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[ctf92]

Hey guys- needed some serious help from a being intelligient enough to help with my endeavor...

 

Basically I want to create a multiplayer flash based pool game (similar to 8ball on miniclip). Creating the basic game is probably the only part of this tricky ambition that I can manage. However incoorperating a multiplayer database is where im stuck. Furthermore I want to include a wager system, where players can enter a lobby according to how much they wish to gamble on a single game or player tournament and where their wager is totaled up and my site automatially takes a small percentage off the top . I would like to have lobbies for games for £1,£2 upt to £5 and then multiplayer tournaments where the winner takes all! I know im asking alot guys but what would be the best steps to take in terms of coding? Any online gambling laws I should take into account? Any advice or help will be very much appreciated.

[hplus0603]

Any online gambling laws I should take into account?

Yes! It will cost you literally tens of millions of dollars in legal fees to set something like this up so it's available in the U.S. It will cost less than that, but still more than a house, to be available in the U.K. using some existing bookmaker system.

Separately, there is the problem of cheating -- you would have to run the physics server side to avoid someone hacking a client to affect the outcome of the game, especially as there is money on the line. Even so, someone could write a script that calculates the optimal shot, and send that to your servers. And, because the client is in the hand of the attacker, there is no way you can actually prevent that. (This has been discussed many times; no kind of encryption or signature helps when the client is in the hand of the attacker.) And, again, because you want to involve money, the incentive to cheat will be very large.

If, despite all this, you want to continue, then there are some service providers that can help. For example, Betable.com has a service that already does the legal stuff for you. All the cheating problems still remain, though.