I would like to address each question separately, in order to be as thorough as possible and to avoid any misunderstandings.
Does each bid reset the clock to the original countdown time?
That depends on the rules of the game. There are two factors.
The first is the time until expiration, set by the creator of the round. This determines how much time is left until the round ends.
Second, is the decay rate, which is also set by the round creator. The decay rate is how much of the time decays between each bid.
For example, let's say that the expiration time is 10 hours and the decay rate is 10%.
When the round starts, it will begin at 10 hours and then count down to zero.
If/when a second bid is placed the timer will reset to 9 hours, since 10% of 10 hours is 1 hour.
If another bid is placed the timer will be reset to 8.1 hours and so on.
How does the pot work?
The pot will pay out as soon as there enough in it to pay the next bid repayment.
Bids are registered as soon as they are sent, but the pot is not updated until the bids get at least one confirmation.
Because in this game right now
http://www.satoshidoshi.com/rounds/round?id=30 there is enough in the pot to pay the third bet but it hasn't been paid out. Is there just some timing bug or is there some other reason it hasn't been paid out?
I agree this should have been paid as soon as the fourth bid was
confirmed. However, our automated payment service has stalled. We are currently using blockchain's API to automatically send out payments from our wallet. Earlier today, blockchain's API stopped responding to our requests, so our outgoing payments have stopped. Our developers are working diligently to solve this problem. We believe the problem originates from blockchain.
Originally, we chose to use blockchain's API because we didn't want to reinvent the wheel and figured it was a reliable enough service that would be able to handle our modest requests. At this point we are considering changing our scheme to eliminate blockchain entirely and move everything in house.
Whatever happens, there is no need to worry. All of your bids are completely safe and all repayments will be honored in their entirety! Also, the bidding still works just fine so you can go ahead and place more bids if you want to.
