Creating the Bad Anatomy raffle for Warcraft

Recently Blizzard changed some rules to Warcraft that now allows people to run casinos in game. They are crude and the operators fill the city spam. You don't know who you can trust but people still play.

An idea I had worked on in the past was to create a lottery for players in wow. We had a lot of it planned but ended not doing because the rules were unclear if it was allowed or not. Now that the rules have changed and we are ready to start it up. So I present to you Bad Anatomy's Cho'gall weekly raffle.

Our initial idea was for a lottery where people could pick numbers and we use real world event to pick the numbers (like the multi-state lottery numbers). But our biggest issue with that is it could take a long time for a winner. In the end we decided on a raffle.

For every 10G someone donates, we will give them one raffle ticket. The ticket is given just so the purchaser knows what his numbers are and adds to the realism of it. A character was created just to handle the raffle. So every message in and out from him is kept separate from all our other mail.

There are 2 parts that make this work. First is the in-game mod I had to develop to receive gold, issue tickets and track tickets, and to pick the winner. It initially started out easier then I thought it should be and ended slightly more challenging then I thought it would be. I may go into those details in a later post. I can run my character up to the mail box and issue a command that will allow him to open every message, collect the gold, calculate how many tickets someone gets, and then send each of them a message with their numbers.

The second part is the supporting website Bad Anatomy's Cho'gall weekly raffle . This is the feature that makes it real. People can check the site to see when the next raffle starts or ends, see the winners, and all the rules to the game. We took a domain name we already had (Bad Anatomy) and re purposed it for the raffle. I tried to give it a simple and clean look. I tried to look at lottery sites for examples and they all felt overwhelming with all the stuff they tried to pack onto one page. In the end, I created the look I wanted.

This experiment is just getting started so I cannot tell you how well people are liking it or even how long I will run it. Head over to Bad Anatomy's Cho'gall weekly raffle to see how its going.