I already made the formula and it’s always worth it.
IF there are at lease one ticket purchased by not-you, then it’s worth more to buy the remaining tickets, unless of course you set up the order at a loss.
You’re putting the cart before the horse.
What I am saying as Qia mentioned is that if you invest X to have a raffle and it looks like the raffle is not going to sell all the tickets, you have two choices:
- let the raffle fail and eat the X which can be significant for high ISK raffles
- buy a few of your own tickets thus avoiding losing X but reducing your profit…which is still profit, not a loss
Also, in #2, there is a small chance you will not only avoid losing X but still make a smaller profit AND win your own prize…that’s kinda the best scenario.
But this becomes more and more risky the more tickets you need to buy…it’s like a reverse raffle for the seller.
Hope that helps and sorry if I wasn’t clear earlier.
You were perfectly clear. However, that doesn’t mean that the strategy is perfect:
You overprice and buy your own ticket losing X% profit but guaranteeing the raffle to complete.
You overprice and don’t buy your own tickets, but x% of your raffles fail, thus you lose x% profit.
You lower your price by x% so that the failure rate decreases.
As you can see, there are many ways to tackle the problem, including accepting a certain rate won’t close. Over time, if you lose the hypercores from a failed raffle a certain % of the time, that can up being the same as buying your own tickets to force the raffle to complete. Of course it all depends on your pricing, how popular the item is, etc.
In my case, I never have bought tickets to my own raffles. I have also almost never had them not complete. So I have never sacrificed income by buying my own tickets, but still experience an almost negligible loss in hypercores due to a rare one that fails. This negligible loss is more acceptable to me than the guaranteed larger loss in profit caused if I bought my own tickets.
1 Like
Why your own raffle fails can be due to many reasons out of your control. You are right that the risk can be mitigated BUT there is a cost in that too. By keeping you ticket price total as close to the actual SELL value (locally) then you make your raffle very attractive but limit profit that way…plus you sill risk the draw failing due to many reasons.
For the time I sold, it was only 60M and up items topping out at injectors. The cube costs were significant and as the dynamics of Hypernet were changing rapidly in the early days, maybe this was more an issue. I honestly don’t know any more so I differ to you on that…
Your points are sound just as mine are; we just have different ways of assessing risk, profit and loss.
Cheers.
Well think of it this way,
Say you have a 16 ticket raffle and only 1 ticket sells. So you decide to buy 15 of the other tickets to force the sale.
So, you have a 6.25% chance of losing, which is greater than the %of the raffle that the hypercores are worth.
Thus, even buying 15/16 tickets, and winning 15/16 times, odds are that over time you are coming out negative over just letting the raffle close and losing the hypercores. LOL. The reason for this is the 1/16 times you lose (which will happen eventually) you lose the item and get only 1 ticket of profit from someone else, which is then consumed mostly by the tax, and doesn’t cover the cores.
SO you can say… I will let them buy two tickets to cover both! But then you are now doubling your chance of losing your item to (2/16) and still only gaining 2 tickets worth of isk, barely covering the tax and hypercores.
To each their own I guess.
But this is the worst case scenario in my example…I suggest that one should only but their own tickets (1) at the last minute and (2) only to the point where if you force the draw but lose the item, you haven’t lost ISK.
Buying 15 or 16 is not acceptable as all you are doing is saving the cube loss BUT incurring the Tax. If you happen at lose the raffle on top of that as you point out, you are only getting 1/16th the value of the raffle and having to pay the cubes and taxes…THAT is totally unacceptable.
I am suggesting the opposite…buying just 1 or 2 tickets as a last resort to force a draw.
Doesn’t matter. All you are doing is lowering your odds of winning by equal increments to the amount of profit you are not sacrificing. Over time, you will come out as a loser no matter what compared to buying none of your own tickets.
Sure you can get lucky, but eventually the odds kick in your luck will run out as the OP found out the hard way.
The OP did exactly what I said to not do a few times now…if you do that, yes, you will lose over time so that’s why I am not suggesting it.
Buying 6 of 8 tickets is not the same as buying 1 of 8. It does matter. Feel free to show your math as that’s all that counts now…
Buy one out of 8:
Lose 12.5% of profits for a 12.5% of winning your item back.
GIven that your hypercores are about 5% of the raffle value, that means that you are losing more than double the profit than your hypercores costed. Not worth it.
Even buying 1/16, you still are losing more profit than your hypercores costed, which I already explained before.
Remember also, that even the time you do win, you still lost the profit of that single ticket.
So its better to let the raffle die and lose the cores than buy one or more tickets to your own raffle.
You are not showing math…
You would still have made more profit by purchasing the remaining tickets.
proof : Hypernet Scammers Paradise - #11 by Anderson_Geten
If it was not doing what it claims to be doing, it would be a fraud. When you break a legal agreement, it’s a fraud ; when you only break your victim’s trust, then it’s a scam. Inside Eve, CCP makes the law and using any tool that bypasses the law is a breach of the EULA, therefore a case of being banned.
It’s not a fraud, yet it’s a scam.
1 Like
No you wouldn’t. The loss in profit from buying your own ticket is greater than the cost of the hypercores. I already proved it. Use whatever fake math and ride the luck until it runs out if you want but your flat out wrong. I don’t care if you are getting less profit lol.
nobody cares, you would not have gotten those hypercores back anyhow.
You are mixing the problem of puchasing your own tickets to complete the offer, with the problem of starting a new offer.
You are therefore making fake math and are flat out wrong.
yes, you claiming
is indeed so stupid it can make people laugh at the nonsense, not only because you make MORE profit by buying your own tickets and completing the offer, but also because the cost in hypernodes is irrelevant.
Yes, and that is why it is not a scam. There is no trust being broken whatsoever. The lottery shows the exact item to be won, the ticket prices, and the odds of winning for each ticket. And then the lottery executes exactly as promised. It is not a breach of trust just because some people are too stupid to understand how the math works and invent weird expectations about how it should be.
Which is 100% irrelevant. The hypercores are a sunk cost as soon as the lottery starts, their cost can not be a factor in your decisions after that point. You have two possible outcomes to choose from:
- Buy the remaining tickets in your own lottery at the last second so that it finishes. Expected value is positive but lower than the expected value of a lottery where other players buy all of the tickets, and subject to RNG risk that does not exist when other players buy all of the tickets.
or
- Allow the lottery to end without all of the tickets being sold. Expected value is the market value of the item.
I suppose it is theoretically possible to have a situation where option #2 is correct, but if your profit margins on a lottery are so small then you should probably rethink your continued presence in the market.
As I said before, that both could be correct based on your pricing and the popularity of the item, etc.
For example, if you price your raffle at 0% profit, over the market, then you likely have the maximum chance of it completing, and of course purchasing your own tickets would be the most damaging as well.
For every increase in price over the minimum, you are going to have a greater chance of the raffle not completing, but you have the higher margin over the item.
Thus you could track this effect over enough raffles. (Price increase vs tickets left at end of raffle if you didn’t buy any).
On the low end price increases might not cause the the raffle to fail. However if you get past that threshold, then you will have to purchase your own tickets to make it succeed. The higher the price you put the raffle at, the more tickets you will have to buy until you reach the other extreme, where you have a raffle so expensive not even a single stupid person would buy it.
So there is a balance. Either you find the threshold of maximum price where the raffles complete consistently (and this could be different for different items) or you buy your own tickets, which in effect is artificially stimulating the same effect by overpricing your raffle but then reducing the value of it by buying your own tickets. You are canceling out that additional margin and it could end up the same or worse than just pricing lower to begin with.
The question is, which method is better? 1) finding maximum threshold where you don’t need to buy your tickets vs 2) overpricing and then reducing your profit by buying tickets to your own raffle.
I imagine it depends on the item being sold and perhaps the psychology behind the most likely buyer. The overpricing method to be most profitable relies on the most stupid people bidding as possible. The other allows more cautious people to bid and still works. So I guess as long as the item you are selling attracts enough people dumb enough to bid then sure, the over price/buy own ticket method could work in that case.
What’s your point? Nobody is ever going to be stupid enough to do this, it is completely irrelevant to discuss. The only lotteries worth discussing are ones where the seller is making a significant profit.
The question is, which method is better? 1) finding maximum threshold where you don’t need to buy your tickets vs 2) overpricing and then reducing your profit by buying tickets to your own raffle.
The answer is obviously 1. You get the same expected value per lottery, except with no RNG factor involved. You should never plan on buying your own tickets, the only reason to do so is that your lottery was planned to sell 100% of the tickets but doesn’t quite get there without a last-second effort to salvage as much income as you can.
But if you overpriced to where you have to buy too many tickets the raffle completes and you get less income than the item value + fees, less the expected return from the % possibility of winning the item back. Then you have overpriced it so much that you would be better off letting it fail, losing only your hypercores than to force completion and guaranteeing a greater loss.
We weren’t talking about people whom buy 1 ticket to complete the raffle. The debate was about people that severely mark up the raffle so it’s covered by a few dumb people’s buy in and then buy 50% or 60% of their own tickets to force the close.