CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

Josh, I don't see premeditated collusion as being a huge problem with your idea. Because having a few extra dummy accounts isn't going to help very much in getting additional tokens. But the problem will be if several of the token holders decide to communicate and split the profits for themselves. Frankly, the bigger problem is that the idea isn't that exciting. Sure, you could clean up, win all 16 tokens, and get the jackpot. But that's really unlikely. What's more down to earth is that I might get a small portion of the tokens if I play really well. So if I get 4 tokens (a QUARTER of all the tokens floating around among hundreds of greedy players), I walk away with $1.60. It's a nonstarter. Even half the tokens is only worth $25.

AnoHito's idea of tokens as being the tournament qualifier is reaaaally interesting. It's kind of like a Golden Ticket! Hand out 16 tokens (you can't collect multiple) and at the end of the week, the 16 token holders go to a final showdown. You could give each one $100 just for making it, but have some larger prizes for the tournament winner(s).

Yea I get this as a principle, but it's tricky. In the $5000 Football, you never gain anything. Having the Football is a very rare event and yet holding it doesn't mean you're going to win anything.

It'd be cool if certain games were randomly assigned prizes and the winner just takes the prize and it's permanent. Like let's say this happens 400 times throughout the week and each prize is $5. That way you have very little to lose by playing as much as possible. But that takes you closer to lottery territory (there's skill involved in winning that game though).

In general, you're stuck with this problem of convincing new players they actually have a shot at winning something, yet not making it about luck. That's a hard nut to crack. Maybe you hand out permanent prizes every 12 hours based on performance during that period.

I still like the idea of there being multiple layers here. Like do the 16 tokens AND the daily prizes. Make it feel like a carnival. Chances to win stuff everywhere you turn. I get that you want to maximize your budget here on one huge prize to draw people in, but aren't there diminishing returns there? How big of a difference is a $3000 vs $5000 grand prize when deciding whether to join a contest? You're also still allowed to say "$X in cash prizes" even if there isn't a single $X grand prize.

^Sure. Something that doesn't require only some fraction of the coins to be won because that's just too confusing.

Yes to all that. It works the same as the in-game currency, but the difference is:

a) They are transferred based on a binary win/loss. There is no relation to the stakes or how many coins are passed.
b) If you have none, you can gain a bunch without putting anything at risk (besides the game stake, which is probably negligible).

The big issue is, if it is an issue, you lose everything at once. This is good for the have-nots and bad for the haves. You could play safe though and just go for the minimum number of games (perhaps 2 per day) to hold onto what you have.

I contemplated a more granular system, where you actually have an inventory. Like say I've been playing for a while and accumulated a 4, an 8, a 16. If I steal an 8, it automatically combines into a 16 and the 16s automatically combine into a 32. Then if someone beats me, I only lose one of the lowest value items I have (a 4). It's pretty neat concept to me, having these combinations, but I imagine the system would be really complicated to code and to represent on the UI. So the simpler way is instead of 4, 8, 16, I just have 24 and I lose it all on a single loss.

Very cool stuff with the gold!

The $5000 Football sounds really fun, but too luck based. The person getting the football to start was VERY lucky and it's likely plenty of people will never even encounter someone who has it. If you do something with so much luck, wouldn't it move you further away a "contest of skill" (something you mentioned on the Real Money page)?

I thought about this for a while and had a neat idea. Your "$5000 Football" reminds me of a classic MMO trope: the ultra-rare drop on a monster. You farm some stupid monster and 1/10,000 times it drops what you need. But also, there are less rare components that you craft into bigger items. I used to play Asheron's Call and there was some sort of golem that dropped a gold "mote." It probably dropped 1/100 times. All my friends had the same feeling upon seeing this thing: a huge shock and rush of endorphins. You'd get a couple of these and combine them into a nugget or something. Combine 2 nuggets into a bar. Rinse and repeat. All these items represent a power of 2.

So you imagine you have 1024 of these "motes" in CM each worth $2. They're awarded to the first 1024 people to deposit/play after a certain time. It's a great pitch. You get something JUST for playing and someone can put 2 bucks into the game and double their money. Of course  there's a catch: you have to keep playing like you said, X games per 12 hours to keep your mote.

I was going to say that you have to strictly combine two $2 into $4 and two $4 into $8, but now that I type this up.... not sure that is feasible. Because you start to have difficulty finding someone with the same item as you. Unless you have an inventory of sorts. Anyway, it could instead be a simple currency that runs alongside the game (i.e. I have $5 and I beat someone with $20 and now I have $25).

You can still have the lucky few people who start this contest with a $100 or a $1000. I like this more than the original football because it represents money you can actually win if you just defend it. Someone getting the "$5000 football" on the last day may have already lost because someone earlier racked up so many wins.

Sorry for rambling. I really think there's something worthwhile in there though.

re: determining victory on these games, could you just set the leave penalty to 200 coins on any Football game?

You have two categories here and I think you should approach it as such: you want to give out a big prize, but you also want to have a bunch of smaller prizes such that anyone feels like they have a decent shot. So why not have both of the following:

1) An entry-fee tournament with one or more large cash prizes.
2) A slew of small prizes ($5-$25?) awarded for various accomplishments, none of which require you to pay a fee.

It's kind of like big corporate sweepstakes (e.g. Monopoly at McDonald's). You know you have no chance in hell of getting the million dollars, but it still grabs you psychologically. Even if you lose, you can console yourself with the occasional free food item. I don't think it's unethical to draw people in with "$X of cash and prizes" even though there are stipulations on that. They can come and read the details and see that you have a good reason to implement the entry-fee. Anyway, the entry-fee will probably be a fraction of what TCD cost.

The small prizes are like the free fry at McDonald's. Everyone's a winner! Realistically you could do dozens of these smaller prizes for comparatively cheap. And you can even have categories that don't seem that hard to attain; not only games played, but maybe you award people for most money lost or biggest loss. And you don't have to stick to cash prizes. IMHO, the real world TCD prizes were the coolest part and I have to imagine they contributed to the excitement behind the contest.

These prizes will be somewhat open to abuse, but there's less incentive to cheat the system as well. Why go through all the hassle to win $20? There's even less incentive to cheat for a non-fungible prize, which is really most appealing to those who respect the game.

I guess it's probably not going to happen, but thought I would mention another idea I had: an interesting prize would be the one-time ability to rename your alias to a combination of your choosing.

Yea, IIRC it appeared that several people did this because I watched as they jumped by tens of thousands at the last minute.

I'd figure a random strategy is a lot more exploitable than a 5% advantage. Assuming you had a column that looked like that first row give them that: 83% chance they have no more than 26. 33% chance they have no more than 6.

Give yourself that first column and you have 50% chance of a 30+. At least when the ante is low, you just fold half the time you get a raise.

Am I way off?

Thanks for coming in here and solving the mystery once and for all, Clock! As a fun programming challenge, I definitely get it. If you ever get totally bored of it, I'm sure we'd all be interested in seeing your source code.

Absolutely. Maybe I should add the time graph to the site? For now, remember the "follow" feature. For example, I followed Judge Doorman. He only plays around midnight my time when I'm in bed and not every night. It's not really worth me staying up until 1am every night on the off chance he'll be there. So I can turn the volume up on my phone and literally be woken up when he plays a game. I'm planning to use that extensively in the future.

And yea, this kind of stuff has a tinge of creepiness to it. But that's equally true of anything you do publicly on the internet. Facebook posts, twitter posts? I remember someone did analysis of Hacker News usage and you could tell one of the top posters had a very unhealthy sleep schedule.

I have to confess I probably won't be expanding this thing too much regarding the other boards. I'm sure others will if there is interest. As I've said, there's no shortage of programmers here. There were tons of third party tools made for The Castle Doctrine!

I agree. My intuition is that writing a good picking strategy, one that can pick up on the opponent's patterns, would be a good deal of work and the betting side is likely intractable. And you can't just get a slight edge (51%) because you have to consider the rake. I'm very happy that it's not so simple and Clock Form currently seems to be a losing proposition. Makes things more interesting for the time being.

Ha. I said that exact thing in my post.

Plenty of people have. Speaking of names, with the upmost respect, ECONOMY MAKER is also a very appropriate name.

Hahaha. Oh god, how embarrassing. I've had a lot of silly ideas over the years. Humbit was about 6 years ago. Not sure if you recall the "Million Dollar Homepage" but I thought it'd be kind of interesting to do that kind of thing for people instead of ads. The voice is a friend who loves to do accents; we had a lot of fun with that.

I own a handful of domains, but for some reason that one is my dumping grounds and never killed the front page.

Anyway, the small projects I'm actually proud of in the last year or so: a couple 7DRLs (Golden Krone Hotel and A False Saint, An Honest Rogue) and another Twitter bot, which pumps out 100 year old headlines. http://jere.in/stuff

I wish I had the attention span for larger stuff.

Jason has asked us not to link to the forums because the game is not officially launched. There's also the issue of the forums URL possibly changing as happened a few weeks ago due to spam bots. You don't want to go through all that effort and then get a dead link.

I would just link to the front page. Jason says the game is nearing release. If I were to hazard a guess, it'd be within this month.

Worst case, the link gets greenlit before the game is released and it points to a very interesting landing page, one which still allows entrance with some effort.