Online Lottery Gambling System

Overview

People entertain themselves by many ways and gambling is one of them. Lots of people are attracted by the excitement and uncertainty when they gamble. In the most of the time, many people don’t have the chance to personally visit a casino. They usually buy lottery tickets from vendors or stores but it’s less exciting than gambling in a casino since they usually have to wait a long time until the result is out. The alternative way is to gamble online so that they can get the results in a relatively short time. People register to an online gambling website, transfer money to their virtual accounts on the website and wish to earn money from it. It’s intriguing that people would spend money on a virtual platform and get satisfied or disappointed by guessing simple numbers combinations. Another interesting thing about online gambling system is it’s rapid evolvement. Players are less exciting when they play the same lottery over and over again. They expect to experience new things so the company needs to find a way to satisfy players or they’ll use other systems instead.

What is being organized?

The online gambling system has only digital resources. The primary resources being organized are lotteries and orders. Each lottery has different betting rule, reward announcement frequency and game methods. Each lottery belongs to a unique category and members of each category are basically identical except for the names of the lotteries. Orders are not only records used to keep players’ activities but also the supporting materials used to determine whether the system should be modified.

A gambling institution that is not related to the online gambling system originally creates the names and basic betting rules of lotteries. The system retrieved the information of the lotteries from the institution and then categorized them using selfdeveloped organizing principles. When a new lottery is created by the game designer behind the system because of the analysis result of the usergenerated data, the lottery either falls into an existing category or a new category created by the game designer.

Why is it being organized?

One type of users of this system is a game player and they can interact with the system to get information of lotteries and orders. Those resources are organized to help players easily locate them according to their needs. There are some bad outcomes if lotteries are not organized properly. First, user will be overwhelmed if lots of lotteries are presented to them without any organization. Second, most users care about the betting rules because those rules determine the chance they can earn money or not. It’s a crucial factor when they choose lotteries to play.

The resources are also organized for institutional goals. For product managers, the resources are organized to let them to keep track of each lottery while the number of lotteries keeps increasing. With the help of proper organization, the categories are selfexplained in most of the time. Thus, product managers don’t have to document every single lottery and remember the subtle differences between them. The organization also benefits communication. Team member of a development team can easily use common vocabulary and categories to describe the specification of each lottery when they try to communicate with each other.

Machines are one type of users of the gambling system. The gambling system interchanges information with other systems to complete users’ operations. Other systems include issuegenerating system, online money transfer system, winning number generating system and member management system. Take winningnumber generating system for example, this system generate winning number set corresponded to the issue when the betting time is over. The winningnumber generating system needs the information about betting rules and rewardwinning frequency of the current lottery from the gambling system so that it can generate the right combination of numbers and deliver the result on time. If these two systems share common definition of the categories of lottery, the communication cost between them would be reduced.

How much is it being organized?

The basic model of the organization is lottery collection. A lottery collection contains lotteries with different names but have the same betting rules that are the number of winning numbers, and the number range users can select. The name of each lottery differs according to the location where the lottery originated. Each lottery has several game methods, which represents different ways to play this lottery, such as choosing numbers in a row or randomly selecting numbers. The hypernym class of lottery frequency class is the lottery frequency class. The organizing principle for the lottery frequency class is rewardannouncing frequency that is the betting time of one issue or the time difference between two reward announcements.

Order is also the basic model that contains information such as order number, betting number set, orderplacing time, betting cost, lottery class and issue. Order is the hyponym class of lottery order collection and issue order collection. The lottery order collection categorizes orders by lottery type of each order. The only difference of orders in one Issue order collection is issue. Issue order collection let users have the freedom to keep betting on the same number set by selecting the starting and ending issues without changing other things. Every order is unique and can be identified by order number. There is a relation between order and lottery. The order’s lottery class property is used to tell which winning number set should be retrieved to compare to the betting number set in the order.

When is it being organized?

Some of the lotteries are originated from an official gambling institution. In the beginning of building the online gambling system, the company retrieved existing lottery resources from the institution. The institution already defined vocabulary to describe the lotteries and the company followed the definition without any modification. Then they established organizing principles to organize those lotteries by comparing the values of the descriptors between lotteries. When a new lottery is created, it’s automatically categorized unless it doesn’t belong to any category based on current organizing principles. When this situation occurs, a new lottery collection will be created and a new lottery frequency class might need to be created by game designers. This process is done before the new lottery is released to users and no further change would be made after it’s released.

As for order, it is categorized to lottery order collection the moment the player placed an order since the player must choose the lottery type at first. An order is not necessarily categorized to issue order collection if there is no similar orders with different issues. If an order is categorized to an issue order collection, it happened when the player placed a series of orders.

How or by whom is it being organized?

The gambling industry is extremely competitive and the company has to keep up with the industry to keep existing players or attract new players. One way to achieve that is to create new lottery collection. Upper level managers usually are the ones who make proposal about creating a new lottery collection, but they only provide the basic guidelines about who will be the target user of this lottery collection and which lottery frequency group it belongs to. Other companies often affect these proposals. If other companies have a newly developed lottery collection, it’s possible that the managers need to create a similar lottery collection as well. The ones who actually design details like betting rules, reward, lotteries, and the game methods are product managers. Managers and developers will discuss the potential risks and implementation difficulties like whether the system can handle the amount of simultaneous betting orders placed in the same time and if the reward formula is proved to guarantee the company doesn’t have to pay much money even when lots of users win the lottery.

Case Study Supporting Material

Original way to classify lotteries (hierarchy classification): http://gamble202orig.pythonanywhere.com/orig

Alternative way to classify lotteries (facet classification): http://gamble202orig.pythonanywhere.com/new

The current organizing principle of categorizing lotteries is betting rule. However, each lottery has different properties such as awardannouncing frequencies and betting methods and player can only know the information by actually accessing each lottery and attempting to place an order. Users do care about this kind of differences between lotteries and they chose lotteries based on those factors. For new users, the information is implicit and can’t be recognized easily and quickly. It creates steep learning curve for them. As a result, I proposed to use a different way to interact with the lotteries.

Facets: Frequnecy:1 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes Reward: $2000, $1800, $1700 Region: Shanghai, Chongqing, Beijing Lottery Collection: Keno, Shishicai, CasualGame Betting Method: 5 Numbers, 4 Numbers, 3 Numbers Betting Amount: $20, $10, $5

The following table lists all lotteries and their properties.

Categorized by

lottery Frequency Reward Region Lottery Betting Betting Collection Method Amount

A 10 2000 Beijing Keno 5 Numbers $20

B 10 1800 Beijing Keno 4 Numbers $20

C 5 1800 Beijing Shishicai 4 Numbers $10

D 5 1700 Beijing Shishicai 5 Numbers $10 E 1 1700 Beijing CasualGame 3 Numbers $5

F 5 1800 Chongqing Keno 3 Numbers $20

G 1 1700 Chongqing Keno 5 Numbers $20

H 10 1700 Chongqing Shishicai 3 Numbers $10

I 10 2000 Chongqing CasualGame 3 Numbers $5

J 1 1800 Chongqing Shishicai 4 Numbers $10

K 10 1800 Shanghai Keno 5 Numbers $20

L 10 1700 Shanghai Shishicai 3 Numbers $10

M 5 1800 Shanghai Shishicai 4 Numbers $10

N 1 2000 Shanghai Shishicai 5 Numbers $10

O 1 2000 Shanghai CasualGame 4 Numbers $5