The "Entropia is a Casino" debate; why the EULA is right in saying it is NOT.

You will hear people say it a lot; Entropia is a casino! Just because it is said a lot doesn't make it true. What is true, is that anyone can use the game however they want to see it. If you want it to be a casino, yes you can take huge risks. If you see it as a virtual real-estate platform, there are all sorts of revenue bearing land opportunities in the game. Or, do you fancy yourself a modern day merchant-trader? THIS is the appeal the game has; it is everything we want it to be, even though it doesn't address these things perfectly.

Let me give you a clear contrast between Entropia and Casinos. Bear with me as I get to the point here.

I have made a rather good living for a couple years playing video poker, which is a 99.54% return (on full pay Jacks or Better), or in the case of progressives, the return does go often into the over 100% range.

Because there are 52 cards in a deck, 5 cards dealt initially allowing you up to 5 more cards to be drawn to hopefully achieve a winning hand, there is a limited number of permutations that lead to those hands. The pay-table unlocks the secrets. It is the pay-table that determines how valuable a non-winning hand is before you draw your new cards. Even though a few people can play perfect strategy, myself included, casinos will still make a fortune on video poker because most people might play with 80% accuracy in regards to what perfect play is. If 1 in 5 of your hands are played imperfectly, that increases the house's edge quite exponentially. There literally are people who will keep their favorite number or their lucky number instead of jacks or better. Gamblers are superstitious, after all.

A royal flush (A K Q J 10) in any order of the same suit, pays 800 for 1 on 5 coins bet (4,000 credits). If you play quarters, that's $1,000. As of the moment you go to play a hand, you have roughly a 1 in 40,000 chance of that hand ending up in a royal flush. It varies based on variety of video poker and the strategy for that variety, but 1 in 40,000 is pretty much down the middle of all varieties. Some are 1 in 38,000, others are 1 in 42,000 ish. It really can take minutes, weeks, or years to get your first royal flush; but incredibly once you get the first one the rest keep coming.

Also one important rule of Class III vegas style random gaming is; every hand must be dealt as randomly as if you were shuffling a deck of cards at your own kitchen table and dealing from them. Some brands of video poker will continuously shuffle the remaining 47 cards while you decide which ones to keep and the result is given that the RNG has the precise moment you push the draw button, or, the entire order of cards is determined when the initial hand is dealt. Either way you get a fair shake, though some consider the first method to be more random. I mean, in that particular instance, every four cards to the royal you are dealt potentially can become a royal. If the next card is already determined, then, sure you still have the same odds just, if the card isn't there it would not have been there. In any case;

$1.25 per hand can pay $1,000. That is money you can cash out right away, or within a few days if playing online.

In Entropia terms, this is 12.5 peds per play, to hit 10,000 peds. It is like a smaller amped mining run hoping for a 5 digit tower. Or lets say an EPIII run hoping to hit it, I mean its not exact but it is close.

It took me 11 years of mining mostly amped to get my first tower of 5K peds. 11 years! And sure, I got a 15K tower too finally, but it is peanuts for what it cost me.

What are the odds of hitting a 10K ped hof? I've gotten to level 53 BLP and level 40 something laser without hitting hof over 300 peds on hunting; and I've pounded robots, Atrox, ambu, you name it. My biggest hunting loot is actually a global, but that is only 500 peds ish. I've got a great many iron missions done, multitudes more half done; plus all the grinding I did before there was such a thing as iron missions. Looks like hunting odds of a decent hof are 1 in tens of millions or perhaps hundreds of millions.  But MA won't tell you the odds. MA won't say "Oh, about 1 in 100,000,000,000,000 kills leads to swirls". They don't tell us what the maximum multiplier is, though if you scour Entropialife you will be able to figure it out; in terms of multiplier, the 5 pec basic filters can hit 500 peds. And that's the highest multiplier ive seen. It tapers down as the cost per click or play size goes up. So that means 1 ped in Entropia can hit a maximum of 10,000 peds; but I've yet to see anything like that.

There are people right now spending $2 a click on EP IV, losing tens of thousands of dollars a month, chasing what, a $20,000 jackpot? That's the theoretical max of EP IV. Many of these people would need to hit a million ped hof to be remotely even, but it can never and will never happen. Supposing they do hof big; they then have to wait two months for MA to pay out; and hopefully they aren't broke bored and stupid resulting in cancelled withdrawals in the meantime.

I've had countless royal flushes in the last ten years. I am way ahead on Video Poker. But the odds are known, the proper strategy is there, deducible by sound math. Mindark doesn't give us pay-tables, they don't give us any information but that which we find out for ourselves.

What Entropia is, is a centrally planned economy; when someone figures out how to make their ends meet, MA moves the ends. Every VU is seemingly worse than the last, but everything is always different. Loot is distributed differently, etc. What works in one VU suddenly might not work in the next. I think this is their idea of Dynamic.

Entropia isn't really worse than a casino though. Casinos don't let you buy sell and trade for markup. Casinos don't let you own a part of their property to make tax revenue off what other people do in your corner of their world. It is just entirely different than a casino; yet it can function as a casino should the whims of a gambler call for it to be treated as such. But the caveat here is, it is not bound by odds and probabilities to treat you as if it were a casino.

A video poker machine is governed by the 52 cards in its deck. A craps table is governed by the odds of 2d6 rolling across its green velvet. A slot machine is at least governed by its reel-stripping. But Entropia? Is governed by people in an office who's job it is to stack the game as heavily in their favor as possible without pissing off their customers entirely. I don't know if anyone can fathom the logic their loot algorithms use; and it literally could be controlled by a monkey in the cage trying to grab a banana on a string; if he accidentally hits the hof button trying to get the banana, someone gets a hof. I mean, really, its how it seems sometimes.

So, no, Entropia really isn't a casino. A casino gives you better odds and tells you what they are and you typically only wait hours or a few days for your withdrawal. That is so far at the other end of the spectrum from MA and Entropia, I just don't know how else to put it.

Actually; if casinos were music, Entropia would be the Weird Al of casinos. No offense to Weird Al. This is to say, Entropia is a parody of what a good MMO and a Casino are. There is so much room for improvement that if they ever made all of the improvements they could make, they would become so liked and so popular I predict they would not be able to keep up with the server upgrades to keep the game online, but it will take someone with a lot of ambition and vision running them to ever get to that level of progress.

While Entropia is not a casino, they are competing with casinos. The sooner they realize this, and treat their customers and their game accordingly, the better everyone including MA will do.