[Transparency request] Publish the RNG engine of the lottery system

[Iscah]

The lottery was not fair and was rigged.
Assuming there are 4 bidders, each one should have 25% chance of winning.

So when the lottery system rolls from 0 to 100 a 24, the first ticket should have won. However, because there was a 5th "ghost" person, there is now 20% chance of winning for each person.
That means now the winning range of the first ticket is reduced from being 0 to 25 to being 0 to 20.

Yes. The four people still have an equal chance of being the one whose number is called. That is still fair odds for each entrant, despite the accidental fail state added.

"Rigged" means that the results are being manipulated to guarantee a particular outcome, which is not what is happening in the example you are giving. It is still fully random and nobody has control over what number is produced to determine the winner.

Henceforth, with a roll at 24, where the first ticket should have won, now the 2nd ticket has won instead.

This is a scam and this is not fair, period.

This is randomness. It is simply one more factor of randomness as to which person won.

The roulette wheel got spun slightly harder or softer, and the difference in momentum changes the winner.

The person holding the box of paper raffle tickets shook it up-and-down instead of left-to-right. Maybe they spun the box around. Someone else's ticket could have been picked if it was facing the other way! Or if the person picking the winner moved their hand an inch to the right!

Random is not perfectly random, and all random chance draws are going to be shifted around by the factors that produce the numbers. But what matters is that all entires have an equal chance and nobody can predict (or alter) and take advantage of which random number the system is going to spit out.

A scam requires malice. It's not a scam unless they then shrug and say "too bad, you lost the raffle and the system is working as intended" – which is not the case here. They're looking to fix what went wrong.

Even if it's a more complicated programming error like Packetdancer is suggesting (thankyou for that explanation; it does sound plausible!) it's still not a scam. It is a glitch. An error. A mistake. They are not trying to rob you of your gil or manipulate the results. At most, a second lottery needs to be run to determine a winner for the plot.

The error only came to light because the lotteries stopped at zero instead of trying to reroll. If they had kept retrying until they produced a valid ticket, and every lottery now had a winner, would you need to see the lottery programming to confirm it was fair? If so, why was nobody asking a week ago to see the code? We just assumed it was going to be random (or pseudorandom) and if it hadn't generated these odd results, we never would have known a difference as long as there was a winner.