Ingame weekly draw

Proposal
Recently, the dutch team started hosting a lottery, however, this has been a lot of work. Our suggestion is creating a game feature that allows the Community Manager to set up a lottery.

Current Workaround
People create tickets, telling how many tickets they want to purchase and a moderator removes the money from their ingame bank account. Then the amount of tickets is added to a spreadsheet. When the deadline has passed, a random number is drawn and the ticket owner of that number receives a prize.

Details
The CM can enable a lottery and choose prizes through the admin tools. When the lottery is active, a small icon will appear at the left of your screen (similar to the fair and events), clicking it will send you to a screen where you can buy tickets and see information on the lottery. When the deadline has passed a winner is drawn and the prizes will be given to the winners.

Abuse Prevention
Lotteries are chance-based, so it's close to impossible to abuse it. Abuse by team members is a lot more difficult using this system.

Visual Aids


Here you can see a concept of the lottery screen. You can see the prizes to the left, the "buy a ticket"-button in the center right and the information on the amount of sold and held tickets in the bottom right.

When clicking "buy a ticket", you get forwarded to the next screen:



Summary
An easier way to organize lotteries for moderator teams.

Administration
Does this idea meet the Guidelines & Criteria? Yes/No
Does this idea appear on any of the Previoiusly Suggested Ideas List? Yes/No

We are already hosting lottery for 67 weeks, further development as ingame feature i doubt it will be released.

More info on the lotto can be found here:
http://forum.the-west.net/showthread.php?t=51724
http://forum.the-west.net/showthread.php?p=657432#post657432

I don't think it'll be something that will pass for a feature within the game. It would have some time back as we are on week 68 today.

Perhaps and something you may want to look into is the use of javascripts. My lotto guy uses scripts to basically run the lotto system which saves a lot more time.

Further from that, I'm in the process of building a website where players can enter so there will be no more need for tickets. The captured data will then be written into a script automatically and run through the admin panel to make all the deductions.

We have entertained many ideas and concepts but I cannot see a lotto like this ever being a feature where everything will be automated. This is why we are taking what we currently have and just improving on the workflow of it.

Perhaps if you would like, you can speak to zd3no, I don't think he will mind giving you some help with the scripts.

For a larger community it is not a huge improvement perhaps, but the smaller communities don't have the ability to "recruit team members" for GM events and/or lotteries. It would be especially helpful for those smaller communities if such an event like the weekly draw could be automated, saving a lot of time and man-hours and preventing small human errors from occurring. You can think of human errors like removing to much/little cash from a player, add 9 or 11 tickets for a player who bought 10 and so on.

Maybe more experience with the lottery and the help of those scripts could help preventing those errors. Currently I have no experience with them yet and neither do most of the other small communities i guess.

Btw, that website sounds awesome, but in that case it could easily be transfered into something ingame could it not?

Ow, and i will definitely contact zd3no. Thanks for the advise