If you were building the rating system yourselves, how would you weight categories such as withdrawals, KYC, bonuses, support, reputation/community feedback and the other parts of the casino experience?
And based on what you’ve seen on Bitcointalk over the years, which casino brands would you say have maintained the strongest and most consistent reputation here?
We’re currently reviewing both the scoring model and the brands we want to test next, so your input would be really useful for us.
If I would build a rating system, I would primarily prioritize community feedback/reputation within this forum since it's almost always quite reliable/trustworthy followed by customer support, deposit plus withdrawal services, KYC and bonuses.
Sites like Stake, Roobet, Crypto.Games, Shuffle etc have been consistently epic over time within this forum though this is a highly subjective topic.
Thanks, that’s useful and pretty close to the direction we’re discussing internally.
Another option we’re considering is not forcing everything into one rating at all. For example, we could have our own rating based on defined criteria and testing, while keeping a separate community/user rating alongside it.
Those two numbers wouldn’t necessarily match, and that could actually be useful. A casino might perform well in our structured test but have weaker community feedback, or the opposite.
We’re also interested in eventually involving trusted community members in some of the testing itself, especially for things that can be independently verified. That could give us more than just one tester’s experience and help us build a better sample over time.
And thanks for the brand suggestions. Stake, Roobet and Shuffle are already very relevant names for the kind of repeat testing we want to do.
First response here covers what I wanted: excessively in profit withdrawals. That's the true test of whether a casino does shenanigans. For me, acceptable to limit accounts. That's just profit based thinking and all good. It's when you're withdrawing a big win, or a big percentage of total deposits, that the usual rubbish happens. Delays. KYC. Accusations.
Do that test, and then test it again. And again. I'd say ratings needs to be based on successions of testing.
This is exactly the kind of follow-up test we want to add.
So far, many of our tests have involved relatively small deposits and withdrawals, which obviously doesn’t tell us how the casino behaves when a player is significantly in profit or requests a much larger percentage of their total deposits back.
Testing that scenario once would already be useful, but I agree that repeating it is what would make the result much stronger.
We’re looking at ways to build follow-up tests around different bankroll sizes and withdrawal scenarios rather than treating the first successful cashout as the final result.
Good question, even with the best intentions at the start, what happens when an advertiser asks to tweak a review or move their casino up the list? Would be interesting to hear how you plan to handle that, for example by keeping ads and ratings completely separate.
That wasn't a standard advertiser request (simply renting ad space); it was a clear shill attempt designed to produce biased reviews.
The 5% weighting for external/player feedback is also part of the rating model we’re currently reviewing. As we recalibrate the individual categories, we want to use more data and, where possible, give broader community feedback, documented complaints and reputation a more appropriate place in the overall assessment.
My assumption was this: when your username (used for testing) can easily be linked to your review site, the casino provides top-tier service to make it appear as though everything is running smoothly because they know you hold 95% of the weight in the rating.
That’s actually a good point.
If simply using a recognizable review-site username gets you better treatment, maybe the secret to instant withdrawals is naming every test account after one of the biggest affiliate sites 😄
Jokes aside, this is something worth considering in the methodology. A test is obviously more useful if the casino doesn’t know it is being tested.
For future tests we can look at using accounts that can’t easily be connected to our site and compare the results over time. Repeating the same type of test with different accounts would also help us see whether a particularly smooth experience was normal or an exception.
If you were building the rating system yourselves, how would you weight categories such as withdrawals, KYC, bonuses, support, reputation/community feedback and the other parts of the casino experience?
My answer to this is still similar to what i've already said to you. While there cannot be a perfect scoring/rating system, you cannot get anywhere near accurate based on a one-off review test or even a couple of it. I would only rate a casino based on multiple experiences from players over a long period of time, amongst these players would be big winners and small ones, that's how i would get a strong idea of how a casino treats their players and score it accordingly.
And based on what you’ve seen on Bitcointalk over the years, which casino brands would you say have maintained the strongest and most consistent reputation here?
You can look around the community and find them yourself. Roobet has been here for a very long time. Whale, Stake, Rollbit and many others, there is no shortage of them here.
I think that’s one of the clearest takeaways from this thread so far.
A single test is useful for documenting one real player journey, but it becomes much more meaningful once we can compare it with repeated tests, different bankroll sizes and experiences from other players over time.
That’s also why we’re considering separating our own structured/test rating from a broader community rating rather than trying to compress everything into one number.
And thanks for the brand examples. We’ll look more closely at the long-term forum history of those brands when deciding which casinos to revisit or add to the test list.
Checked some of the casinos you have tested and I saw only a few of them are given good score for the Bonus so I am wondering what is your main criteria to give the score related to the bonus?
Do you give good score for the bonus part mostly for those casino that offer you something like no deposit bonus, welcome bonus or free spins?
Frankly speaking, I'm surprised to see you give Rainbet 5/10 and Stake 4/10 but you give BC.game 7/10 Betplay 7/10 Vavada 8/10 for the bonus part.
Are you excluding VIP rewards offered by the casinos as a reference for you to give a rating/score for this category?
Good question. The bonus score in the real-money tests isn’t based simply on whether a casino offers a welcome bonus, free spins or a no-deposit bonus.
One of the main things we look at is the wagering requirement and how it actually applies. For example, we distinguish between wagering that applies only to the bonus amount and wagering that applies to both the deposit and the bonus.
We also look at the structure of the offer itself: the matching percentage, whether the full bonus is credited immediately or unlocked gradually through wagering/activity, and any other restrictions that affect how realistic it is for a player to actually use or withdraw the bonus.
We also separate bonus wagering requirements from general AML turnover requirements, as those are not the same thing.
VIP rewards are currently not included in the bonus score of the individual real-money test. We look at VIP/loyalty programs separately as part of the broader casino review and overall brand assessment.
That said, the scoring system you’re looking at is something we’re significantly reworking now. Feedback from this thread has already highlighted several areas where the criteria need to be clearer and more consistent.
Once we have enough tests and data, we plan to finalize the methodology and then recalculate the older test scores using the same criteria, including the bonus category.
