The House Always Wins

Here we are, few weeks into the Patch 4.3, and almost everyone and their uncle has killed Deathwing in the LFR feature, and we are nearing the point where people are yet again coming to the boring what to do now place. Well why is this important, or better yet how can we use this to our advantage to make gold ? The answer to this question is either by selling stuff on the AH, which is pretty much every day standard and nothing special, or you can take the creative way and start making gold by getting people interested in events that are fun and profitable for you as well as for them.

   Well i did some thinking about how to make an even that would make me gold, and at the same time get people to enjoy it and even make some gold while doing it. Well what i came up was a epicwincasinohybridgameofawesomeness (this would be a valid representation for the event if English followed the German logic in making words when they cramp 10 words into one, and just to clarify i'm not bashing on the German language, nor do i speak it but face it they do it non the less). 

   Ok now let me explain the core of the matter.  I started off with the basic of a casino game where i would take the element of letting the roll decide who the winner is, then i took an element of adding a premium prize that would make people interested in the game in the form of a jackpot, and last i made it so that every game, no matter what the roll is the player is the winner, or at least one of them is.

   Now down to breaking it down even more. Like i said i started off with the basic idea of the Casino, but had so move away from it because the Casino idea on it's own is considered to be exploiting the economy and can get you warnings even 3 day bans. The reason why this was considered cheating the economy is because of the way people would set it up where if you would roll 1-66 you loose 67-95 double money, 95-99 tripple and 100 x5, but the fact remains that there's 66% chance you will loose which meant you always ended up loosing (the player not the casino). So i took the idea about the gambling from the casino, but that's pretty much where i stopped with that. Next i took a bit of an event that i remember doing back in the TBC time within our guild at the time, namely this event was weekly lottery where every guild member would deposit 100g in the guild bank and at the end of the week one member would get 50% of the entire winnings and the other half would go for the guild for whatever we might need.

   So i gave you a vague underline of the idea, now here's the details on how it actually worked. Like i said i was going to do the game of luck thing so normally i needed people that were interested in playing. I did a macro where i would inform people of an opportunity to make gold by playing against other people. This prompted whispers full of questions about how that would work and what's the catch, so i needed a reply macro in which i told them it's a game of roll and the winner takes all, and a chance to win a Mechano-Hog.

   If you are still reading you are wondering what does a Mechano-Hog have to do with gambling, well that's the Jack Pot i was mentioning previously. Well let me continue and you will see how everything falls into place. In about 5 minutes i had ten people interested into playing the game, so i explained to all of them the rules and what was at stake, and what are the winnings. The rules were simple, yet alluring for the player :

• Entry fee 50g (higher if everyone agrees to the same price)
• Upon fee payment everyone is given a number according to their place in the raid group (just so you don't end up with a confusion tell people what their numbers are, or to make it even easier you can use an addon for raid rolling)
• After that make a /roll 10 (depending on how many people you have, for this example i'm considering 10 people), and to the winner of the roll goes 80% of the total sum.

   So as you can see each roll someone ends up winning gold, and that someone is not you (excluding the 20% fee). Now it's important to tell people that those 20% are going into a fund that will be used to pay for the Jack Pot when the winnings are high enough. To make it more alluring, and convincing i had one of my friends that i had told i was going to give him a gift come in the party and make a few rolls until he won. When i won i announced that we have a Jackpot Winner and gave him the Mechano Hog. Upon giving him the mount and him using it in front of the gathered crowd and getting the achievement i got swamped with people wanting to jump in and play. To make sure that everyone follows i DID ACTUALLY give a mount out, but it wasn't from the winnings but rather a gift to a friend that i was going to give out anyways.

   So underline for the whole thing was, people pay 50g with a chance to win 400g. Every round there's a winner and you are there to simply get people together and not to take their gold (to a certain degree). 

   Its a fact that if you have 10 people playing the roll, each roll the winner takes 400g for 50g investment, and you end up with 100g going towards the jackpot or your personal bag of gold, whichever you choose to be. I did this for about 2 hours, had some fun and people had some fun. In the start while i got it off it was slow getting people but after the first hour and especially after giving the Mechano Hog away entries exploded. In the second hour i made 6k from the 20% fees i was taking (and this can be a flexible amount, to anything you find fair but keep it decent)

   Anyways i'll keep polishing this way and see what i can get in the long term and i will give an update in a future patch, but until then, keep your eyes open for good opportunities out there.