1. In most pictures a hint will rule out lots of possible answers which might decrease the pot. Maybe I could make a portion of the money go towards the pot but again, wouldn't a hint decrease the
total possible number of guesses? Why guess two or three times, when you can buy a hint and guess once with a higher probability to win?
But more people would buy hints as long as they're reasonably priced, maybe 10% of the guess price. If half of that goes to the pot and more people participate then the pot
might grow quicker.
I was thinking that practically any kind of hint will give you more chances to win than having to ability to double bet each time your bet. Imagine this case:
The free hint is: "it's a game"
The paid hint is: "it's team based"
The answer is: "team fortress 2"
What would you prefer? Being able to bet a second time for every bet you pay for? Or having access to the paid tip? I would surely prefer the hint over the free bets. That means that in this scenario the hint should cost MORE than a bet. As in 110%, not 10%.
Cryptic hints would be
even more helpful in my opinion. Consider the same scenario but the paid hint is: "Need a ... here."
With that hint all you have to do is start guessing random games and seeing if this hint makes sense. When you reach TF2, you will notice that the hint makes perfect sense. Even if this guesswork doesn't work, chances are that the hint will be at least an excellent confirmation mechanism before you place for a bet. Does the hint make sense? If not, don't bet. That will save you a lot of money, even more than a hint like "it's team based". So it has to cost even more. Unless I make it really, really cryptic...
In any reasonable case, a textual hint should cost more than a bet.
2. It will cause players to focus more on a single picture rather than spreading their guesses to all of the available ones. This could be good or bad, I don't know. It would surely be against players that
just want to pay just for one guess per 2 days. Those players would either face the disadvantage of having fewer info than other players that want to bet multiple times on a pic, or pay for the hint as
if it was obligatory.
Maybe not. I think it depends on hint price/reward ratio. Maybe people wouldn't think too much about it if hints are cheap enough.
If they are too cheap, everyone will buy them, so why implement them. They need to be priced properly else they will be something like an entrance fee to the site. I'm talking about textual hints here. :-/
3. In a picture that is close lets say to 50%, if nobody has solved it then you can be pretty sure that without the hint you have very few chances of solving it (since someone else has probably bought
the tip and still wasn't able to solve it). This makes the tip look somewhat obligatory. It reminds me of pay-to-win games. If it really ends up being obligatory, then I could as well ask for an
entrance fee to the site. Also see point 3: the hint would be pretty much obligatory for occasional players.
That might be true, but then again can you really be sure that someone has bought the hint? Moreover, the same hint could make much sense to another person.
Well right now maybe you can't. But if more people start betting and the hints aren't priced highly, you should expect that someone has bought it when the picture has progressed enough.
5. No matter what the configuration of the hinting system, after some time (maybe a long time) it will be "easy" to calculate whether hints pay back for their money or not. And after that point you will
either always buy one or never buy it. Until that time though I think hints will make the game more "random" for most players since you won't be able to know how helpful the tip will be or whether you
should buy it or not. More randomness will cause more frustration as even the current randomness of the game has caused frustration to some people. I can already imagine people complaining about
how helpful for others was the tip that they didn't buy and which caused them to loose 3 bets, or how useless was the tip that they bought.
People complain either way, the question is if you give them the incentives to keep playing. I think that if you post more pics, people will play more, but you can only do this if you turn a profit.
Sure, you can't make everyone happy. My point here is that hints don't remove "fairness" complains from the site since they don't make the game more "fair" in any sense. On the other hand I can imagine people complaining about them. So, ceteris paribus, I THINK hints would increase complaints and thus dissatisfaction. I can't be sure of course, for example now I've seen two players askign for hints so some people would be more satisfied.
Here is an alternative that almost "fixes" point 2 and 3 and maybe 4: Pay to see the picture advanced by X hours or by X% of the remaining hours. You only get to see ONE scnapshot so the advantage
you buy is temporary, as time passes, other players reach the point that you saw. That way occasional players don't necessarily compete with players that have paid for a permanent hint that is valid
during the whole duration of the picture. This way the game won't be that much pay-to-win as players will need to constantly buy new hints in order to have a permanent advantage over other players
which won't be worth the money.
I like this one. In the end you'll only find out what works if you try different approaches. It's called split testing, try a few things and keep the one(s) that work best.
I think I'm going to try this. I will start adding paid hints to some pictures while leaving other only with the free hint. I'll need some time to make this though.
One concern about this system: Would it NEED to be 0-confirmations? Would it be too much to ask someone to wait 10 minutes (or in some cases much more), in order to see the picture advanced by
1 hour for example? Of course the picture will be advanced by 1 hour after the time the hint payment was CONFIRMED, not the time it was PAID.
I guess it should be instantaneous. In the 10 minutes needed for a confirmation, people might change their mind. At the very least it will spoil the fun. Idk, maybe use an account system or unique urls like just-dice?
I don't want to touch accounts. Unique URLs were my idea also. Click on "Buy extra hint" to be taken to a unique page, pay to the address there and AJAX load the impoved picture when payment is received.
Another hint idea: View the picture with a different kind of distortion. That has a little problem though, if you overlay the two pictures with the different distortions, you will
probably end up with a cleaner version of the picture. That means that people who know how to use picture editing software will have an extra advantage so I guess this is not such a good idea.
