InfernalMachine's dashboard

Yes. But why should people who are at the top of the net worth board, and who are possibly at the top of the new quarterly gain board, also be trying to compete on the weekly percent gain board? I thought the idea was to have more people getting recognition. The inertia of large portfolios is going to open up the weekly board to people with less net worth who are predicting well. Isn't that a good thing? If a rich player wants a higher weekly gain situation, they can pull a 4d and try to reduce their net worth to a more manageable level. It's a choice.

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.

But are there words which shouldn't ever be used (at least directly) on HD questions and comments, and how does a user know where the line is drawn?

Next, even when we get past the last hurdle, are there ways of expression (rather than simply words) that cause the damage you mention? In particular, is it possible to ask a question or make a comment in a manner which has the result of making some portion of the HD community uncomfortable about their membership here? Sexism, racism and such are not only about free speech versus sensitivity, but also about inclusion. Does a question such as the initial QIK-related one, in the tone it takes towards female anatomy, have the intended or unintended consequence of discouraging female participants in HD from feeling equal citizens here? (For that matter, do my title and initial post in this thread do the same thing? I intended silliness, not offensiveness, but that doesn't mean I didn't cross a line.)

I'm going to guess/predict that this matters a lot to the Hubdub creators. I'll also guess that it matters to the HD community in general.

I credit meanderingsearcher for creating the second question, which brings attention to the whole set of issues that questions like the first raise.

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 pleased with this solution. It's great when Hubdub shows it listens to the community. Thanks.

That said, I'm open to discussion on a future cash reset or rescale if it's decided that it's necessary. I'm not against HubMarxism, just rushing into it to meet the quarter deadline.

One question: When do gains start counting for the new quarterly board? I'm guessing that now old predictions can count as gains for the new quarter.

i brought up Roadies questions more than 2 weeks ago. that was at least two weeks after satyaki was penalized for gaming-type behaviour. the tone here may be related to a perception that the warning was laughed off, and behaviour didn't change.

as for pre-recorded shows, they have to be banned. this goes for Lost plot twists as well as survivor etc.

me too. also, it takes forever to reload the graph, so by the time i get to try and bet again, the whole market has moved, and the process starts all over again.

I find it really slow. My browser (firefox) pops up a slow script warning. Have gone back to the old version. Like the "busy" icon idea from kruijs. Categories, please!

Sounds good to me. I only wish I hadn't cashed out most of my Obama wagers after "predicting" these questions would sit until the convention.

The only gender issue I have is how to refer to certain players either in comments or here at the forum. I've been using the they/their impersonal (hey it's better than it/its) and I can't quite bring myself to call someone he/she, but it's a little awkward nonetheless.

The crisis (if one exists) is as a result of bundling the quarterly shift with Das (H)Kapital. The quarterly shift is easy - zero the quarterly gain figures, maybe also add the weekly % gain leaderboards and certain other features. Done. No controversy.

Perhaps there really is a need for redistribution of wealth, but as destry says, managing large amounts is an adaptive skill which you can figure out, so it's not really a good reason for changing things. In fact, it may be a good countervailing argument for leaving things as is, as the problems involved with large portfolio management may actually slow growth at the top, allowing people to catch up.

Xbox Live (those vicious capitalists ;-) ) do not worry about such things as achievement point redistribution, and yet people somehow find the courage to play, even though they are far behind (perhaps hopelessly behind) on leaderboards. It's something to shoot for, an incentive rather than a discouragement.

It's curious how amenable the majority of us are to having our wealth disappear. Surely this differentiates H$s from real $s! Only destry has directly objected - I can definitely see his point btw, and wonder if we aren't going to regret being so "nice".

Anyway. Wealth-redistribution is a BIG idea, and difficult to implement. Quarterly change is simple. But if you do both at once, you make the deadline for deciding and implementing an enormous philosophical shift in the game really sudden. As rohan is suggesting, slow down. If you're sold on doing both at once, rohan's 4 month first quarter is not a bad idea. Otherwise, why not implement them separately, or even see how destry's idea works over quarter #2, continue this discussion here, and come up with plans for Q3?

It's not as if starting a new quarter and having a weekly percent gain board, as well as the ability to see where you are (ie paging of leaderboards past the top 20) aren't going to have any positive effect on the game.

Once you make changes (along the lines as proposed) to cash amounts (ie the ability to wager), you have made HD into two games, the quarterly game(s) and the all-time game. If you accept wealth-alteration (which I'm okay with personally), then that's what you're accepting - a splitting of the "game" into two. [But the alternative is not so bad - quarterly amounts are zeroed, questions are left as is, net worth and available to bet stays as is, basically the game remains as is, but the quarterly board is "fresh" and you can also view weekly % gain. It's not perfect, but it at least makes sense and works. I wonder if the problem here is that they are implementing quarterly change-over AND wealth-redistribution all at the same time?]

Not just because it's mine, after reading the various ideas put forward, I like my idea best.

To summarize, each quarterly game starts at equal (or pole position near-equal). All questions created in a given quarter belong to that quarter alone. At the end of a quarter all questions not settled are suspended (no bets, no cash-ins) until they are settled (maybe a rule where questions can only be up to a year in advance?). In settling a question from a previous quarter, the pay-out or loss affects the players' totals from that past quarter. A question which is thus suspended at end of quarter can be duplicated (using its current odds but initially with no wagers) for the new quarter.

The results from all quarters are used to determine the all-time totals, but other than this and the respawning of long-term questions to the new quarter each quarter is a completely separate game.

An alternative to suspending questions at quarter-end is to leave the game open, but suspend new questions. You keep your cash and predictions, you can still wager and cash-in, but slowly the questions will run out, and perhaps the game totally finishes after 12 months. HOWEVER, Q1 game has no influence on Q2 game. So April 15th, 2009, you could be finishing off Q3, Q4, Q5 and starting Q6, as well as following the all-time game (which just adds up Q1-Q6 results).

As can be seen, this method leaves the long-term (less than 12 months) questions as is. Their results still add to (or subtract from) all-time worth, and you can still play them (bet more, cash-in) until they're settled.

Although it may look complicated, it actually may be very easy to implement. Questions, cash amounts and open predictions etc are all tagged by the quarter they belong to. The quarterly games exist side by side but independently.