Hi Sigothx1,
It is a good thing to notice the disdain towards the methods used by the casino you work for. They are not just clearly far from best practice - they're also from a business point of view neither smart nor efficient. So allow me to give you a clearer picture on an alternative so that perhaps you can persuade your employer to improve both their ethics and bottom line.
Before I begin, lets make sure we agree on terminology, more specifically lets define the withdraw lifecycle :
0. submitted : user submits withdraw
1. pending period : fixed-length timeframe in which absolutely nothing happens
2. verification : casino verifies docs, kyc, play, etc ..
3. approved : verifications are done but not yet submitted to processor.
4. processing : submitted to processor.
5. finished : confirmation or failure received from processor.
Lets also agree on some of the actions the user can do :
flushing : asking support to eliminate the pending period - only meaningfull during step 1.
locking : asking support to eliminate the ability to reverse the withdraw - meaningfull untill step 4.
Ok so now that we speak the same language, lets begin our tale of the dragon named 'pending period' that so many casinos have allowed to nest on their courtyard. Now make no mistake, even tho some of the kings of those castles may have an eerie resemblance to an evil Mr Burns, surely some of them are good at heart - what is holding them back to deploy their slayers ?
Well, this dark tale begins with the construction of a new road. The old road was bricky and mortar-y and not suited for horse and carriage .. the new road - mystically called information highway - was smooth, and fast, but alas guarded by an evil orc called Processor. For each nobleman and noblewomen that entered or left the courtyard Processor would charge the King a fee upto often half a tithe of their purse.
King would still organise his parties, games and banquettes, and for a while things were fine. Yes, processor was demanding a hefty fee - so high that a couple of bards now had to eat with the horses - but the King figured it was unavoidable to get his parties to be attended. One sunny day, pondering the uncertain faith of bards eating haver for longer periods of time, the king is walking past the castle walls and hears the distinctive noises of a nobleman and not-so-noble woman spending quality time right outside the castle walls. To uhm - verify mutual conscent - the King circles outside the castle walls only to find half a dozen of nobleman sleeping it off - a handfull answering the call of nature and a couple of of at least R-rated displays.
After putting some of his guards outside the castle walls his councelors calculate that more than half of the people leaving and entering the gate simply go outside for a call of nature or to get out of the noise for a while. May that just be the point in time that a fierceful dragon called 'pending period' decides to set up camp right in front of the exit gates. The dragon is vicious when awake and will hear the tinkle of every gold shilling. If you have none you can get past but if you do you'll have to wait till he sleeps. While the King is hesitant at first, he immediately notices that the weight of the purses he has to hand Processor each day have more than halved - and since the dragon only occasionally eats a guest - he decides no urgent action is needed.
This is - if I recall correctly - the tale of the very first medieval pending period.
Ok, that was fun - but I'm also actually being pretty serious. 3Dice does not have a pending period - we have other - friendlier and more effective methods - but we didn't always have those. So, when a casino has no pending period or other measures, and the manager looks at the accounts at the end of the week he might see something like this : Lets say we have 3 players and they all started with 100 playing balance on their debet card at the beginning of the week.
player 1 : deposit : 100 withdraw : 0
player 2 : deposit : 100 withdraw : 1000
those players seem fine, player 1 lost, player 2 won.
player 3 : deposit : 1100 withdraw : 1000
so this player has within one week, also lost a hundred, but he withdrew, got his withdraw and then redeposited.
lets look at the transaction costs. (at say 5% - not unrealistic).
player 1 : 100 * 0.05 = 5
player 2 : 1100 * 0.05 = 55
player 3 : 2100 * 0.05 = 105
---
165
Ok so that's what the manager sees. Even tho only 1/3 of the players are exhibiting this behavior, they are responsible for 63% of the transaction cost. Not only that from the 300 that the players deposited .. 165 or 55% !!! ends up with the processor. And to make matters worse .. player 3 is costing more than he originally had budget - so his behavior is impacting the experience of player 1 and 2 - which is unacceptable.
For 3Dice the first step was to disable deposits while withdraws were pending. We still do that. It's effective for payment methods that have an inherent slowness like check or wire. We had no reversal options and withdraws were automatically locked at that time. This did however cause a serious workload for support. Not realizing they would be locked out of real play for days .. waiting for check, reloading card etc .. we had an avalanche of requests to implement reversals. A second aspect is that the locks were only during the processing period, so for instant methods they had no effect. As a result we still had profiles like player3 above withdrawing and depositing multiple times per day - sometimes even per hour.
At that point we spoke to some of those players (some of them members here) to find out what was driving their behavior and to simply make them aware of the problem and ask them to keep it in mind. These discussions is where the idea of the 3Dice safe was born. We found out that for many players the psychology of 'moving the money from the balance to a safe place' was really the key driver. Just like in vegas sometimes you just want to convert some chips or empty your card to get some hard cash in your wallet - in fact the 3Dice safe borrows its name from the safe boxes you can get in vegas - the ones where you leave your key in the hotel room.
The 3Dice safe works amazingly well - it allows players to keep their current mindset, and it allows us as casino to keep offering the top quality payouts that we are known for. Thanks to the safe we don't have to have scary dragons - we have a ton of players that keep enough in their safe to cover the bonus offers they expect the coming weeks, or move money to their safe right after they deposit - it is used hundreds times more than the most used processor and has not only virtually eliminated all 'player3' scenario's, it has even optimised player 2 and 1 scenarios - an unexpected but nice side-effect.
Ok, that's the pending period side of things - I would like to handle responsible gambling seperately as I feel that it is actually more related to the entire withdraw lifecycle as opposed to just the pending period.
Luckily I can be short on that - RG is always a bit of a balance between protection and freedom and so we offer a variety of options there. There's the full lock my withdraw - unless you have a very persuasive argument you will have a hard time to get support to undo that - if you are also using other RG options like deposit limits your reversals will count towards that to. Apart from this all-or-nothing strategy we also offer users the option to set a certain % as the maximum they can reverse at a time. This way they create points in time where they have to stop and consider.
So in short, with the propper mix of tools you can both respect the players and defeat the orcs .. no dragons needed ..
just my two shilling,
Enzo
before i start i want to make clear i hold 3dice in very, very high regard as a casino, they do things they do not have to do to combat said issue of simply reversing and losing, bare in mind id feel comfortable in saying most online casinos do have the option of reversing without a "safe" ect.
now, im in not in the absolute best frame of mind and feel like ill edit this post tomorrow ( day off, go me ) but i would like to respond now all the same, firstly, we must discuss transaction costs, im assuming here but im fairly confident that 3dice is an offshore casino, im in the uk, the casino i work for is regulated in the uk, and as i mentioned in my previous post 99% of players are from the uk. This means when i talk about transaction costs, they are either non existent or minimum, when we pay to a "for example" santander account, or barclays or halifax, they do not charge us, it may well be very different offshore, but here, you can put any amount ( within reason ) into anyone elses bank account without so much of a waiting period. So the argument of player 1/2/3 is irreverent, as all 3 cost us the same, the only thing that matters would be time, player 1 wouldn't get looked at, unless our system flagged the player for some reason ( name on card didn't match, suspicious play, paypal not in the same name, list goes on and is somewhat vast , but majority would have no need to be looked at ) this is the same with player 2, our system automatically flags to our banking section if the player needs to be looked into.
player 2 might have linked accounts, might be using a suspicious address, might have suspicious play, this would flag, and upon w/d would be clearly looked into, and let me tell you if joe bloggs deposited 100 quid for the first time and hadn't done anything to arouse suspicion his account would not be looked into upon w/d, unless hes withdrawing a huge amount, the majority of people dont as youll know, however we would still wait 3 days in player 1/2/3 cases.
player 3 would be in the same boat, you said "if hed w/d and re-deopisited" on his very first w/d if there was ANY suspicion that would have been the time to look into it, not on a second w/d. and even if he did make a second w/d again, the system which bare in mind wasn't made overnight, would flag ANYTHING that looked out of place on an account, to be fair the majority of flags on accounts are false positives, for example, depositing more than i think 6-800 in a day would flag, even if your a VIP, as you know yourself things have to be checked and re-checked.
now, onto the next issue, you look at cost, which is what any business does, "so his behavior is impacting the experience of player 1 and 2 - which is unacceptable." no hes not, hes a separate customer, the fact you had to spend more
time on him does affect player 1 and 2, but it doesn't mean they should wait longer for a w/d we both know it does, as your banking team have to spend more time of on player 3, but that does not make it right. Obviously someone with a high amount of w/ds and deposits in a small time frame is going to be checked and rightly so, but the original question was is it ethical to allow other player a pending period, there is nothing stopping 3dice, my casino, and every other casino simply disabling reversing a w/d once one has been asked for.
"For 3Dice the first step was to disable deposits while withdraws were pending. We still do that. It's effective for payment methods that have an inherent slowness like check or wire. We had no reversal options and withdraws were automatically locked at that time. This did however cause a serious workload for support. Not realizing they would be locked out of real play for days .. waiting for check, reloading card etc .. we had an avalanche of requests to implement reversals. A second aspect is that the locks were only during the processing period, so for instant methods they had no effect. As a result we still had profiles like player3 above withdrawing and depositing multiple times per day - sometimes even per hour."
i wanted to quote this paragraph, props to disabled deposits when a w/d is processing, you mention a big workload for support, i fully get that, ive seen it, you don't stipulate that was "enough" for you to enable reversals im going to go out on a limb and assume by this you did, which i can understand the non-allowal of reversing causes a lot of headaches for any casino, and tomorrow i will read your terms, if the "safe" option allows you to put money in it,
AND UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE allows you to cancel it, i give even more props to you and this is something that more casinos, including mine need to do, however if there is a "get out clause" meaning you can move it back into playable, its simply a novelty.
now i read this,
"we offer a variety of options there. There's the full lock my withdraw - unless you have a very persuasive argument you will have a hard time to get support to undo that"
now to me, a player, a FULL LOCK should mean, once i chose this as a player, i could offer your CS rep double the amount of my w/d in hard cash, and they would still say no, a FULL lock should be what it says, but your ending comment suggests that "for the right reason" it can be unlocked, i apologize if that isnt an option, but if it is, hello again novelty.
and lastly, every casino offers deposit limits, mine included, and we very well both know the majority of people ignore them, and once a player does hit that dream win it makes no difference, the issue is reversing a win not limiting yourself to what you deposit.
i will at some point edit all this, but i did want to respond, my absolute last point is this, ive played at 3dice, am i right in thinking you do not pay back to debit cards? you have to request a wire? genuinely asking out of ignorance.
. And if you do have the luxury of working in an environment like this - then standing your ground in the off case that reason fails is not that hard anymore - I've had players threaten me that they'd just deposit the exact same amount somewhere else if I did not let them deposit or reverse.
