It may "seem" that way VWM but that doesn't make it so.
In fact the strongest voice of opposition to the actions taken by the casino came from within the casino administration itself. Doubtless we added a little fuel to the fire but if it wasn't for those internal efforts we might be talking about a mini-Betfair here as opposed to being thankful that the player's issue got squared away as it did.
And I shouldn't make too much of the "ELEVEN DAYS" if I were you. That's not an outrageous period of time for a management mistake of this magnitude to be identified, isolated, articulated, debated and corrected. If you've ever worked within a large corporate environment you will know that generally speaking paint ages faster than major corrections of this nature seeing the light of day.
My point is that this isn't a particularly well justified occasion to break out the torches and start a witch hunt. No doubt the player was victim of a grievous lapse of judgment but the process and time frame in which it was isolated and made right is cause for hope, not panic, IMO. Needless to say, your mileage may vary.
Maybe if people had actually WORKED AS A TEAM within FL, this would have been fixed sooner. If opposition to this was coming from INSIDE the casino, just WHO wasn't listening, nor engaging their "common sense circuits".
I might expect this level of incompetence at a white label, or rogue casino, but when this happens in respected operations like FL, how can players be confident that there is ANY casino that can be trusted to be fair.
This doesn't look like a mistake, but a POLICY CHANGE that has had the effect of embarrassing higher management into doing a U-turn ONLY because of the negative publicity generated, as well as pressure from within and from the PAB.
Players don't see all the internal workings, they only see what's on the outside, which is an insane application of a rule, followed by a refusal to listen to reason.
Unlike other businesses, there is no regulator to "slap down" incompetence like this as there is when our energy companies and banks make similar corporate blunders. The lack of such a formal "slap down" means there is less of an incentive to reverse bad decisions before they detonate in their corporate faces.
This was such a GROSS error that I find it hard to believe even a TRAINEE could have made such a screw-up. It is quite astonishing that their grasp of casino mathematics is so poor, given that it is their JOB to know how games and promotions work.
Management should also have known that arguments like this challenge the basic assumptions that the games are fair and random, and players are quick to spot such discrepancies, and a few to cite decisions of this nature as "proof" that the random games CAN be beaten, and this is the "punishment" meeted out to players that exploit the "patterns" in the random outcomes. Heroes themselves said that the player "exploited patterns" in the Blackjack game to unfairly win a significant amount, which damaged the integrity of the software to such an extent that the provider yanked their license, and paid the player out of their own pocket.
There needs to be some kind of "incentive" to ensure that no other casino will DARE try this kind of argument again, claiming that players can "abuse" a game unfairly WITHOUT taking a bonus.
There have already been some ROGUE casinos that have tried this (notably Heroes Casino), but this has to be the first ACCREDITED casino to come up with this argument.