InfernalMachine's dashboard

I wish I hadn't wagered on the Arsenal vs. Manchester match! Ouch.

I hope you'll get an official response to the point you are bringing up, because it's an important issue.

Now I'm Canadian, and we are very aware, living next door to the US, that some Americans seem to know very little about the wider world, seem to think that the US is the world. But that is not what's happening here.

The site creators are Scottish. But they decided to make the site initially focused on US news. That was deliberate. (I don't mean ONLY American news, I just mean that they chose to start with American users catered to primarily.) When they announced the public beta in late January, they made this very clear -- it's one of the reasons that all times are mapped to PST (ie California time). Here's a reference:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/...

Obviously this will change over time, as people from all over join up. But the bias towards US news is not accidental, and we who are not American can't really say it's unfair, as that's how Hubdub was set up.

There's a link in both the home page of HubDub, and at the left of your open questions list in My HubDub. In the Noticeboard box.

You're right. It's just a game, and it should be fun.. But games have caused wars - wasn't there a war in the 70s in Central America over a football match? For games to be fun, they need a balance between intensity of effort, and the sober judgement of reason. So the players go all out, and the referee(s) keeps it fair. But when rules get bent, there is understandable, if not justifiable, anger. It's a matter of trust. For a game to be fun, you have to trust that the outcome is the same one that would have occurred if the rules had been fairly and accurately applied. Otherwise the honest players just end up being spectators to the cheaters winning, which defeats the purpose of playing. These discussions are useful at this point in the life of HubDub, because we are helping to form a sense of what those rules must be in order that the game can truly be fun for those that join later, as well as ourselves in the months and years to come.

(Is it ironic that the person who started the topic "Are we too concerned with gaming?" is writing this?)

Here's an amusing postscript to the story (I'm not particularly amused, as you'll see, but you might be). I checked my created questions folders tonight, and found the very question I've been talking about in the void questions folder. It was voided after being settled for being ambiguous! Which means someone complained about the question and result. I wonder if it was the same person who threw all that money at it (I mean they would have had a 3-5 x payoff on bets of more than 20K if they'd won)? Maybe I'm getting paranoid, but what a gam(ing)e strategy. Find questions, misinterpret them, bet heavy on the long shot, and then hope to bluster your way to winning or at least voiding the question and getting your money back. I have a firm response in with the editor on this one.

The question was complicated. And you had to read the background text to correctly interpret it. I was very very explicit there though. No misunderstanding if you read it. (And I'd think that if you found it too complicated to understand, you wouldn't bet the bank on it.)

Anyway, we'll see. It brings up an interesting issue though. What exactly is a question? Is it only the text of the question, or can it be partly specified in the background? In other words, if I bet on a question without reading the background text, and possibly the settlement info, can I claim, because the question itself can be interpreted in various ways (which a "good" question would disambiguate in the background text), that the question as a whole is ambiguous, and so can try to impose my own interpretation on it, or, failing that, get it voided? It's tricky. I mean, you want the main "title" of your question to be succinct. But that sometimes means leaving out details that influence how it is to be understood and later settled.

Any thoughts on this?

It also suggests (to me) to not write such labyrinthine questions in the first place.

"Let's go."
"We can't."
"Why not?"
"We're waitng for the Godot question to be settled."
"Ahhh!"

Certainly the leaderboard is the closest to community you find at HD. For some reason, the Comments pages have not initiated the same level of thoughtful discussion as you find here, and News items seem largely irrelevant (though they are central to the HD concept). Also there's the fact thing. To make questions that are able to be settled, you have to stick to facts and measurements. But people who are passionate about the news are also interested in the nuances of how facts interrelate, and that isn't really catered to in a contest to predict facts. So there's a bit of a conceptual letdown. It's fun to guess, it's fun to trade, it's fun to climb the leaderboard, but somehow it ends up having nothing to do with an interest in the world. (There's that horrible moment when you hear about some awful occurrence in the world, and your first thought is, "Hey. That would make an interesting HD question.") But we may mature as a community, get over all the competition, and return to a more thoughtful tone. Perhaps some changes in the presentation of the site will encourage that.

There are questions about various American TV shows like Survivor that I consider neither news nor interesting, so I just don't vote on them. They don't upset me though. I assume they have value to others, and who am I to tell them what they want to predict on. There is a solid subcommunity at hubdub who participate in the market questions daily. The weird questions you mention, which I wrote, were obviously geared to this community, who might find them a little challenging and thought-provoking even. Admittedly there's a touch of Monty Python in them too. And they are of no interest to many others. But does that make them wrong?

I guess I just don't understand why the market questions make you so angry. I mean, it's not like you can't create much better questions about way better topics here. That's the great thing about HubDub. We can write the questions. Obviously with so many question makers, there will be many topics that bore you or even irritate you, but as long as the questions aren't designed to cheat, so what? Just ignore them.

What's interesting is that HubDub is a "prediction market". So there's no surprise that there are going to be the two extremes (predictors and market traders). It's built into the concept. And presumably it requires both.

In defence of traders, they perform an important function in the market (idea courtesy of doloop). They spot where a market doesn't reflect the likely outcome (if they're good at what they do) and correct it, because there is guaranteed profit in doing this, while betting (just predicting) is taking a risk. That's why most of the top twenty are traders. They are taking much less of a risk with their money, because they are only predicting what the community will predict (to some degree of certainty), and may well cash-in before the outcome.

Admittedly, that is not the only way to play here, and it is not the most obvious approach ("It's all about the predicting."). And most people will be a bit of both.

to a.a.a. : I was just observing the absurdity of my own posts, seen from a certain angle. No offence was taken, no animosity was suspected. I should have used the smiley text for "I'm joking.". Thanks for the nice words though. It really is a very nice forum, we're all civil, friendly even. To tell the truth. I'm as or more excited about new topics and posts here than I am about new questions in the game.

Hang Seng (Hong Kong) has been popular. The BSE (India). Nikkei (Japan). But, in the future, there may be demand for other markets, based on a large number of interested users (South America, Australia, France, Canada, etc.) So the rules should grow with the community, I think.

But I want to repeat that there is obviously a difference between questions that suspend with the market close, and ones that suspend at market open. The strict rules should be for the former. But, like sports games, there's a good argument for more leniency for the latter.

As for only allowing straight up/down questions, I don't know. But perhaps restrict the number of questions to 3 per stock market max per day. Yesterday, as well as some arcane questions by me (which I'm holding off on for now), there were 2 good DOW questions about the close versus some fixed figure. What happened was that in the morning one question had lots of activity, and in the afternoon, the other. The straight up/down would have been (was?) basically irrelevant because of the nature of the DOW's day. But on other days it would be otherwise. One thing: the 12 hour cash-in freeze discourages people coming up with day-appropriate questions on the day, or at least discourages others from betting on them. Maybe that's a good thing - I'm not sure.

One possibility is for the in-play financial questions to be only created by the editor, just like in sports. Perhaps we could send suggestions to them for good questions, spicy questions, etc, Also, it might be possible to have an automated process for the editor to repeat questions day by day.

I think right now it comes down to how much HD seeds the market with at question creation. All the bets on Yes (for example) are pooled, and that amount is divided by the total of Yes and No bets to get the percent for Yes, and similarly for No. But think about betting on a virgin question. The odds don't go to 100%, which means there is "hidden" money already in the market. And on a 50/50 Yes/No question, where would the money come from to pay you back 200 on a 100 bet (pretend you are the only bettor on that question).

So if HD puts more cash into the question, split into pools of cash according to the initial likelihoods, then the market is less responsive, and if less cash is put in, the market is more responsive. I don't know whether or not money is paid back to HD from the market as it comes in from users. (Caveat: I'm supposing this is what's really happening. Official response?)

There are problems with this mechanism. HD is essentially underwriting low participation questions, and pumping far more money into the economy this way than they are from issuing new user accounts.

Think about this. The money that the two of you made yesterday, that was like 400K. But did a large number of other players lose (collectively) 400K? I don't think so. In the top ten (previous), I saw no change in the net worths of anyone else, which was surprising.

I think that the issue at play is that this is a public beta. Weird things will happen. Cheating loopholes will exist, be found, be closed. Bugs and server failures will happen, and hopefully solutions will be found. Experiments in liquidity and other market factors will occur, will have dramatic results, will call into question the fairness of the net worths. This is all understandable -- in fact, expected. You can't know what might need fixing until you see it happen.

But as a public beta, I don't think there is any expectation that this period of time is official (ie the real game). So I think that at some point where you guys feel the system is streamlined and fair, then it goes out of beta. That's also the appropriate time to reset the user balances. Game companies do this. They often run the beta until game release or a week or two later, and start up a new game as the official game. That's the best practice here, I believe. Everyone knows long in advance that this version will close at some point, and we all start equal again in the new one.

A second issue is within this version. People get upset, maybe for good reason, maybe not, when arbitrary events change the nature of the game. I was for obvious reasons shocked and upset for an hour or two, and really frustrated when I found out why. I'd asked the day before for warnings to be posted about changes to the inner dynamics of the game - it's the least we might expect. Also, I think that HubDub should come up with a policy about what to do about the results of such changes. This is a beta issue, as I assume there will come a time when changes like yesterday aren't being made - you've worked out a formula that works.

But pics4d should not feel he/she has to apologize to us for good fortune. I certainly had no suspicions of them. Nor should they have to return the money (because there was no policy in force at the time that said so).

But tinkering with the game in-play raises the issue of the (virtual?) contract that is made at the time of virtual-wager by each player. So there will be questions. And letting people keep their winnings into perpetuity (rather than just for now) is unfair, and discouraging to many current players and certainly to all new players.

I know there are new ideas for leaderboards that measure growth. But with the exception of anomalies like yesterday, I can easily predict (from experience) the amount of their net worth ($15,000), because that's around the ideal amount given the total number of players at this time. So I'll still be more interested in net worth, because this displays (hopefully) the long-time players who are good at the game. The quarterly gain (after the first quarter) will show the up-and-comers, and the weekly percent will show the lucky and the up-and-coming up-and-comers. Obviously these have their appeal to people in these various situations, but ultimately as it stands the net worth is the gold standard, the premiere league. So it matters that the amounts there reflect fair gains.

1,2 and 3 would be great.

For 2, the extra info, it would be better as a link, rather than on the page itself.

Maybe some totals would be informative - win/loss/net on all cash-ins and settleds.

Could there be a separate holder for open questions that are suspended. Maybe also, if there was a checkbox on the question pages and the Home lists, a Questions You're Watching List on questions that you want to wager on later.

For the archiving, I guess it will be a mechanism in the settled/cashed-in/void pages using check boxes and an update button. If so, it woud be useful to have All/None global selectors, like in email sites, that fill in (or clear) the checkboxes. Also, I guess we need a link to get to the archive itself. Will it be sortable/searchable too?

Speaking of which, would a search function be useful? I currently use the Firefox search function, and assume all the other major browsers have some such thing.

It might be useful to have an option to flag results that you want to question (questions you believe were settled incorrectly).