peter.clayton

Not quite sure what the fuss is all about but here goes from the evil empire that is unionjackpots.com.

Once upon a time...........

A couple of mates decided to have a crack at building some feature packed fruit machines that everyone could play. They would be free and everyone would be happy in the land of Fruit-Emu and elsewhere. So the guys had a bash at it and realised that it was going to be a lot harder than it looked. If the machines were going to be clones of existing machines they couldn't be played online due to copyright infringements and the market was already well catered for. The problem was that the software had to be downloaded and it couldn't be networked as emu machines, or a lot of them if they were clones, were illegal which prevented any network element. Why did it all have to be underground? Why not get something organised where you could challenge each other, have tournaments and all live happily ever after?

Equally, the people behind the evil empire at UJ were fed up not being able to play real machines which they could gamble on because everything online was crap, which is a technical term. They thought that the people who chose to gamble were getting ripped off because there was no skill element and nothing that could replicate the real pub experience. What if you could design machines that you could play online, that would replicate the pub experience and would be as good looking as the best machines from the fruit-emu guys?

Being pig headed they continued in their merry quest unhindered about the costs or even realising what this would require in terms of effort and investment. They just wanted to see if it could be done.

So they pulled together a small team and got to work. If they had known then what then knew now they would have taken themselves to the highest rampart in the land and thrown themselves off. But they didn't.

Then one day one of the evil people at UJ said, 'shit guys, have you any idea what we have spent and what this is going to cost'. And everyone else looked at each other blankly and said no. We then had to decide whether to abandon ship or finish the damn thing off, and being pig headed (a recurring theme) they decided to finish it off which required making the play for real option a goer in order to recoup costs.

No one bought a white cat and a large leather chair at this point so we could sit there stroking the cat with evil grimaces on our face, and we hadn't considered buying a chrome bridge with a trap door into a tank of sharks. We thought it was a fair trade, to see if we could actually compete with the big boys who were not serving the market very well and delivering value to punters. Could it be done, could a bunch of upstarts really take on the big boys? We wanted to know, but not being rich, a play for real element was necessary and even more expensive to achieve which we didn't really know at the time.

So we fired ahead knowing that everyone in the land would love us and throw roses at our feet when we told them what this David was going to do to the Goliaths. Oops.

We needed to talk to 2 types of people. The first was the pro players at sites like fruitchat.co.uk who have massive knowledge of machines in the real world but have no idea how to actually build them. The second were the emu guys who know how to build them but without the need for a complex back end like a full gaming site. Oops again.

We rode into town on the back of white horses without any appreciation at all that some of the emu guys came from a back ground of problem gaming, we just had absolutely no idea and didn't really think it through. Once it was pointed out to us by DAD we apologised and disappeared for a while. Until we returned to apologise for the launch cock up and to respond to a couple of threads that we did not start but felt we had to answer because we were getting slated so badly it was hard to ignore.

Like this one.

We did not start this thread and only provided answers to questions people really wanted to know, but somehow it always makes it worse. We also accept that gambling can be a problem for some but I think you have to have had a problem with it to fully understand.

I smoke way too much, but at no point do I blame the manufacturers of cigarettes. I accept that there is something addictive about me that makes me smoke and there are far more cigarette packets around than fruit machines. But I have not started a campaign against corner shops or super markets. I accept that it is my problem and no matter what the Government does to help you get of the fags, I probably never will. But this is my deficiency not Philip Morris's and if I want to stop it has to come from me until I get to the state where I can walk past a corner shop without wanting to smoke or blame them for forcing me to smoke. And remember, this could kill me where other forms of addiction can not.

None of the above is a criticism of addiction because all the people behind UJ smoke, every damn one of us, so we do understand, but we also fail to see such a direct connection between what we are doing and being responsible for addictions to gambling when we are not even up and running and will form such a small part of the market.

What we will do is listen to you and demonstrate that we are capable of changing our opinion, rather than some of the rants that appear as responses in threads, who absolutely refuse to consider anything other than their own view. It's why we disappeared for about 3 months off this site, because people asked us to and DAD made a really good case for it due to the particular nature of the thread.

DAD and I don't particularly see eye to eye but I can at least understand his point of view and he was very eloquent in his argument. Even though I can not agree with him I can at least agree to see where he is coming from.

So we ploughed on, slightly taken aback by the response from this site but this was mainly our lack of foresight in terms of understanding the audience behind this site that had had a problem with gambling.

Even at this point we had not thought about buying a jet black and sinister looking speed boat so we could fire missiles at families on a boating lake.

Hey guys, said one of us, let's keep both happy. Let's always have a free play option for those that don't want to gamble and a play for real option so we can get at least some of our money back. No matter what people assume, it was as innocent as this. Perhaps wrongly, but there was no intend to lure people in, especially from this site because we don't want a penny from the emu players, just their advice. (Can't wait for this bit to be copy and pasted and then trashed by another rant).

We then embarked upon a sale of our wives and girlfriends for medical experiments so we could plough even more cash into the project. And if anyone knows how to answer this question from our beloveds then I would really appreciate it.

"You haven't put much into this have you honey"?

Even at this stage there was no pillage planned. We could license out the games which would possibly make everything on our site free play only, or we could sell the site to one of the big boys who would hoover it up and make it a small part of their existing gambling offering. Or we could do it ourselves and get our money back and then decide. There was no original plan to allow us to buy stealth helicopters so we could bomb small countries and steal their oil. It doesn't bother us whether people believe us or not, we know the intentions behind UJ and have done since the start. And they weren't too bad, just perhaps a little challenging.

So here we are. Defending ourselves again and sometimes for understandable reasons. We're not going to defend ourselves against accusations that we know are not true, but we will against those who misunderstand where we are coming from.

Trust us, at this point we are not in a position to buy our own island unless it is a Tracey Island from toys 'r' us. But we would love to get our money back and finish the job.

If you want to bin this thread then do it, it's your site not ours. If you want to keep it up then fine by us. But we are not here to subvert innocents with our evil ways.

Who knows what the future may bring? We may cock it up, we may lose a ton of money, we may get our money back, we may become a full gaming site and rule the world from a high tower that revolves, which would be nice if I didn't suffer from motion sickness.

But I know that what we are doing has no deliberate motivation to piss people off, screw them or cause problems. If we do then we'll listen, to well reasoned arguments and try to make changes accordingly.

All we want to do is offer a better product to an existing audience that is currently getting no value at all with AWP's. We're not convinced it will increase the gaming audience as the whole point about UJ is if you offer a better product you should be drawing existing players from other sites who already play, we don't want virgins.

This is far easier for us than to make gamblers out of non gamblers, as we don't have the money to do this. In other words, the pie is already there, we just want a slice of it by offering a better product at a better price with a better playing experience and higher value.

Everyone is entitled to have their own opinion and while you can call us naive in some respects, evil we are not. Now where's that laser canon I need to talk to Geddy.

The first time this was asked it was in connection with people backing the business, Outback Gaming has nothing to do with the business in any respect but we are free to choose who we want as suppliers like any company.

The next one for Beta once Mad Money Monster gets released.

Aha, it appears to me you are after the 'special sauce' formula! I will try to answer the best I can.

In terms of Fruit Machines - the games are fully controlled in terms of game state by the creation of multiple game instances and depending on the number of concurrent players there may be several thousand live 'game instances' for each individual title. When a player logs in to a title he will be allocated a game instance to play. If there are pre-existing game instances available the player will be given one of those and the player will begin his session from where the last player left off (as you would do if you walked into a pub). If no game instance is available (if all are occupied by active players) then a new game instance will be created just for you as if we have wheeled you in your own special machine on request. When you leave the session - then that Game Instance will likewise become available for others to play from where you leave off!! No two instances are ever the same, but when a game instance is created anyone allocated that instance in the future will always continue in the cycle from the last sessions end point.

You can find the winner of the iPod, for any competition that has closed on the main holding site. Just go to the bottom and click on Terms & Conditions and you will see it there.

As for Treasure Hunter, it is different enough to avoid any infringement and this has to be checked very carefully before you launch such a game, so we're okay on that score.