Leaderboards: the new solution

I have to laugh at seeing my not-so-popular-at-the-time Royal Bank of Hubdub idea resurfacing. To clarify: I called it Royal Bank of Hubdub as a "witticism" related to RBS (The Royal Bank of Scotland) and the national origin of HD.

It's weird to see people clamouring for wealth-redistribution and taxation in the game, given how phenomenally unpopular these ideas have become in real life. (BTW, that's an observation, not a criticism.)

Redistribution in itself seems to me a drastic move in a game - you're basically penalizing the successful, while a game usually does the opposite. If a game creates a situation in which a minority's success ruins the game experience for the majority, then perhaps, as Tom has hinted, there's a need for the admins to look at the mechanics of the markets to see if this phenomenon can be reduced or removed.

Taxation: this reminds me of that behavioural economics experiment where people are paired up and offered a total of $10. Person A proposes a split of the $10, and person B decides whether to accept that split or not. If the split is refused, neither A nor B gets any money. The results of the experiment seem to be that unless A offers very close to a 50-50 split, B will refuse - that is, they'd rather get nothing than let A get too much more than themselves, and secondly that A intuitively knows that, and very rarely offers a split that far from 50-50. We'd rather give up wealth than see someone else "unfairly" get ahead, I guess.

I think I tend to oppose these approaches, because they are counter to the incentives that are central to a game. However, I've always supported the possibility of all starting equal when the game comes out of beta - but that's because it's a one-time thing and mostly because it addresses the problem of loopholes in the early beta regarding gaming, market adjustment, late cash-in, etc.

The bank idea has its merits, but it's important to remember that investment in a bank is all about incentive or security. Security, in the sense of not getting robbed, is not an issue here, so far at least. So having a bank would mean that money placed in it would have to have some payout, so the wealth of depositors would increase. When I suggested the idea, I was really thinking about the bank lending money to people who go bust, and using the interest charged as a basis for the interest payed to investors. But I certainly didn't intend a bank as a means of forcing people to take their money out of market-wagering, and punish them if they want to have access to their earnings.

So taxation and banking only fit the bill if there's some use for the gathered money.

I'm far more in support of two other ideas. The first comes from the world of sports, and that's the concept of seasons regarding the status of teams in their league tables. Every season you all start with zero points, although it is a matter of pride if you won the championship last year, or came in first in your league (if that's a different thing). As a game, HD can clearly benefit from looking at how other games handle too much winning (imagine a (historically) top team if the league just kept adding all the individual seasons' points together).

And, although I personally am not all that interested or impressed by bling, I think that a way to meaningfully spend money is a great idea. It takes the cash out of play, and yet it has "value" - in fact, it should also have a resale value in terms of H$ (discounted 50%?) so that you can exchange it for cash if you wish. I can even envisage HD auctioning unique items. The challenge is to make these items actually desirable.

I'm not attacking anyone's personal ideas - just putting out my own thoughts about the various ideas that have come up, as a small piece of the larger discussion.

Banking sounds like a voluntary activity. To encourage people to put wealth in the bank, you can't excessively prevent them from taking their money out whenever they feel like it. If it's too costly or complex to remove one's deposit, deposits aren't worth making, which defeats the purpose of adding a bank to the game.

Selling bling (and buying it back at reduced price upon request) is a simpler and more fun way to have money parked, provided the bling is actually worth buying. The occasional reset to an even playing field idea is, to my view, best handled by using a mechanism from the sports season construct. (The Boston Celtics will not be claiming a communist plot when they find themselves with 0 points at the start of the 08-09 season.)

If there were a great demand for loans of H$ in the game, a bank is the way to go probably. But loans then encourage leveraged wagers - Bear Stearns, here we come.

Rohan, you can simply use questions in which the percentage is 90+ to invest in that you are certain of outcome. Will britany move in with hiedi, will obama drop out of race, there are good questions to put money into, tie it up for a month make 7-8% on it and still have access to it as well. I think the reason so many at the top were open to ideas is because they are very active on the site, enjoy what it has been, want to see it continue to grow. I think most of them enjoying the fact that there is no scaling or redistribution is they were okay with whatever it took to grow the site. I have different ideas of what it takes to make the site incredible.
I too could have large amounts of cash, but instead I look for questions and wager on them. With 240, 000 that is only 24 questions placing 10k on each of them. I have about 65k in the obama question, 30k in the pennsylvania primary outcome, another 30k in the which will end higher at end of month google or yahoo. Taking big risks make for good results, and if I lose a few of them well I stll got quite a bit of money. I have taken to wagering more on sports questions than I use to.
I love being an active member on this site. I like that the admins (most of them) are very open to suggestions, and they really care of the success of the site as well. I think it would be great if there was an admin schedule so that someone was covering site 24 hours a day. That way issues could be resolved fairly quickly, quesitons that were obvious gaming could be voided (and the user REPRIMANDED).