I tend to be friendly and i tend to have an open discussion to most things and especially i tend to reason when i have sort of a dispute to people... but this time i have to put it bluntly like this:
If you register on a website where it says "By registering I accept the terms and conditions" you should a) have read them b) have understood them and c) accept them.
In case one of those does not fit please dont register. A lot of people can confirm that i try to run this as transparent and friendly as possible.. but still people try to get back at me.
Today morning i woke up to a scam accusation from someone claiming 2BTC which were clearly never send to me. The dispute was settled pretty quickly.
An hour ago i received a message that someone wants a full refund on his account for loosing patience with the game etc (why not telling me that while the game was in hiatus?)..
But as i take every PM serious, i thought about ignoring this one though, but i will answer it when i am done here, i checked the whole account...
So, as to make clear how i deal with this i am ready to drag this into the public, just to show you that i dont want to obfuscate, but how silly things can end up:
So i was given the Username and the following statement:
I know you just re-opened it but I've lost patience and it is unfair to your dedicated users. I poured tons of money in, and have been regretting it deeply since.
Thank you for the refund.
My account username: ****
My bitcoin address: ****
My account email: ****
I tried to be faithful to your service for as long as possible but I've simply given up unfortunately. For the record I attempted "dismantling" a rig and it threw an error message, before the rig was gone. No funds were added back to the account.
At least i was given a username, thats always a good way to start tracking down. With the username in hand i first checked the balance of that user: Showed up with coins on multiple chains (but no BTC on the account), so the user was at least using the service in the past.
Next up was checking the Rigs: Ok, the user had several assembled rigs, a few vASICs and one dismantled rig (Dismantled means that all parts are stripped from the GPU and can be assembled with to new rigs). So maybe there was a misunderstanding there. Dismantling it doesnt mean that they are refunded(!).
Next up checking the users activity.
My ideas was to look up wether the user was active shortly before the hiatus or not in which case i might have understood the impatience... so my primary log, ranging back for 3 months (containing mostly debug messages and no
user activity whatsoever) didnt show any activity. First backup tier, going back to 7/1/12 didnt show no activity either, second backup tier came up with results!
So the last action that was recorded was in June. roughly half a year before the game went offline. So what did the logs show up? Some deposits, some parts being bought and a pool getting created.
So just for the record we are talking of 1.25 BTC here, which were spent in june 2012 where the average price of bitcoin was close to $5. Bringing that into perspective of todays price we end up with roughly 0.14BTC at todays prices.
What is the conclusion i draw here?
Given the fact that the user has accepted the terms and conditions which clearly state that i cannot be held responsible for the outcome of the game: you wouldnt ask Satoshidice for a refund if you loose, would you?
Furthermore: The user was able to use the game for more than half a year, and seemingly he did (he has rigs, he has coins so the rigs worked etc) and last but not least the sum we are talking about. Its not like we are talking about someone who put hundreds of USD into that game which vanished into nothingness.
For those reasons i refuse to pay the refund. And i would like to ask other people not to start asking me for refunds now that Bitcoin has such a high value... I generally dont do refunds except for when they are justified. Normally i try to check everything twice in order to come to the right conclusion and this should be an example of how i do this.
