Recently active topics in Hubdub tagged with fun

Having 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.

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