In Banning of third party casinos
I guess I got here just in time to ask questions after some clarifications, so hopefully that lets my questions be a bit more useful. (I say that and then spend an hour writing it out...)
First let me say I do think banning third party gambling is a good step for Torn as a whole. For full transparency, Nebula has recently gotten into offering raffles. So it isn't like I don't have any skin in the game. But I would still lose no sleep if those have to be discontinued. So hopefully you believe me when I say that nothing I say below is me trying to just protect that part of our business.
What I want to do instead is be a bit nit-picky about the specific wording used, because I think that's where the biggest problems currently exist. To be completely clear about what my actual concern is: It isn't that I think Staff are about to start applying this ruling to war trackers and banning them. It's that as the rules are currently written, I don't think the text itself decides most of the cases I can come up with. The exact legs that the ruling uses to stand so it can exist only appear in your explanation in this thread. Which works fine for people who are reading it, but it isn't the rule. Whoever is reading the rules in two years is reading the version on the rules.php page, and expecting them to make a decision that could get them Fedded based on discussion in a forum thread isn't reasonable. That's how you wind up with enforcement that feels arbitrary to new players, who lack the context of where the rule came from, and just adds hassle and work to Staff.
- including external player run environments requiring buy-ins for non Torn content such as third party casinos.
Using the test you've shown here, "whether the service operates outside of Torn and relates to non Torn content," is much clearer than the original wording, and that's good. But it's only spelled out here, and not in the rule. And "non Torn content" is doing almost all of the work in that sentence, and it is never actually defined anywhere.
Here's where I feel like it falls apart though. Imagine a war tracker with premium functions that people can buy to help them manage their wars. Or FFScouter, which is absolutely a tool I like and use, and I don't feel should be banned, but which DOES require a buy-in for various things. Its flight time guesstimator doesn't just say "here's a list of flight times, and when they might be landing back." As best I can tell, it monitors active players for what type of flight they regularly use, and then uses that to provide an expected landing time. That estimate doesn't exist anywhere on Torn and doesn't come out of the API. Or Stig's bot, which Nebula pays an upfront cost for and then a continued service fee. Accessing his server is free, but the Giveaways, Advanced Stakeouts, Markets and Auction House, Bounty Sniper, etc modules all require their own buy-ins.
I'm not specifically suggesting that any of those are banned under this. What I'm pointing out is that if you hand the rule AS WRITTEN to somebody acting in completely good faith and ask them whether a subscription-gated external tool that produces information Torn itself doesn't produce is "requiring a buy-in for non Torn content," they can quite reasonably land on yes. The only thing stopping them landing there is what's been talked about in a thread in General Discussion. Which I don't think is really the precedent for how to arbitrate a ruling. If "non Torn content" is about subject matter rather than about where the thing is hosted, which is clearly what you mean by it, then that needs to be in the rule itself. Something as small as "content unrelated to Torn gameplay," or just an explicit "this does not include tools, data, or services concerning Torn itself," would largely cut out that particular loophole.
I don't like including "such as" for the same reason. I get why it's there, since without it somebody argues "well, mine is technically a bookie, not a casino." But what it leaves you with is casinos as an example of a category whose boundary is never actually defined, which throws all the weight right back onto "non Torn content" again. If the category really is casinos and bookies, then name them both and drop the "such as." If it's genuinely meant to be broader than that, then the category itself needs defining, because as it stands the example is the only concrete thing in that sentence.
- or buy-ins to external player-run gambling services
The wording on this one is considerably better, since "gambling services" is doing real work there instead of leaning on a "such as." Much smaller fallout zone, and much less room for interpretation. But it does lead me to the question I most want answered, and it applies to both quotes... What specifically constitutes a buy-in?
You've said giveaway platforms are unaffected because there's no buy-in, and that you're receiving free stuff with no obligation or bet. Fair enough. So consider a trader who runs this: "The top 50 plushie sellers to me each month all get a chance at a bonus 5m giveaway." No buy-in there, it's just an incentive attached to an ordinary trade, trying to get more people to use them. Now the same trader runs this instead: "500m giveaway, and the first 100 people who sell me 10,000 plushies at 92% market value get an entry." Every single person entering has now paid roughly 8% of a plushie stack for a ticket, the draw itself happens off-site, and at no point has anybody handed over anything that gets called a buy-in.
Is that a buy-in? I genuinely don't know how the current wording answers it, and I think that's the sort of loophole you're asking about. A definition based on consideration (in the more legal sense) rather than on payment (so, value given up in exchange for an entry, however it gets routed) could maybe fix this? But without something along those lines, the answer to that scenario depends on which member of Staff happens to be making the ruling, which we know has differed, and just ends up being appealed and kicked up to someone else, taking up more of their time.
There's a smaller version of the same question too. I know factions that run overdose raffles, where every overdose somebody logs in a month counts as an entry. Nobody pays anything, and the faction doesn't gain anything from it. If the entry is an in-game action, is that a buy-in? I can't think of any specific examples off the top of my head to actively abuse this, but it does feel like there could be some space in there which risks being messy. Maybe "selling" raffle for each loss that a player contributes to a target?
One thing I do want to push back on directly is the idea that paying out winnings can itself be treated as promotion.
I understand why you'd want that, since a payout is traceable and it proves the thing operated. As enforcement logic, that's completely sound. But as RULE logic, it means the plain text of the advertising guideline no longer describes what's actually getting enforced under it. If a package I paid for arrives at my door, I'm not claiming the company advertised to me. So if sending winnings ought to be prohibited, I'd much rather see you prohibit OPERATING one of these services instead. That makes the rule much cleaner. It becomes easier to defend when somebody inevitably appeals it, and it doesn't require anybody to accept a definition of "advertising" that doesn't match the word.
The last thing that comes to mind is off-site raffles, and I want to be careful with how I put this, because I don't want it to read as me just being pedantic so Nebula isn't impacted. I'm not asking you to spare raffles. If the answer is that they go, then they go.
What actually bothers me is that you are acknowledging they aren't the real issue, and that you came up short trying to word around them, and that they may get caught in the crossfire anyway. That's the same problem as everything above, just said with complete clarity. A rule that Staff already know overshoots what it's aimed at is a rule that only works for as long as Staff keep choosing not to apply it to the overshoot. Which is fine right now, while you're the person who wrote it and it's fresh in everyone's minds. But it falls apart in three years, with different Staff, and nobody remembering this thread existed.
So I'd rather see it go one of two ways. Which one, doesn't faze me.
Either there's a line that can actually be drawn, in which case draw it in the rule. For what it's worth, I don't know that the useful distinction is the buy-in at all. I think it's whether or not there's a house. A raffle is a fixed prize, published odds, and one disclosed draw, so the shape of the math is something you can check before you enter. "This item is worth 800m, there are 100 tickets, each one is a 1% chance" is a claim somebody can actually evaluate. A casino is repeatable wagering against an operator holding an edge that never gets stated at all, so there's nothing there for the player to evaluate in the first place.
The obvious counterargument to that comparison though: Nothing stops a raffle from being rigged. You code weighted odds in for a couple of accounts who are working with you, they win more often than they should, and they quietly pass most of it back to you afterwards. At that point it's a slot machine with extra steps, and from the outside it looks identical to an honest raffle.
The partial answer is that a rigged raffle is a lie about a specific stated term, whereas a casino doesn't have to lie about anything at all. The house doesn't need to cheat to extract value from its players, because the math already does that by design. So one of them is a thing that CAN be run honestly and sometimes isn't, and the other extracts by default.
In all honesty, I don't think that fully rescues it as a written rule, because from the outside Staff can't tell a rigged raffle from a clean one any better than I can. Which is presumably why they are caught by the ruling as things that are "inherently unverifiable" to begin with. Which I do agree with.
Which takes me to the second option, and what I think is probably the cleaner and better choice. If the complexity of distinguishing the two isn't worth the work, then just say so plainly in the rule. Something like "any off-site service where players give up value in exchange for a chance at a prize" catches raffles, and everybody knows exactly where they stand. Raffles might not be the target, and they might be collateral damage. But I'd rather have a well-written rule where killing them is a necessary price to pay, to make the game at large a better experience, instead of a rule that is trying to be apologetic and say "Sorry, you're not the target, but you're being hit anyways."
It's the middle version I'm arguing against, where the rule reaches further than it's meant to and the gap between the text and the intent gets managed by discretion.
None of this is me arguing that Staff shouldn't have room to interpret a situation when somebody is obviously trying to duck the rules. They absolutely should. But when a single undefined phrase is the criteria for whether or not something is a rule-breaking offense, that discretion stops being a reasonable tool for enforcing edge-cases, and starts just being the rule itself. Every reasonable effort needs to be made to minimize how often it has to get used.