Thoughts on a Launch Contest

Dan_Dan84 · 2015-02-25 03:18:35

I love reading Jason's interesting ideas for a launch contest. Reading them, I imagine him typing with his hair on fire. Then, we come in with our input (also interesting ideas), and we all realize how difficult it will be to push these blocks of ice into the fire...

I've been following this thread. From what I've read, there are seven central things a launch contest will need to do:

1) Most importantly, it should draw new players in, get already registered players (testers) playing again, and get everybody to play a lot.

2) It should have "water cooler appeal" and generate "buzz," the way "Steal Real Money" did. A contest name that grabs people's attention and makes them want to check it out. Also prizes that turn heads. Big money is always good, but interesting physical prizes can be appealing, too (and may be more in keeping with the nature of the game).

3) It must be skill-based, both in keeping with the nature of the game and to prevent the game from running afoul of any laws.

4) While skill-based, the contest must also give everybody a chance to win something: established players can shine, but new players also stand a fighting chance.

5) It must prevent any form of collusion or cheating, because that would defeat the purpose of the contest. After all, the core game asks people to deposit money and play against an anonymous opponent over the internet. If people feel that the game is not fair, then $2 is all they will ever deposit.

6) It should be simple to understand. The more complicated the rules, the less likely new players will be to give it a go.

7) And of course, from the practical side: the liabilities for Jason (prize money, logistics of creating and sending out prizes) should be able to be forecast with precision in advance.

So that seems to be the core of what we're aiming for.

I think all of the ideas are interesting here, but the one that really grabbed me is the football idea and now, the "gold, silver, and copper" amulets idea. The idea seems to tick most of the boxes on my little checklist. It seems quite simple and straightforward, and so far, I can't see any opportunities for serious cheating as long as the conditions Jason met are imposed (e.g. can't play the same person twice while holding an amulet, 200-coin leaving penalty). Everybody has a chance at an amulet game, and anybody could win it (though skilled players should be able to hold onto it for longer than others). And the best way to encounter an amulet? Why, play lots of games! And the best way to win the physical amulet (a neat prize!)? Play lots of games!

So to me, all that's left are two things:

a) Figuring out the initial distribution of the amulets, such that it's not based on luck. Perhaps the idea of the first X people after Y o'clock who deposit money get it? Or the first Z people who open a game after Y o'clock? Or maybe some of the leaderboard stats?

b) The name of the contest. The hook. Perhaps a name and an announcement in keeping with the style of the game teaser page (perhaps something that could have come out of The Secret self-help book: "You are an antenna, broadcasting energy into the universe. Send out energy on just the right frequency, and the Amulet will come to you." OK, obviously something better than that, but yeah. The teaser page is so funny and interesting; I'm sure its style can be used to publicize and generate interest in the contest).

I also like Jere's idea of the "carnival" aspect, where it seems like there are chances to win something around every corner. It can't be too luck-based, I suppose, but it should reward people just for playing a lot. But again, most of the criteria that could be used for those prizes might be subject to manipulation/collusion...

Whatever is decided upon, I'm sure it will be interesting. Getting excited!

storeroom leaflet · 2015-02-25 07:23:30

the amulet/football idea is interesting. Seems like a fun contest which meets a lot of the desiderata for the promotion. The main issue I have with it is that it seems to me with 5-10 colluding accounts you could get a *huge* advantage. My suspicion is that it is very hard to get long winning streaks at this game, so the winning streak number if this was done for a week would be in the 5-15 range (a statistical analysis on this would be useful and should be doable witht he data Conto Delirium has been collecting). I've been trying to think of ways around this which preserve the positive features but haven't come up with much. If you have a large pool of players that the amulet holder gets randomly paired that should bring the edge right down, but the pairings really have to be outside the players control. Or maybe games against players trying to get the amulet from you need to be interspersed with games against a different group of players who have more at stake in the games (so they can't have an incentive to throw them).

jere · 2015-02-25 12:31:38

I like the multiple amulet thing, much better than a single football. It's going to be painful to lose those things, but as long as people understand that winning games is important rather than simply holding it (and there are leaderboards to track this), it should be fine.

Regarding the actual prizes, I've been saying physical prizes are really cool several times. But let me play devil's advocate briefly. If all the prizes are physical, might that reduce the allure of the contest? I bet anyone here would be ecstatic to receive a gold amulet as a cool Cordial Minuet memento, but your average Kotaku reader is probably thinking: WTF, am I going to have to melt this or pawn it or what? A good mix of cash and physical prize might be a better idea.

My suspicion is that it is very hard to get long winning streaks at this game, so the winning streak number if this was done for a week would be in the 5-15 range (a statistical analysis on this would be useful and should be doable witht he data Conto Delirium has been collecting). I've been trying to think of ways around this which preserve the positive features but haven't come up with much.

I have the same intuition and here are some ways of looking at it (besides analysis because I am lazy). The current best player is Forethought Tobacco with an Elo of 366. Look at his profit graph. A few long streaks, but plenty of up-down-up-down.

Then look at Elo. Against someone with the worst Elo, Tobacco's chances appear to be 90%. What's the chance of getting a 15 win streak against a new player: only 20%. If he plays someone in the top 20 Elo, he's looking at less than a 75% chance.

So what you're saying is: all you need is 20 accounts and you're sure to win (assuming you can get your hand on an amulet to begin with?).

claspa · 2015-02-25 14:44:59

What about to make an account and his results winnings/losings (for himself !&! the opponent) legitimate for the contest, the account has to play at least X-amount of games during the tournament time?

So if someone is setting up several accounts and let them lose against his main account, he still has to play X amount of games with each of the accounts to make them count.

Combined with the fact that you cannot play the same account twice once holding the same amulet, you have to play different players.

Edit:

I second jere's opinion about a mix of physical and cash prizes. The system could use more "in-game" money (in a diverse distribution).

Last edited by claspa (2015-02-25 14:49:07)

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-25 18:46:33

Yeah, cash along with each amulet is fine. It can match the rarity of each amulet. More cash for gold, less for silver, less for copper. But the gold ones could certainly be sold for their gold content... still, it would only be a $600 value if they are half an ounce each. I think they'll be worth far more at auction as unique, one-of-a-kind objects. There are 728 registered CM players, but a lot more people who know my work. Limited editions of Diamond Trust go for around $100, and there are 1000 of those in existence.

Given what you guys are observing about winning streaks being generally short, it seems like ties are going to be a huge problem. Need to deal with that up front...

Regarding the 20-account collusion, who has 20 unique credit cards? Oh, crap, visa gift cards. Could easily buy 20 of those...

I don't know that forcing new accounts to play X regular games first would help.... someone would just create their 20 accounts ahead of time and rack up the necessary games.

Some kind of randomized match-making for amulet games could help. However, you could imagine the colluding amulet holder just making a game with stakes that most new players wouldn't want to join ($50 or whatever), which would give their accomplice account plenty of chance to be the one to join.

Amulet games could have a fixed stake (like $1.00), and then randomized match-making would work (just a simple random delay of when a game shows up on the list).

I was hoping to let amulet games happen at any stake, though, but I wonder if there would be a race to the bottom anyway (if you're trying to win the most games in a limited time, proposing $100 games is probably a bad idea). Though a set $1 stake might push it out of reach for brand new players.

One bad side-effect of this contest would be people game-hopping looking for the amulets. If you join a game and it's NOT an amulet game, you'd want to leave that game as quickly as possible and try joining another one.

So, if you have the amulet, you'd want to play as much as possible, and all your games would go to the end (winner-take-all).

If you don't have the amulet, you'd want to JOIN as many games as possible... but not play as many games as possible.

Could the amulet status of your match be hidden until it's over? YOU JUST PICKED UP AN AMULET. Then everyone would be afraid to leave any game before conclusion, which would change the game quite a bit.

I just thought of something else.... maybe the 200-penalty for leaving should only apply to the player who is currently up in coins (or both if they are tied).

So, if the amulet status of a game is hidden from you as the non-amulet holder, and you're down 50 coins, you can safely leave for the normal 6 penalty, whether or not its an amulet game...

This would motivate non-amulet holders who are up in coins to stay in every game, just in case it's an amulet game, but still let them leave a game when they are way down without a shocking penalty for leaving. Because, obviously, the leave penalty would have to be hidden (it can't say LEAVE AND PAY 95, because that would let you know it's an amulet game).

On the other hand, as an amulet holder, you'd always know it was an amulet game...

claspa · 2015-02-25 19:31:54

jasonrohrer wrote:

I don't know that forcing new accounts to play X regular games first would help.... someone would just create their 20 accounts ahead of time and rack up the necessary games.

Not regular games, not first.

During the contest time everyone has to play at least x amount of contest games. After that all the results regarding the increase of coins and decrease of coins while holding an amulet count for you and your opponents.

This would make it quite a hassle for anyone with 20 accounts.

jere · 2015-02-25 20:57:50

^Yea, that would help especially if it was the fixed-stake stuff. Let's say 5 contest games (otherwise a loss to the amulet holder won't count at the very end; I think coins should count regardless). Not impossible, but definitely a huge pain for colluders.

Amulet games could have a fixed stake (like $1.00), and then randomized match-making would work (just a simple random delay of when a game shows up on the list).

I really think this is going to be necessary. Either a random delay or games only kick off every 15 seconds and the people waiting are shuffled around. What about $0.25 for stakes? It's a meaningful denomination and if you're new to the game, that amount feels pretty intense. It lets someone who loses 2/3 of games and who put in the minimum $2 deposit play 15+ contest games (after they've played a bunch of 1c games). For someone who deposits $5, that is closer to 50 contest games.

Could the amulet status of your match be hidden until it's over? YOU JUST PICKED UP AN AMULET. Then everyone would be afraid to leave any game before conclusion, which would change the game quite a bit.

Hmmmm. Finding out at the end would be cool, but knowing during the game seems A LOT more intense to me. I don't know if game hopping will be a problem (no room to complain if I get 7 coins), but if it is a problem why not just make all contest games have the 200 coin penalty?

joshwithguitar · 2015-02-25 23:05:32

I still think there is no need at all for the 200 coin leaving penalty. It changes the game unnecessarily for people who happen to join an Amulet game, which would be especially bad if you didn't know you were playing one, as has been suggested.

Why not just work it as I said before: if you leave a game whilst holding the amulet you lose the amulet to your opponent. To win an amulet you must either take all of your opponents coins or have them leave. This has the same basic effect re:amulets while meaning that you can still treat an amulet game the same as any other if you want to.
Edit: To put it simply: if you leave an amulet game early, your opponent ends up with the amulet. Otherwise the games are no different to normal.

I personally like the idea of having hidden amulets. Even if you had a 200 coin leaving penalty this would not stop people joining many 1c games and leaving until they find an amulet game. The thing about a competition like this is that it will affect the way people play, but there is nothing really wrong with that. Encouraging people to play out full games during the period would make things interesting. Sure, a game that you know is for an amulet would be more intense, but if any game could be for the amulet then EVERY game would be more intense.

Last edited by joshwithguitar (2015-02-26 00:31:16)

claspa · 2015-02-26 03:06:58

I fully approve of what Josh is saying: Hidden amulets; if you leave an amulet game early, your opponent ends up with the amulet, same treatment like non-contest games

I am also in favor of having a fixed amount for a tournament match. 1 USD though feels quite too much for me and I can imagine new players would find this intimitating. Maybe something in the range between 0.1 - 0.2USD.

The chance of winning a gold amulet has the possibility for a nice marketing aspect: Play CM and win real gold!
That should grab some attention.

storeroom leaflet · 2015-02-26 04:51:38

Here's an idea that I think might deal with some of the problems (well it's actually a bunch of more or less separable ideas). I'll just give the mechanics, not sure about the flavour. The idea here is to have amulets and amulet points won by winning games where one player has an amulet, prizes should be more or less proportional to points won to avoid providing incentives to collude (so you can have prizes for those with the most points but they should be small in dollar value compared to the total payout given to players proportional to their points). Have a 1c, 10c, $1 and 5$ amulet, the first game to start at each of these stakes is for the amulet of that stake. Each amulet starts with 100 points attached to it which is the minimum amulet stake. Every game at one of these stakes where one player has the corresponding amulet is for the amulet as well as an amulet stake of half the amulet points (rounded up) attached to the amulet (or 100 amulet points if there are less than 200 points attached to the amulet). if the amulet holder wins they keep the amulet, if they lose they first take all the points that were in the amulet and their opponent receives the amulet; in either case the amulet stake of the game is then added to the amulet. For example if the amulet has 300 points attached to it, then the next game the player with the amulet plays has an amulet stake of 150 points. This means if they win, they keep the amulet, the number of point attached to the amulet goes to 450 and the next game they play has an amulet stake of 225 points. If they lose they get the 300 points attached to the amulet, but the amulet goes to their opponent with the 150 point amulet stake attached and the next game they play will have an amulet stake of 100 points. At the end of the promotion of course the holder of the amulet gets all the points attached to the amulet at that time. To encourage the amulet holder to play, every time a coin is raked in a non-amulet game of the corresponding stake the amulet loses 1 point attached to it. (Probably only while the amulet is not playing though I'm a bit worried about a pair of people deliberately dragging out an amulet game in this case, especially towards the end of the promotion). Then to avoid this being too costly to someone who can't play, an amulet holder can voluntarily give it up at any time, in which case they get the amulet points attached to the amulet and the next game to start at the corresponding stake is for the amulet with the amulet stake reset to 100.

The idea of the above system is to avoid incentivising throwing games by making them constant sum. The above system isn't quite constant sum as the system doesn't take into account the extra value of having an amulet with more points attached to it (as it allows you to play games with higher amulet stakes). This just requires an adjustment of the points awarded for each result. Assuming players can keep finding amulet games without limit while they still have it, want to maximise their expected number of points and have 50% chance of winning each game, and don't have to worry about losing points for not playing then the simplest adjustment is to say that if the amulet holder wins instead of the points attached to the amulet increasing by 50% they increase instead by 25% keeping everything else constant. Of course when the amulet has less than 100 points attached to it the games are no longer constant sum, but the incentive among a pair of colluding players there is to pass the amulet on, so this is not much of a concern and can be dealt with in a number of ways. Also the amulet is worth more to stronger players so they could in theory increase their edge by paying people to lose to them, but with fixed stakes for amulet games and some measures to prevent players organising match-ups I think the realistic potential for this is minimal.

The rules for this system are a litle more complex than some other amulet systems, but the relevant things players need to know at particular points are fairly simple: If you win you'll get x number of points and keep the amulet, if you lose you'll get y points and lose the amulet, try to get as many points as possible. It doesn't have any random elements and rewards skill, but at the same time everybody has a chance to get some points, and even score well if they get a single win when there's a bunch of points stacked on the amulet. Also the fact that there are amulets at different stakes would make going for the lower stake ones seem less intimidating I think. I like the idea of trying to encourage some slightly higher stake games as well this way (that's why I suggested having a $5 amulet), but there is a risk that only a few people would compete for it and it wouldn't really work that well.

There are also lots of things you can tweak in there, or different elements you can add or remove. For example one thing that might be interesting to add is a bit of a push your luck element to holding the amulet, by either allowing/requiring the amulet holder to wager some amount of amulet points on each game they play (if they lose then they those points get subtracted from the points they take from the amulet, if they win point get added to the amulet). Or making it so that if someone loses the amulet they don't get the full amount of points attached to the amulet added to their score, whereas if they give it up voluntarily they do. These elements shouldn't discourage someone from playing as they can always give up the amulet voluntarily and then try to win it back again by playing more.

storeroom leaflet · 2015-02-26 04:53:58

I'm with Jere on revealing amulets during the game. I think it would be much cooler to know while you are playing and know that your opponent also knows. It does seem like it would make collusion harder though if it were hidden.

jere · 2015-02-26 12:15:55

I'm not sure on that myself. I keep going back and forth. As long as you encounter the amulet often enough (and keep getting motivated to play your best), I guess afterwards might be better. If I play 30 games and never seen an amulet, I'd probably get pretty bored. I know you don't want to have to cast 1000 of these things, so maybe you consider having a good number of cash-only (like $10) amulets.

Also, you were probably planning this, but it'd be good to see after a game if you had a chance at winning the amulet, but lost it.

Dan_Dan84 · 2015-02-26 13:48:06

Re: revealing the amulet

Is it possible to have it both ways? We want to discourage "game-jumping," but we also want to encourage excitement: "Whoa, I'm playing for a shot at a gold amulet!"

Could the amulet be revealed at a certain point during the game? Say, after the nth round? And/or after a player is down to x coins?

I think Storeroom's idea is also interesting. It would just need to be explained simply, so that the idea could be picked up quickly.

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-26 19:35:05

Storeroom... I read this a few times and have a slight grasp of it, but I'm having trouble seeing how it would stop someone with 20 accomplice accounts from having an advantage.

Every time you win while holding the amulet, you get the stake points that are attached to it and the total points on it go up (so the next stake you'll win will go up too). When you finally lose, you get all those built-up points.

Amulet starts out with 100. I win. I get 100. Amulet goes up to 200.

I win again, I get 100 again, Amulet goes up to 300.

I win again, I get 150, Amulet goes up to 450.

I win again, I get 225, Amulet goes up to 675.

I lose, I get 675 points, the amulet passes to someone else, and now has 338 points in it.

My total points are 675 + 225 +150 + 100 + 100 = 1250

Or do I have that wrong? Maybe I don't get points each time I win, but only get all the points in the amulet when I finally drop it. But you said:

If you win you'll get x number of points and keep the amulet, if you lose you'll get y points and lose the amulet

Maybe I only get 675. Still, winning a lot before dropping it benefits me.

Anyway, as long as winning while holding the amulet is good, I'm motivated to make a bunch of accomplice accounts that I can win against, right?

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-26 20:11:13

I don't know that I want to change the WHOLE game too much during the contest.

Remember, this will be the very first taste of the game for 1000s of new players. So, turning on some huge leave penalty for all games doesn't seem right.

Amulet hopping will happen. If you want an amulet, and that's your goal, then every second you spend playing a non-amulet game is a wasted second. Granted, hopping has a cost of 6 coins, but if you're playing penny games looking for an amulet, it would be worth it. Even at a fixed stake of 25 cents, hopping costs less than 2 cents. I can imagine a bunch of people putting in $10. That's enough to cover 500 hops. Okay, they can do this if they want to. But imagine the experience on the other end for a brand new player who is NOT amulet hopping. Even worse for a new player is someone who wins 8 coins and then leaves (just enough to cover the leave penalty).

Even if amulets are hidden to non-amulet holders, any other hints, like an extra delay before joining the game, will be used to sniff out amulet games. And we'd need join delays to stop collusion. And I wouldn't want to add join delays to ALL games (again, that would suck for new players).

The cool thing about Steal Real Money is that it measured and rewarded "normal" behavior in the game. It didn't use an outside metric like "who has the most pitbulls," which would have skewed behavior.

The problem with measuring normal behavior and attaching an outside reward is that it is vulnerable to collusion.

The cool thing about CM is that it isn't vulnerable to collusion at all in its natural state. In this regard, it's unlike TCD, where collusion could give you a large advantage. So, Steal Real Money just amplified the collusion tendency that was already there... it didn't create a new one.

Anyway, clearly EVERY game can't be an amulet game, because that's vulnerable to collusion. It also doesn't solve hopping, because some amulets would be more sought-after than others.

Even flagging games at random as being amulet games doesn't stop collusion (just have two colluding accounts play tons of game---this would ensure that they get lots of amulet games).

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-26 22:13:51

Went outside and stared at the sky for a few minutes... Aha!

So, clearly amulets have to be hidden during games to non-amulet holders. That means no join delay or anything, and no special stakes. Also, it means Josh's suggestion of no huge leave penalty for amulet games. The last one in the game, or whoever takes all the chips, gets the amulet. Score for an amulet based on number of games played while holding it (can you hold it more than once? Sure, why not?)

So, how do you prevent collusion to boost your amulet win count?

Instead of a random join delay, there needs to be a random display delay, where each game appears on each player's game list (and is joinable) after a slightly different amount of time. This should be the way it works anyway, for all games, to increase anonymity.... or maybe just for amulet games (don't want to add extra delays, generally).

Let's say the max appearance delay is 30 seconds.

Each player is permanently assigned a random number between 0 and 30.

Each new game is assigned a random number between 0 and 30.

When a player asks for the game list, for each game, their number is added to that game's number, mod 30. If the game is older than that number of seconds, the game is shown to them and is joinable. If not, the game is hidden and cannot be joined.

This effectively assigns each player a random delay for each new game that is created. These delays are always in the same order, in a modular loop, but no player has the advantage of seeing all games before other players.

This can be exploited with many accounts (because they'll all be spread out in the mod space, so one of them will have a low delay for any game). But if you have multiple accounts hammering on JOIN for a given stake level, and a bunch of them fall through because their delays aren't up, they're going to create their own games at that stake level and end up joining each other (especially if the display delay only applies to amulet games---spamming JOIN from multiple accounts is just going to get those accounts instantly matched against each other).

Also, we can make this as hard as we want by increasing the max display delay. For example, it could be 10 minutes. The trade-off is that the amulet holder will likely wait longer to find an opponent, but they've got a hot potato anyway, so they can wait a bit.

This makes collusion to rack amulet wins much harder than simply picking one accomplice account and joining the right stake at the right moment

jere · 2015-02-27 01:00:27

So, clearly amulets have to be hidden during games to non-amulet holders. That means no join delay or anything, and no special stakes.

I missed it. How does having all "contest" games (potential for amulet) at a set stake reveal anything?

The delay stuff you're describing sounds good, but you seem to lose a lot of collusion busting when you let people pick their stakes. If I have an amulet and I do my collusion at the $23.45 level (especially if I do at an odd time like 1am PST), I'm probably not going to get matched with anyone else. And I'll make certain by opening the game with my non-amulet holder. The amulet holder doesn't join until that game pops up and there is almost 0% chance it's a rando. The only way I see this failing is if someone intentionally watches that stake, gets lucky with a low display delay (sees it before Mr. Amulet), makes the same stake, and then Amulet happens to see that game before the other one. Sounds outlandish.

On the other hand, if you put everything at 10c, the collusion is only reliable if nobody else is on the game at all.

Also, I'm not sure you've explained what happens when we both open the $23.45 game simultaneously. They'd never join?

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-27 02:21:43

How did I end up with the smartest players in the world playing my game?

:-)

I felt like if amulet games were at a set stake (kinda like tournaments, with an always-there stake button), you'd often join that stake and be disappointed, or people would all be spamming that stake, and it would change player behavior too much. Maybe you're a new player and you're playing nothing but penny games. Maybe you're Judge Doorman and are bored even by ten dollar games. This is "normal" player behavior. But everyone who cared about the amulets would be playing nothing but 10-cent games for a whole week.

You're right about high stakes making it easy to join with your accomplice, even with a substantial display delay. And people using accomplices late at night would have a big advantage too. Even fixed stake doesn't really help much at a time when everyone else is asleep.

Yeah, with the display delay, if two people started a $23.45 game at the same time, they'd never join. One would start and wait for a joiner. That game would exist with one slot empty. The second player would go to start one, but check for an open one first, and not see the existing one because of the display delay, and thus start a second game with one slot empty at the same stake. They'd both continue waiting.

And I was suggesting that non-amulet games would have no display delay. So of course the amulet holder would just insta-join the game of their non-amulet-holding accomplice.... sheeeesh!

And if an "amulet" game could only be created by the amulet holder, you'd have all the rest of the players never creating games.

And if you said, "Server gathers X people who want to play a game at this stake before finally picking one to let join at random," someone would just use X accomplice accounts.

Rolling back here a bit....

Is there no way to uniquify accounts? Clearly credit card numbers don't work, because of ubiquitous throw-away numbers from gift cards.

What about phone numbers? I do have an auto-dialer API that can call you and deliver a unique code.

Maybe it's easy to create dummy phone numbers now through GoogleVoice...

Truly uniquifying accounts in a non-intrusive way (everyone fax me your driver's license!) seems like a dead end.

jere · 2015-02-27 03:14:22

If I run into one those smart players you're talking about, I'll point them here.

Re: uniquifying, Having seen people complain about the existing, tiny barriers to entry (entering your CC, deposit fee), I definitely wouldn't add any additional friction. Anyway, it still doesn't stop a group of people from working together.

Basically, I think the fixed stake thing with delay (for everyone) is good enough and you shouldn't lose sleep over it. Hard to predict what turnout you will see, but Steal Real Money got 800+ people on the last today. With several hundred people playing everyday, with all of them going into the same bucket, colluding will be a losing proposition, not to mention a huge hassle.

Cobblestone · 2015-02-27 03:29:11

I have to apologize, I haven't read absolutely everything in this thread... sorry if this is way off here, but reading your last few posts gave me an idea:

What if the person with the amulet can't make games? The amulet player doesn't see a list of games and only has a join button, and the game they join is chosen randomly. Also, once they join, the stake changes from the dollar value to the amulet. So amulet matches are random and the amulet is at stake instead of money. I guess an amulet match in this case would need to go to zero? I haven't really thought that part out.

This doesn't really solve the collusion problem entirely for when there are no games. Maybe if you made amulet matches happen only when there are 2-3 games available, that would help.

Last edited by Cobblestone (2015-02-27 03:29:36)

Dan_Dan84 · 2015-02-27 03:40:55

Yeesh, this certainly is tricky!

I like the amulet idea, but every time we turn around, we realize there's another chance for collusion (or to change player behaviour in such a way that new players won't get to experience the actual core game properly).

I went to the Cordial Minuet teaser page and had a look around, just to get any ideas from there. Short of gifting players with marrow from the left leg of a wolf and a case of St. Lucia wood, I couldn't see much to exploit from there. Except...

I haven't thought this through at all, but Scrabble tiles appear prominently in both the trailer and the teaser page. Could they somehow be used? Of course, we don't want new players thinking Cordial Minuet is some kind of word game...

storeroom leaflet · 2015-02-27 04:02:35

Jason: Under my system you only get the points attached to the amulet once you drop it (or at the end of the promotion) so in your example you only have 675 points. The only colluding behaviour this is designed to deal with is throwing games, it does this by trying to make a pair of colluding players indifferent about the outcome of their game. So for example two colluding players are playing and the amulet has 600 points, if the amulet holder wins they end up with 900 point in the amulet (or 750 taking my proposed adjsutment), if they lose their opponent ends up with only 300 points, but the original holder has 600 points, etiher way they have 900 points between them (points on the amulet give more chance of winning more later though which is why I proposed the adjustment of the amulet holder only getting 25% added to the amulet).

Two players are still motivated to collude to get into an amulet game together in this system, but this has to be dealt with by other means as it is always good for players to be in amulet games. This was the reason I suggested having multiple amulets at different fixed stakes, but it would have to be combined with something like your random display time idea to avoid players controlling match ups. The reason I think it is still good to try to avoid incentivising game throwing is that there's going to be no way to stop players from working out they are playing each other (they could just send each screenshots of their board). The main downside I see to my proposal is that you basically have to have the prize pool be mostly cash (how else to make prizes proportional to points?)

joshwithguitar · 2015-02-27 09:52:46

Are there ways to check to see if a card being used is a gift card? Perhaps address verification? Do gift cards have addresses? If so you could just not allow them or at require that people using them provide additional identity verification.

I think it will be quite hard to prevent someone with multiple accounts getting an advantage without unwanted side effects like restricting the price range of amulet games. So perhaps it is best just to make find methods of making it prohibitively difficult.

storeroom leaflet · 2015-02-27 11:59:33

Unique accounts stop someone from getting 100 bots colluding, but it doesn't stop a group of 10 friends doing so.

Also I really think that you need different amulets for different stakes rather than one that the amulet holder gets to choose the stakes for, as such an amulet would probably get stuck at some stake anyway (e.g. 1c to find weaker opposition or $20 to keep the player pool small).

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-27 22:19:49

A few things have become clear:

Amulet games can't be marked as such for non-amulet holders because it changes player behavior too much. They can't be marked on the game list, because then players would be refreshing waiting for nothing but amulet games. They can't be marked once you join a game because then people would dump non-amulet games shortly after joining (to go back to the list and try joining a different game, hoping that it's an amulet game).

Of course, the amulet holder would know that they have the amulet. Without this piece, the contest wouldn't be very exciting or interesting.

We can't let the amulet holder name any stakes they want, because they could use high stakes to guarantee that their accomplice account joins their game.

Having one fixed stake for all amulets would change player behavior too much (no one would play other stake games at all).

We could have 36 different fixed stakes, with each amulet getting a different stake. The problem with this is that a given stake would be "set" by the amulet holder creating a game. This means that non-amulet holders would never want to create their own games. They'd always be trying to join games matching one of the 36 known stakes. (This would change player behavior too much, with everyone joining games and no one creating non-amulet games).

If the amulet holders could not create games and could only join them, then all non-amulet holders would never want to join games---they'd all be creating them---so that would change player behavior too much also.

If the stakes were confined into a range (say, anything under $2), then anyone who wanted an amulet would never play games outside of that range.

CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

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Re: Thoughts on a Launch Contest

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