, vista da un appassionato (18 points, 19 comments)
5. E finalmente, Flash, ce lo siamo tolti di mezzo! (17 points, 16 comments)
6. [veon_fpo] Progetti FOSS, anche tu puoi contribuire (16 points, 15 comments)
7. ULTIME NOTIZIE! TL;DR ha bisogno di voi! (15 points, 0 comments)
8. [nierro] Clight, demone utente per linux scritto in C (15 points, 14 comments)
9. [serhack] Anti-DDoS Amazon Web Services Infrastructure (13 points, 7 comments)
10. ItalyInformatica cerca articolisti per li suo nuovo sito! (11 points, 13 comments)
170 points, 11 submissions: timendum
1. Da ieri youtube-dl è in grado di scaricare i video da RaiPlay (36 points, 12 comments)
2. Youtube-dl ora è in grado anche di scaricare video da Mediaset (29 points, 6 comments)
3. Gli sviluppatori che usano lo spazio guadagnano di più di chi usa la tabulazione (23 points, 18 comments)
4. Notepad++ si tutela contro l'hack della CIA (23 points, 3 comments)
5. La commissione europea finanzia MariaDB con 25 millioni (21 points, 8 comments)
6. SistemaTS: Inserimento spese sanitarie 730 in Python [OC] (14 points, 1 comment)
7. Le regole sulle password sono una cavolata (9 points, 9 comments)
8. OVH regala 3 mesi per contratti da 1 anno (5 points, 5 comments)
9. Tool per analizzare i thread più commentati [OC] (4 points, 5 comments)
10. Burger King ha sfruttato Ok Google e Wikipedia per una sua pubblicità (3 points, 7 comments)
157 points, 20 submissions: _samux_
1. [ENG] Elenco di libri gratuiti per sviluppatori (28 points, 5 comments)
2. [Eng] Un hack russo per sbancare slot machine al casinò (12 points, 3 comments)
3. Spanner, il nuovo database di google (solo disponibile come paas) (10 points, 1 comment)
4. [ENG] Deep Learning Porn Video ClassifieEditor with Caffe (10 points, 1 comment)
5. ecco la nuova squadra digitale del governo italianoS(xbk3lk5sdokiyowakwr3xl44))/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1#first) (10 points, 5 comments)
6. SSD Prices Skyrocket As NAND Shortage Deepens, HDD Shortage Looms As Components Become Scarce (9 points, 0 comments)
7. crittografia e diritti civili (9 points, 8 comments)
8. Perché i siti istituzionali italiani sono vulnerabili (8 points, 1 comment)
9. Sull'atteggiamento censorio italiano riguardo all'innovazione tecnologica. (8 points, 32 comments)
10. [Eng] Docker in produzione, una storia di fallimenti (7 points, 5 comments)
111 points, 8 submissions: sempiternum
1. Net Neutrality Day - Che cos’è la net neutrality e vale la pena interessarsene? (29 points, 39 comments)
2. Telegram introduce le chiamate audio (23 points, 13 comments)
3. Questa meridiana nella mia città sembra il logo di ArchLinux (20 points, 3 comments)
4. FitBit, uomo killer incastrato dai dati rilevati dal fitness tracker della moglie uccisa (11 points, 2 comments)
5. [DIWhy - CableFail] Mi serviva un connettore rj45 femmina-femmina ma non volevo spendere soldi (10 points, 10 comments)
6. Reddit introduce i bot per le gif (7 points, 12 comments)
7. Ubuntu 18.04 verrà distribuito con Gnome come desktop environment predefinito (7 points, 7 comments)
8. Firefox 54 punta su Electrolysis e separa i siti web dal resto del browser (4 points, 2 comments)
100 points, 14 submissions: Tippete
1. Piccoli vps per grandi progetti (18 points, 30 comments)
2. Reverse engineering di un termometro da cucina (13 points, 0 comments)
3. BYOD, che ne pensate? (9 points, 25 comments)
4. [ENG] Munich city planning to move back to Windows and Office from open-source software (8 points, 15 comments)
5. Building a Billion User Load Balancer (7 points, 0 comments)
6. IT, come eseguite la manutenzione delle vostre infrastrutture? (7 points, 5 comments)
7. A man flying in a hot air balloon.. (6 points, 2 comments)
8. La responsabilità del fornitore di un servizio Wi-Fi (6 points, 0 comments)
9. Come si aggiornano gli utenti di II? (5 points, 1 comment)
10. Rilasciato Proxmox VE 5.0 (5 points, 2 comments)

Top Commenters

fen0x (887 points, 440 comments)
cybertex1969 (529 points, 244 comments)
KarlFiabeschi (511 points, 269 comments)
MonsieurCellophane (443 points, 203 comments)
alerighi (435 points, 200 comments)
veon_fpo (421 points, 257 comments)
pokerissimo (295 points, 135 comments)
toyg (289 points, 117 comments)
Jianlucah (248 points, 138 comments)
Tippete (224 points, 121 comments)

Top Submissions

Definizione di backup by vitalijzad (91 points, 5 comments)
Sono Salvatore Sanfilippo aka "antirez". AMA! by antirez (70 points, 146 comments)
Ciao ItalyInformatica, qui Italo Vignoli. AMA! by italinux (55 points, 99 comments)
CIA toolbox revealed by wikileaks.org by Matagyah (52 points, 7 comments)
Errore contabile, creativo dovrà restituire all’azienda parte della visibilità con cui è stato pagato by alo75 (40 points, 1 comment)
Sono il Presidente di Italian Linux Society. AMA! by m4db0b (37 points, 39 comments)
Sono Matteo "matt3o" Spinelli, sviluppo tastiere meccaniche. AMA! by matt3o (36 points, 47 comments)
Da ieri youtube-dl è in grado di scaricare i video da RaiPlay by timendum (36 points, 12 comments)
Credo di aver trovato una falla nella sicurezza di un sito italiano abbastanza utilizzato, chi ha voglia di aiutarmi a confermare? by JackHeuston (35 points, 46 comments)
Sono Igor Falcomatà aka "koba(iashi)". AMA! by kobakai (34 points, 52 comments)

Top Comments

55 points: MonsieurCellophane's comment in Esistono programmatori non nerd?
30 points: alerighi's comment in Perché serve matematica in informatica?
22 points: mikiita's comment in Attacco hacker mondiale: virus "Wannacry" chiede il riscatto, ospedali britannici in tilt. "Usato codice Nsa"
22 points: timendum's comment in GIVEAWAY!
18 points: cybertex1969's comment in Mentre finisce di installare... [Settimana 14/2017]
18 points: fen0x's comment in Il sito di cui parlavo è Hoepli. Sembra abbiano sistemato la falla più grave
18 points: kobakai's comment in Sono Igor Falcomatà aka "koba(iashi)". AMA!
17 points: Kwbmm's comment in Qual è il vostro browser preferito?
16 points: KarlFiabeschi's comment in ACCOUNT TWITTER DI PERSONE REALI CERCASI!
16 points: chhap's comment in Ubuntu 18.04 sarà basato su Gnome e non Unity

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