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EMPLOYEE
Have we become too concerned about gaming ?
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
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
I’m frustrated
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Inappropriate?Patrick...
You bring some valid points. However, I think there is a bigger underlying issue here. The integrity of the game is key for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, in order to monetize the site, which I would think is key for the HD guys, you need people to play as it is all about eyeballs. While I see how you feel, I think you are the exception as it relates to competition. Sure, we all want to compete against ourselves, but, IMO, the point of competition is to win. If, however, there is obvious cheating, it does discourage me. I love the community aspect of HD, hence the reason I started the forums to help accelerate the growth of the community. Granted, I think there is a bit of overreaction with the changes, but part of being in beta is trying things and seeing what works and what doesn't work.
I am pretty confident the HD team will make the appropriate changes during the beta and will implement several fail-safes to protect the overall integrity of the game.
I’m confident all will work out in the end
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Inappropriate?I think there's probably a fair amount of gaming going on, it's just too easy to do at this point. As the number of participants grows and the markets respond faster there will be less of it.
I hadn't _really_ been thinking of HD as a beta, but of course it is. Does that mean we lose all our H$ when the site goes live? -
Inappropriate?Really interesting discussion and points. In many ways Hubdub is a game. However it is one in which we collectively can set the rules. What we always wanted to do was create a game that identified people that were very good a predicting future events (including predicting price movements). Currently there are some ways for users to be succesful without being good at that, which we would define as gaming the system. If gaming becomes too prevalent then it negatively affects everyone. Therefore we are working on a bunch of ways to try to reduce it.
As you've identified above the 12 hour rule is really a band aid fix. We are actually working on a long term solution which has three elements:
(1) Power user vetting - Power users get to vote up/down new questions before they open for trading. If a question gets three down votes then the question is voided and sent back to the creator (who can edit and re-submit). Three up votes opens it to trading. Non-power users can become a power user by successfully creating 5 questions which go through first time.
(2) Weekly leaderboards - Users are ranked on their % position improvement in the past week. Therefore each week everyone starts of level.
(3) Friend leaderboards - Users can select who they want to compete against. Think another user is gaming the system, then don't include him/her on your personal leaderboard. (We are really excited about this feature)
I’m excited
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this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Nigel...some very good ideas and they sound promising. I have to say I am impressed by how much you truly want the community to have input on the site as it grows. Might I suggest multiple leader boards, similar to how I am running the contest on the forum where there will be weekly as well as monthly competitions? Overall, I am excited about where things are heading!
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Inappropriate?I agree almost entirely with InfernalMachine - but tarheelv is correct that the "leaderboard" does attract a lot of users and fire up the competitive juices. I am not sure who suggested it, but RESETTING the leaderboard every week or so, so that everyone begins anew is a very good suggestion. People with large pocketbooks can beat up many others with it. Resetting the leaderboard regularly would solve that problem. -
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Inappropriate?I don't know about resetting the leaderboard if, by that, you mean restting all users to some arbitrary number of H$. A lot of you guys are working quite hard to accumulate your H$ (unlike me who just got lucky and stumbled across a sure thing that was at a very low percentage) and I'd hate to think all that hard work would go to waste.
Also, folks with large pocketbooks can screw up too as my recent performance proves.
I’m just lucky
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Inappropriate?Sooner or later some users will have phenomenal bucks (Bill Gates/Warren Buffet type bucks) that will render the leader board pretty meaningless. By resetting, you recharge the board and the competition. Hubdub could always track performance on leaderboards just like music, for example - anaverageamerican has been in the top 20 for 10 weeks!
1 person says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Well, yes and no, as I found out today. Having doubled my cash yesterday I had my sights set on hitting the 60 K mark (only 50% increase). But not so easy at all. Large cash does not scale up from medium cash strategies because you easily swamp a market, which is rarely what you want. You want lots more cash out there than you're putting into a question so you can bet without the odds skyrocketing and so that if you're holding several bets then cashing out one does not overly devalue the rest. In one bet I made today, putting 4K on a 60-40 choice sent the odds up to 85-15 which means a maximum return of 17% on investment. If I'd bet $100,m I'd be looking at 67%. And it's hard to know in advance what a large bet will do to the odds without a calculator widget on the bet page. I think it's more about betting in many markets, but that makes it hard to keep up with the moment to moment action, and you also run out of questions you know enough to be betting on. The nice thing is that you don't run out of money as quickly, but even that has its value - you learn to make hard quick decisions about what to drop in order to move money into a better opportunity. Today I didn't lose much on the stock market questions in the long run, thanks to the NASDAQ and Google, but in the DOW I just gave money away to my rivals. That said, if the DOW had closed up, I'd have passed $60K just on those winnings (I was buying UP at 5 and 10% all afternoon).
I don't think they're resetting the cash amount though. They're making the leaderboard based on percent growth, and resetting the board weekly. For now the net cash remains as is.
I’m confused
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Inappropriate?Oh whow, well that was something that happened with my UEFA Cup questions.
http://www.hubdub.com/e/Market/UEFA_C...
http://www.hubdub.com/e/Market/UEFA_C...
http://www.hubdub.com/e/Market/UEFA_C...
Those are just examples how the markets have been manipulated. I was lucky ( seems like a dozen others on the leadersboard ), recognized what happened and took advantage ( went from 25k to 40k ).
I doubt that it's necessary to mention how annoying this is. I invested quite some time in good predictions and playing the game the way it was meant to be. But neither is there anything like a real developing poll / market, nor is it entertaining to match with the elite as there isn't any real elite.
So this was probably my last day at hubdub. I don't see a point in creating questions or in evaluating probabilities when all that really matters is the cash in button at the right time. -
Inappropriate?Hi Golwar,
I think these were some of the markets that suspended after the kick-off. It is fair to say that we've been fairly overwhelmed in the sport category. It generates a huge number of short term markets (although the nice thing is that settlement is generally very clear).
This week we are looking at how we should re-deploy our resources to better support the sports markets. Additionally, I would be keen to offer more in-running events (that is advertised in-running events rather than accidental!)
Hopefully you will see an improvement over the next week. -
Inappropriate?No, that wasn't related to wrong set settlement dates. I made some errors there, but donal corrected everything in time.
It's obvious that those question have been manipulated pre-match and all of them at the same time and with the same strategy. -
Inappropriate?I really appreciate the dialog taking place here.
To me it is interesting, engaging, lively and fun.
Looking forward to a great rollout of hubdub2 for
grins and hopefully hucks ;-) -
Inappropriate?1. jersjusttrolling hd$323,753
2. pics4d hd$280,417
If you guys wouldn't be so friendly I'd have left hubdub meanwhile.
Well, the truth is that I abandoned playing anyways, but I'll keep an eye on the development here ;) -
Inappropriate?Imho good ideas. I particularly like the power user idea, because it could significantly reduce duplicat markets. Which in turn would create more volume in the fewer existing markets, which would make gambling less attractive.
Another couple of ideas (already brought foreward elsewhere):
- tax the cash with e.g. 1% per day
- a "Tobin tax" of .1 to 1% on all transactions -
Inappropriate?Nice to see calm discussions prevailing. A very mature bunch on Hubdub.
I have to agree with tarheelv that integrity is key. Gamers must be stopped or at least a serious attempt made to do so! The power users and other ideas should help, time will tell.
No matter what protective systems are put in place Obvious gamers to the system should be quickly brought to justice by the Hubdub team. It is crucial to the integrity of the game to punish obvious cheaters quickly and harshly.
I have never received a clear answer as to why the Hubdub team will not drop the hammer on cheaters, is it a legal question? I doubt this site will ever be allowed to use real money, with real payouts so legal issues should not matter. Is it an ethical question? Is it a disagreement between Hubdubs creators?
Maybe we will never know.
Although I have helped to conceive some of the new rules that have been put in place and I am constantly "challenging" the system, I think it is important to Hubdub that we do not get to bogged down with rules etcetera. As I have stated before the Hubdub team needs to worry most about how to make money or this site will not last.
I’m confident
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Inappropriate?Just to follow up on the gamers discussion. Keeping Hubdub really challenging is one of our top priorities. If there is a means to game your way to the top of the leader board then that destroys the challenge and makes the site dull.
Over the past couple of weeks we have really tightened the system to reduce gaming (some of you will remember when you could create a 50/50 question at 1% odds, bet big on the Yes and then cash out before the void). There are still a few loop holes in the system that we are working on.
We've really focused on fixing the system rather than trying to catch and punish individual gamers (although we have done that as well).
I guess you could compare us to a ship that went to sea with a few holes in the hull. The choice is to either patch up the ship or to bail the water. We've chosen to primarily focus on patching up the ship.
While we are hesitant about resetting the leaderboard, what we do want to do is to re-focus the leader boards on weekly and monthly performance therefore users that have gained massive wealth (by fair means or foul) have no great advantage. In fact some of you have noted that it can be challenging to get a high % growth if you have a lot of cash.
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this answers the question
EMPLOYEE
EMPLOYEE