Thoughts on a Launch Contest

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-20 21:00:09

I'm trying to come up with some kind of contest to promote the launch of the game.

Those of you who played The Castle Doctrine may remember the Steal Real Money contest that I held the week before launch:

http://thecastledoctrine.net/stealRealMoneyContest.php

This worked well because it attracted both existing players AND brand new players. There was no entry fee (beside buying the game), so even new players felt like they had a shot at winning.

One problem that I didn't discuss too much at the time is how an outside prize really motivates cross-account collaboration and cheating. In the case of the TCD contest, people were motivated to build up huge bounties on one account and then "dump" the bounty in their main account by dying. If they waited until the last minute to dump the bounty, then the money was safe from being stolen by other players, and their main account could suddenly jump to the top of the list. People were also motivated to camp in their houses right at the end. I have a foggy memory of instituting emergency "house kicking" right at the end to keep things fair. Or maybe I made the robbery time limit more strict to prevent robber camping.

The point is, these issues came up. It sucks to have winners of a contest who may have exploited some loophole to give themselves an unfair advantage.

I've thought about holding some kind of tournament with a big outside prize, but it feels like a tournament would scare away new players "I don't have a chance, so why bother?" It also seems like an entry fee is necessary to prevent a tournament from being exploited by multiple accounts. If it's free to enter, you could pool thousands of accounts together and have them all lose to one account, causing that account to win the tournament. Entry fees make this prohibitively expensive (especially combined with a tournament structure that blocks one account from winning too much from another account). BUT, an entry fee would make it a no-go for brand new players. Also, if the entry fee is way smaller than the prize, then multi-account exploits become more attractive.

So, I'd like to just have an "open" contest over a week or something. Reward biggest profit ratios, biggest Elo jumps, most games played, most games won, I don't know.

The problem is that these are all easily exploitable with multiple accounts.

Been stuck on this for a while now...

shallow_depths · 2015-02-20 22:59:13

How about have your open contest, but then reward the top X players with an invitation to the exclusive winners tournament on the final day, which has the more lucrative prizes. That one could even be knockout-style with controlled matchups, though I guess that's an issue with multiple timezones etc.

joshwithguitar · 2015-02-20 23:23:10

Hmm, rewarding any of the leaderboard items could be problematic:

ELO gained: If this is going to happen I'm just going to start losing a few 1c games... there is no way I will win this from where I am on the board and it would be easy for me to bounce up from a low ELO.

Profit Ratio: Well, this one encourages stopping playing after a big win and is also extremely open to exploitation. If someone was to stop playing after one win they would have an infinite ratio.

Most games played: Well, this one will surely go to someone who has made a bot, so possibly Clock Form, although to make a bot that just plays starts games and then leaves would be very easy and surely win this (as long as it was the only one doing it).

Most Games Won: is interesting but would probably go to a bot as well as there should hopefully be lots of new inexperienced players who will still regularly lose to a bot. Also, if you have two bots playing each other all of the time one always has to win.

Total profit: Obviously gives a massive advantage to those with a big bankroll.

So... I'm thinking just an extended tournament under your current system would be easiest with some extra money added to the prize pool. It is hard to think of anything as cool as the TCD Steal Real Money comp for this game. You could also possibly add a tournament ELO in which everyone starts the same and then give a prize to whoever is on top at the end.

storeroom leaflet · 2015-02-20 23:56:36

hmmm... tough one. To prevent motivating collusion or rewarding special tournament skills, you would really want to avoid non-zero sum interactions. Standard tournament prize structures tend to have a lot of non-zero sum interactions as whoever is closer to the the big prize money tends to have more at stake (poker tournaments are actually an exception here, where it actually the short stacks who have more at stake due to the potential to survive into the money). Off the top of my head I can ony think of two ways of avoiding this:
1. Have prizes proportional to winnings (unworkable as it requires negative prizes, it would just be everyone playing at higher stakes)
2. Have a knockout tournament (actually doesn't require match-making, but does require exactly 2^n players which is rather awkward).

My intuition is also that there aren't really significantly different ways of avoiding zero-sum interactions altogether. You need expected payoffs to be proportional to coins won each round, and it doesn't look like there's another way of doing that. There may be approximations around that avoid the issues with the above tournaments without opening the door too wide to collusion. For instance a Swiss system only requires an even number of players and approximates a knock-out, though you likely will have people with a shot at prize money playing people without such a shot in the final round (though a swiss requires match-making). Maybe a tournament where game entries double after a certain period of time might be another such approximation but I'd have to think about the details and their implications.

Last edited by storeroom leaflet (2015-02-20 23:57:42)

jere · 2015-02-21 00:23:54

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.

In the case of the TCD contest, people were motivated to build up huge bounties on one account and then "dump" the bounty in their main account by dying.

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

storeroom leaflet · 2015-02-21 01:16:26

How about this: entry fee is e.g $11, $1 is tribute leaving $10 to play with. In this case there are n rounds, in each round the aim is to double your money (no tribute is taken from tournament games as it is already taken with the entry fee). After a certain period of time those players who have not yet reached the target amount are required to play games where at least one of them is playing for the remainder of the money they have to play with, until all players have either $0 or at least the target score, those who have reached the target amount by this point would only be allowed to play with the excess. Repeat until there are only two players, then they play games until one has all the money. A certain portion of the prize pool in later rounds can be divided among the players proportionally to the amount of tournament money they currently have.

This structure still allows players to decide how much risk to take on each game, allows players to leave games when they think they're beat, and doesn't require match-making. The only way to get an advantage with colluding here is to have an account lose as much as another gains, this could be profitable if there is an inflated prize pool, but no more than just entering multiple times would be. Also your expected gain in prize money will be proportional to the tournament money you win so skill in this tournament should be basically the same as skill in the main game.

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-21 02:31:43

Yeah, Jere, I was thinking of physical prizes here as well. There are no shortage of interesting occult items, for example....

Storeroom---this sounds like an interesting tournament structure. I'm really hoping to stay away from "tournament" for this promotion, though. It sounds way too intimidating to brand new players.

One idea that just came to me:

Call it "The $5000 Football" plan.

Maybe just one "football" that moves from player to player in the game.... you have to play frequently to keep it (at least X games every 12 hours), you know when you have it, but no one else knows that you have it (or maybe it shows up on the leaderboard). You have to play DIFFERENT people to keep it. Maybe when you have the football, you stop being able to join games against people that you've already beaten while holding the football (so you can't exploit a few accomplice accounts repeatedly)

Once you lose while holding the football, that's it, it's gone, and the person who beat you gets it.

And you WIN the big prize if, at the very end, you won the most games while holding the football (or won the most chips, so stakes don't matter, but clean-sweeps matter).

So, this encourages everyone to play a lot.

The person with the football wants to play a ton (to up their chips-won count while holding the football).

The others who haven't touched the football yet want to play a ton to increase their shot at playing the football-holder and winning it.

Seems like there needs to be some way to handle partial wins/losses where one player wins more chips. If a few chips change hands and one leaves, who won? Can you win the football by winning a few chips? Maybe you can only win it once you take at least 75 chips total (maybe across multiple games) from the football holder.

Maybe there could be a big prize for the longest streak with the football and ALSO a big prize for the player that ended that long streak. Other prizes for shorter streaks. This would give brand new players reason to try (they may have no chance at a long streak, but a good chance of sniping.)

Maybe you only hold it for 24 hours max. If you lose during that time, you lose it, if you hold it until the end, it's given to another random player. But a top player can't hold it all week that way...

Maybe there's more than one football traveling around at the same time. Maybe they each count for a different prize, with separate stats tracked for each one...

It seems exciting for this football to be traveling around in the game.... you never know when it might reach you.

Thoughts about this?

(Of course, it wouldn't be a football... an amulet or something more thematically appropriate... maybe it could even appear visually on the game screen).

.. · 2015-02-21 10:26:53

That football idea sounds pretty fun, in fact, maybe you could even have a system like that running all the time (but without large prizes). Holding the football becomes like an in-game achievement, similar to "I just beat judge doorman".

Maybe you only hold it for 24 hours max. If you lose during that time, you lose it, if you hold it until the end, it's given to another random player. But a top player can't hold it all week that way...

That shouldn't be necessary if you're required to keep playing games to keep it. You'll lose it soon enough.

Obviously, you need to be careful with requirements such as "you can only win it once you take at least 75 chips" which could be exploited by leaving, though requiring a significant victory definitely sounds good. At least if the person holding the trophy leaves the game, the game shouldn't count towards the the games they have to play to hold onto it. Of course anything they lose should still count towards their tally, so the regular leaving penalty might be enough?

jere · 2015-02-21 13:21:42

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?

jere · 2015-02-21 13:34:52

To summarize: what I'm suggesting is something closer to the TCD contest. You start out with a small amount of money (or, if lucky, a large amount) and have to build it up. The big difference is it's a lot easier to take money from a top player here than it was in TCD. I would expect high turnover, but that should be pretty exciting.

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-21 22:34:28

Yeah, Jere, the "luck" of being blessed with the football at the start is a problem. I wouldn't be legally allowed to do that randomly. Probably give it to the player with the highest Elo or something. There's also the idea of some wealthy player "buying" a football. Like, it costs $100, but if you win the most while holding it, you get $5000. So there could be a bunch being passed around.

I'm not totally clear on your mote idea. Yeah, I could imagine "The first 1024" people who deposit after time X getting one (that counts as a contest of skill, like the radio call-in contests). But what happens then? Do you pass it to someone else when you lose? Do you gather them by winning against someone? So, by winning against a lot of people, you could build up a bunch, and then get paid for them at the end? Or if you've built up 100 of them, and then you go up against someone who has one 50 of them, and you win, do you then have 150?

Anyway, in addition to each one being worth $2, we could have first, second, third, etc. places for the person who gathered the most of them. And along with the cash they'd get, they'd also win a physical keepsake prize.

Amping up the leave penalty makes sense to enforce binary win/loss for "special" games. But I do worry about changing the game skill too much.

Also, if you're holding a football (or footballs), and we amp up the leave penalty, it means that every game you play is winner take all until you drop it.

This seems pretty safe from a 2- or 3-account exploit. Yeah, you could get a lot of money by registering 100 accomplice accounts, but that would require 100 credit card numbers.

Would also need to figure out how to make this sound really exciting in one catch phrase. STEAL REAL MONEY is pretty tops. "$5000 Football" (or thematic equivalent) is also pretty inspiring sounding, even if in reality, it would suck for most players----it would still get them excited. Explaining this in a concise, exciting way is a bit harder...

One thing that I really like is the idea of handing out physical gold (been thinking about "medals" or "amulets" in gold, silver, copper, etc for a big tournament). Maybe tiny occult beads of some kind that are each 1/100 of an oz. So, instead of money "motes" there would be tokens that are actually worth real motes of gold that would be mailed to you. Maybe if you collect a lot of them during the contest, you can literally combine them into a larger, more interesting amulet.... like, 100 of them will get you a 1 oz amulet, or a ring or something.

By having a "first 500" limit, there could be nice hard limit on how much gold is at stake and how much mailing I would potentially be liable for.

That might be more exiting. WIN REAL GOLD or something like that. Get them blessed by The Order of the Golden Dawn or something.

Especially since so many games have "gold" in them... but never real gold.

joshwithguitar · 2015-02-21 23:08:18

Re:leaving penalties in football matches
I'd just have it so that if you leave a game while holding the football then you lose it to your opponent. And to win the football you have to take all of your opponents coins (or have them leave).

jere · 2015-02-21 23:22:34

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

But what happens then? Do you pass it to someone else when you lose? Do you gather them by winning against someone? So, by winning against a lot of people, you could build up a bunch, and then get paid for them at the end? Or if you've built up 100 of them, and then you go up against someone who has one 50 of them, and you win, do you then have 150?

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!

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-21 23:49:00

Hmm... yeah, this is getting close!

So... one thing with "winner take all" in terms of the golden tokens is this: they will snowball, and the snowballs will keep getting bigger. There's no way for a heap of 20 tokens to ever get split back up into two heaps of 10.

As Jere points out, people holding snowballs will become as conservative as the game lets them be. This was "fixed" in the original single-football idea by counting wins while holding the football, so you want to play as much as possible when you have it. Here, when you have one or many, you want to play as little as possible.... especially against people who have no golden tokens. Getting stuck in a game with a non-token-holder when you have tokens yourself is the worst. Nothing to gain, everything to lose.

One simpler idea is that when you lose, the winner gets half of your tokens. This would break up the snowballs, and be closer to what you're talking about, Jere, without being too complicated. If you have only one, you lose it, of course.

But still, aside from the "to keep my tokens" quota, there's no reason to play once you have a bunch. And the quota can't be THAT frequent, because people do need to sleep. Hmm... if it's just X games every 12 hours, it seems like someone would play dummy games against an accomplice account to fill their quota. Unless we go back to blocking you from seeing players that you've already played (for a single big football, that made sense, but with 1000 flying around, it will be hard to explain and for players to reason about).

What about... when you have tokens, you can only play people who don't have them... Then there are no snowballs at all... Two accomplices would just pass them back and forth.

claspa · 2015-02-22 00:46:08

I want my winning board in gold.

Similar like this:
WinningBoardt

(I just had Paint here, I am sure everyone of you could have done a better job)

jere · 2015-02-22 01:27:29

^

^^ Well you have to have snowballs. There's no excitement if no one walks away with more than $2. But the losing half idea is perfect. Even the best player here will lose a significant portion of games.

Preventing too many matches against the same people is probably your best bet. Confusing? Not if you implement the always-up, fixed stake like the in the last tournament. You join that and just have to wait until someone you haven't played joins. If someone you've played too many times is there waiting, you'll never know it.

I'd be careful with a 12 hour quota btw. If you work a day job, it's really easy to miss out on that window completely.

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-22 02:23:09

Well, figuring out what the rule should be is itself kinda confusing.

If you have no tokens, how many times can you try playing a given player with tokens? If you win, will they have a chance, ever, to play you again and win their tokens back?

In the tournament, you stopped seeing someone as an opponent once you had won $X or more from them.

You're suggesting a kind of "Play Token Game" that's separate... that you have to pick on purpose.

I was thinking of this as something that is happening more under the surface. Like, rewarding you for playing the regular game. Surprise! You just beat someone who had tokens and you got some.

Maybe a quota of games per day isn't needed to hold your tokens.

Maybe you can just decide to quit when you want to quit. Won't greed encourage people to press their luck to win more tokens, especially if they only stand to lose half of them?

'Cause that's the only reason you need to control repeat match-ups (so someone can't use an accomplice account to fill their quota).

One worry (without quotas) would be that 500 people would just keep their starting token and be happy with that, and then stop playing for fear of losing it.

Yeah, I dunno... it seems like this idea will encourage certain people to stop playing (or even with a quota, play as little as possible).

Seems more like bonuses should be un-lose-able once you get them.... and that there are only more to be gained by playing more. The original one-football idea had this, because just having the football meant nothing... the bonuses came from playing a lot while you had it (and though you could lose the football itself, you couldn't lose the win count that you had built up so far).

joshwithguitar · 2015-02-22 14:09:38

What if your final reward grew exponentially with the number of tokens you get? This would encourage people to play on up until the point in which they have all the tokens.
For instance, there are 16 tokens that are all worth 10c initially, but 2 are worth 20c, 3 40c, 4 80c etc and all 16 together are worth $6553.60.

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-23 04:08:03

This is an excellent idea!

One down-side: it limits the number of tokens that can be floating around. 16 is doable... 100 is not!

Unless there's some cap on the maximum number held by one person.

Also, if this was combined with "win one or lose one," where only one token is ever at risk even if you have more, I think people would be willing to keep playing and not turtle...

AnoHito · 2015-02-23 04:47:25

I think there would need to be more tokens available then the minimum required to max out your prize money anyway, because otherwise someone could decide to be a jerk and hold onto one or two tokens to prevent anyone from winning the maximum prize. If you said for example, you need 16 tokens to win the highest possible prize, and there were 64 available tokens, there would be a pretty small chance that you wouldn't give out at least one full prize.

But what I think would be cool, is if you had an open contest that used some sort of token system or something like that to select four players, and then put those four players in a special tournament to determine their final prize. I know you said you didn't want to do a traditional tournament because it would scare people off, but since everyone in the tournament would already be a winner, and the tournament would just be to determine how much they win, I wouldn't think something like that would be a problem. You could even record the tournament matches on the server and post them publicly (maybe even with commentary) to help publicize the game. Nate's story really did a lot to help expose this game to a wider audience, and doing something like this could help achieve a similar level of publicity.

Illuminati · 2015-02-23 12:58:55

(I haven't read the other comments on this yet so I don't know if this has already been said)

Maybe do what Clockform did, make weak bots and strong bots.
By this I mean adding like another menu part to the game something along the lines of "challenge the bots" once the player clicked on that then they would have a scale 1-10 on difficulty (10 being the hardest). Now, the easiest (1) would be like penny bets, and the most difficult would be set up so it would play for around 40-50$.
You would make the bots more and more difficult as the levels went on seeing as people may try to "farm" 50$ from bots.
Feel free to question this idea of it doesn't make sense.....

Last edited by Illuminati (2015-02-23 12:59:13)

joshwithguitar · 2015-02-23 14:08:41

One big problem with my idea above is that it is very vulnerable to collusion as it is about as far from zero-sum as you can get: player one wins 1 token so now has 13 = $409.6 gain while player 2 loses their one token = a 10c loss.

jere · 2015-02-23 15:14:35

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).

Seems more like bonuses should be un-lose-able once you get them.... and that there are only more to be gained by playing more.

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.

Last edited by jere (2015-02-23 15:28:47)

jasonrohrer · 2015-02-23 22:35:21

Hmm... we've kinda come full circle here. Hard nut to crack indeed.

Josh is right about collusion. Imagine someone posting in here... "I've got 13 tokens worth $819.20. If someone is willing to meet me online and lose 1 token to me, which is only worth 10 cents to you, I'll go up to $1638.40. I'll pay you $400 for that one 10-cent token."

AnoHito: part of why I don't want a tournament involved, not even as an end game, is that it seems to cater to the established players too much. I mean, who won every tournament? Jere! Or at least he placed very highly in every one. Most likely, he'd win the contest if there was a tournament involved. Or JA or BG... the usual suspects.

The one-football idea was interesting because someone like Jere might not ever get his hands on it (though he and everyone else would obviously try), and even if he did, he'd only hold it for one day max. Granted, that idea simply doesn't touch enough players. Though... given Chain World and A Game For Someone, I'm not sure that *actually touching* players matters as much as giving them something exciting to hope for and talk about. 3 people in the world actually played Chain World, but it is by far my "most popular game." 2x the Google results of TCD. Well, not more popular than Passage, but still, for a game that 3 people played...

And Steal Real Money also made it clear how important the STORY of the contest is.

I do like the idea of a Golden Ticket... trying to conceive of a skill-based version of that.

So... I'm coming back to the "one amulet" idea (or maybe a small handful of them). I think, if you were trying to rack as many wins as possible while holding it, it would be pretty hard to hold it for long, if one loss makes you drop it to someone else. If you could only hold it once during the week, and could only play each opponent once while holding it (to avoid racking wins against an accomplice), I think it would bounce around through lots of different people. Really, I can't imagine one person holding it for more than an hour if they were actually trying to rack wins and not just hold it to be a jerk. So that one amulet would touch at least 168 people during the week. Make that 6 amulets, and we're talking about 1000+ people touched (who actually held it).

Beyond that, there's all the people who had a chance to get the amulet. How many people can the amulet holder play in an hour? At least 6. So that's 7000 people who would have the excitement of at least one AMULET GAME during the contest.

If those six are half ounce gold amulets, this would cost $3600.

Maybe throw in some "lesser demon" amulets as well in silver and copper... those would be cheaper, and thus there could be even more than 6. I dunno... 36 of them, why not? 6 gold, 12 silver, 18 copper. 6000 people could hold one at some point during the week. If we have that many people playing during launch week, we're doing pretty good.

Maybe you can hold each amulet once, so after holding one, you can keep trying for others. But when they're actually awarded at the end, you can only win one, starting with gold and working down to the smaller ones. After you win one, you're taken out of the pool (like, if you won a silver, you couldn't win a copper too, even if you had more wins while holding that copper amulet than everyone else).

The game client could be modified to show the actual amulet on the screen during an amulet game, and the game could have a 200-coin penalty for leaving.

I've actually got some experience with lost wax casting (I made my wife's wedding band), and the UC Davis craft center has lost wax casting equipment---they have copper and silver there for purchase and say that I can bring my own gold. So I'd probably just make these myself, which means they'd be really unique and rustic and strange and spooky looking.

(Seems like, after launch week, something like this could continue on a longer scale.... like a whole month with an amulet passing around.... maybe over time, they could get bigger and better, add precious stones, etc. I guess the protocol should let the server specify the amulet image that the client will display...)

Professor Chin · 2015-02-24 13:28:31

I like the gold, silver, copper tokens idea very much!
Even more if you cast them yourself

Every Token game would be thrilling. Still after you loose a token you would be motivated to play again and try to have a chance to do better with another one.

CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

#1 2015-02-20 21:00:09

Thoughts on a Launch Contest

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