Lee,
I will post a response from our Controller regarding your comment about
Outwit:
What incentive would we have to rig the contestants in Outwit? If we
had
any incentive, it would be to allow for more people to win. No matter
who plays and how they do, each round costs us $10. Many of the people
that have played more than once are people with weak Vitals. If we were
going to rig it, we would want to reward people who have made many JF
purchases. Anyone who has had even an entry level stats class should
know that the odds of having a repeat winner are actually very high.
One
of the oldest examples of probability is described in this link -
http://www.cut-the-knot.org/do_you_know/coincidence.shtml
Essentially what this is saying is that, there is a better than 50%
chance that in a group of 23 people at least two people will share the
same birthday. At first glance, the odds of this happening seem much
lower than 50%. The article does a great job of explaining how it
works.
Our Outwit game works much the same way. Let’s compare this to the
birthday example. Assume we have 365 contestants (to match 365 days in
a
year) playing outwit. If the same people played 23 times (which we play
about 35 in a day), there would be a more than 50% chance that at least
one person would be picked twice. Obviously we do not have the same
people playing every time but we do have a large group that play at
least 15 times per day. I would be more surprised if we went a couple
days without having a repeat winner. There are many other examples I
could provide that show in many cases the odds of something occurring
are much greater than one would think. However, I believe the birthday
example is the easiest to understand.
One answer to this “problem” is to prevent people from winning
twice in
a day or week or month. This is commonly done in radio station contests
(“only one winner per household per 30 day period”). I do not like
this
option at all. It takes away from the integrity of the game. It
basically is taking a truly random game and forcing it to not be
random.
Also, why should someone get punished, by not being able to
participate,
just because they won?
In summary, the game is not rigged and is working properly. We would
have no incentive to do this. It is actually causing us more work by
explaining to people that the random generator is working properly. We
could save time and some negative comments in the chat by forcing
people
not to win twice in a given period. However, I am not willing to
sacrifice the integrity of the game to achieve this.
I hope that information helps. If you have further questions or
concerns, please let us know.
Kindest Regards,
Jake Dressler
Customer Service Manager
Jellyfish.com