Recently active topics in Hubdub tagged with competition
-
9 Replies
Brand New Leaderboards Live!
Show more... ...Show lessHey everyone, we're very pleased to announce the arrival of the new Weekly % Gain leaderboards, and a reset Quarterly Gain leaderboard. Now, hopefully, more of you can enjoy the fame, fortune, luxurious lifestyle and movie offers that come with being a top Hubdubber! Well, Hubdub fame, H$ fortune, and if we ever make a Hubdub movie we promise to cast you as yourself.Reply to this discussion
Every Monday morning a new week begins, and with it the opportunity to maximize your weekly % gain for that week. Do well and your success will be recorded historically for all to see.
The Quarterly gain and All time leaderboards are still there, but now you can view any page and jump right to yours easily. This will let you compete with those around you and clamber to the top one position at a time.
Of course, all are available for the whole site or for just you and your friends.
If you're a dedicated Hubdubber but haven't made it to the top 20 yet now is your chance. Enjoy and good luck!
Tom
Destry (Official Rep)
last replied
on April 03, 2008 05:56
-
126 Replies
Leaderboard end-of-quarter changes
Show more... ...Show lessHi everyone, there's a big event in the Hubdub calendar coming up (quarter end) and I wanted to get your feedback on our suggested leaderboard changes that will come into effect then.Reply to this discussion
There are a number of problems with the current situation.
1. New users are discouraged from joining Hubdub by the dominance of the leading players. Fewer users motivated to compete is bad for everyone.
2. The large amounts of cash at the disposal of some Hubdubbers makes it easy for them to move markets significantly. This is bad for them and everyone else, and reduces the accuracy of the site's forecasts.
3. Excessively large amounts of wealth become increasingly difficult to manage.
4. The challenge of a level playing field for users at all levels to compete on skill alone is removed by vast differences in worth. We want to make Hubdub as fun and exciting as possible for everyone.
We're eager to take the opportunity of the end of Hubdub's first quarter to create a solution which solves these problems, but which also:
i) Recognizes the incredible achievements to date of our top predictors, the time they have spent nursing their portfolios and the skill they have demonstrated at predicting
ii) Creates a weekly incentive to, on some level, 'start over' if you had a bad week previously
Here's our proposed solution.
a) The leaderboards we will have are:
- All Time Earnings (the combined gains a user has ever made in any quarter determines their position here)
- Quarterly Gains (as now: the gain made by users in the current quarter) [also available historically, e.g. for Q1 2008 too]
- Weekly Relative Gain (all users ranked by the percentage increase of their net worth since the start of the week)
The most emphasis will be given to Weekly Relative Gain, to encourage weekly play and to allow users at all wealth-levels to compete head to head.
b) All leaderboards will have multiple pages allowing you to browse everyone's position, and jump to your own page so you can compete with those around you.
c) We cannot allow users' wealth to continue to grow indefinitely over months and years. The problems we have now (discouragement of new users, massive market movement, difficult portfolio management) will only increase over time if we do. Quarter end seems an appropriate time to recognize and reward our top performers, but scale back everyone's wealth in a fair and reasonable way. We didn't want to scale everyone to the same amount, because better predictors have earned their right to a head start next quarter. Instead, we're proposing to scale back cash and predictions (proportionately) in the following bands:
Users with quarterly gain 20k or more will begin Q2 with 20k (combined cash and predictions)
Users with quarterly gain 5k or more (and less than 20k) will begin Q2 with 5k (combined cash and predictions)
Users with quarterly gain 2k or more (and less than 5k) will begin Q2 with 2k (combined cash and predictions)
Users with quarterly gain of less than 2k will begin Q2 with 1k (combined cash and predictions)
Users' profiles will be awarded an icon show which band they started in that they'll keep for the rest of the quarter.
We know this rescaling could be contentious. We've worked hard to come up with a solution that's fair to everybody, and is in the interests of the Hubdub community as a whole.
For our top predictors, rescaling doesn't penalize the skill you've shown. It allows you to prove your prowess again, against Hubdubbers of similar caliber from the same start point. I imagine the excitement to see who emerges top early on from you 20k'ers will be immense! And remember, your progress to date will put you top of the All Time Leaderboard and the Q1 historic leaderboard right away, so Hubdub immortality is yours. You can continue to build on your All Time Leaderboard position in successive quarters. In future, you may also be able to 'pimp your profile' by buying stuff with the cash represented on the All Time Leaderboard.
For our new predictors, it will give you a chance to make your mark on Hubdub right away and not be at the severe disadvantage that currently exists.
And for those of us in between, we'll be able to have weekly face-offs no matter what our worth is on the relative leaderboards.
Please let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions on the above. We're open to ideas for the fun icon titles given to users in each band, no modesty necessary :)
Tom
Tom Griffiths (Official Rep)
last replied
on March 21, 2008 13:06
-
18 Replies
Have we become too concerned about gaming ?
Show more... ...Show lessHaving thought for a bit about the 12 hour freezes on, first, betting on your own question and, now, cashing out on new questions, I think there is a danger of giving way too much oil to this squeaky wheel.Reply to this question
First off, both seem like band-aid solutions. The cashing out freeze is like putting a band-aid on a band-aid. The question creator isn't allowed to bet anyway in the first 12 hours, so the freeze is actually ONLY to stop people who have broken the explicit HD rules on having more than 1 account, or who collude in secret with another member to game a market.
Now wouldn't it be far more useful to deal with this through flagging such behaviour in the server logs and kicking them out of HD, rather than changing the markets arbitrarily (I mean, why 12 hours; why not 24; why not 1 or 2?) in a way that harms the strategies of the majority of rule-abiding players, and which hampers the market-crucial corrective contribution of short-term investors (they're not betting on the outcome, but rather on whether the market correctly mirrors the realistic odds - they in fact are your best tool in correcting the market from bad initial odds and weird perturbations) as explained beautifully by doloop elsewhere in this forum?
But it's more than just that. Just how important is preventing gaming? How much admin and editor time, as well as forum space, is being allocated to this concern at the expense of all the other aspects of HD (growing the company, enticing new members, server bandwidth into the future, design improvements, bug squashing, new and improved functionality, building a community, improving the settled/voided ratio of questions, documentation, etc.)?
Here's my take, for what it's worth. I don't care about gaming all that much. I expect a certain amount of it - any leaderboard on any online game always has ridiculous high scores that are initially discouraging but later just silly and dismissable. You compete first and foremost against yourself. You know if you're impressed with your own achievements, if you killed that question or those Super Bowl questions. And the enjoyment of the game is not really about being on the top of the leaderboard (although its fun to see if you can make it). It has got to be in whether or not you enjoy participating in the markets, in whether you actually enjoy predicting things competitively here, in whether or not you enjoy coming to the HD site and participating in the community, making a few extra hucks ;-) at the expense of your rivals, friendly or hated, honest or cheaters.
As for competition, compete against the person ten above you in the leaderboard. Wait you say, I'm in 567th place and can only see the top 20. Precisely. That's what I want fixed first, that and other "game" related issues, not more and more restrictions on legitimate players and endless discussions about irrelevant "gamers".
Comments? Flames?
Patrick
Nigel Eccles (Official Rep)
last replied
on February 15, 2008 11:00
Loading Profile...


EMPLOYEE