Bit Potato - Hottest bits since the potato!!

[dman99]

We are pleased to announce that all Potatoes now have a starting price of less than 2 LTC!

Congratulations, you just fixed your site and are going to have a LOT more winners now.  I'm back in the game now.  I love it when feedback is actually listened to.

[demoniality]

yeah well done guys, awesome update. Now if you can just stop the botters we will be in business (you can see just from the previous winners how it's the same guys, including the one i posted about on the previous page winning them all before anyone else has a chance).

edit: another glitch? flashes up to send payment to blah blah then it takes the opportunity away from me one second later and shows somebody else waiting for payment?

ip using LhRXHfDoDuNZbcjtzWcFQVQgGuzerHqNYp is killing it for everyone, 9 potatoes a day!?

I can literally click my mouse non stop for hour after hour pre-emptively waiting for verifications to finish and i will never get the potato. i love the game, but the frustration of being beaten by a program someones written will cause me and others to leave and ultimately kill this site. When just the botters are left nobody will buy once the potato has reset because they wont sell it. Then they will leave too. Manual banning is not enough because it doesn't seem to be happening. A captcha or daily quota per ip would save customers and your business bitpotato, you have to realise this.

[Coinme2]

yeah well done guys, awesome update. Now if you can just stop the botters we will be in business (you can see just from the previous winners how it's the same guys, including the one i posted about on the previous page winning them all before anyone else has a chance).

edit: another glitch? flashes up to send payment to blah blah then it takes the opportunity away from me one second later and shows somebody else waiting for payment?

ip using LhRXHfDoDuNZbcjtzWcFQVQgGuzerHqNYp is killing it for everyone, 9 potatoes a day!?

I can literally click my mouse non stop for hour after hour pre-emptively waiting for verifications to finish and i will never get the potato. i love the game, but the frustration of being beaten by a program someones written will cause me and others to leave and ultimately kill this site. When just the botters are left nobody will buy once the potato has reset because they wont sell it. Then they will leave too. Manual banning is not enough because it doesn't seem to be happening. A captcha or daily quota per ip would save customers and your business bitpotato, you have to realise this.

It's a little worse than that. The wallet id you are referring to belongs to the user name "BitPotato". I was on for a good part of the day yesterday/last night. They got every reset potato! I don't mean some or quite a few, I mean all!!! I'm talking about watching for almost 14 hours of that user winning every level reset potatos. I managed to get two low priced potatos and neither was repurchased. With the new lower starting prices, that is more incentive for the botters to purchase two of the first three sales to gain their profit.I believe I may have to give up on the game. Sitting there waiting for a potato to time down(that's if "BitPotato" doesn't snatch it with 5 minutes left) and then clicking away all for nothing is just too big of a waste of time. It is not possible to get the first two sales anymore, and with sales rarely getting past 3 purchases, it will not be profitable. Guess the bots can fight it out.

[Deathdisguise]

It's a little worse than that. The wallet id you are referring to belongs to the user name "BitPotato". I was on for a good part of the day yesterday/last night. They got every reset potato!

Yeah that guy's a real tool (lolol)

A captcha or daily quota per ip would save customers and your business bitpotato, you have to realise this.

While your moral crusade against 'Guzer' seems to be a little extreme, do realize the following:

- I use that address for BitPotato, CoinBomb, LTC Treasure, and other gambling games. Yesterday I won two potatoes, one of which did not sell. Today, I won a cheap spud, and am likely going to lose the Gold potato today, since someone is locking it out to prevent buyers.

- A more eloquent solution to the botting problem would be to give each address a cooldown. Have it so it can only be clicked every 100ms, and anything more wouldn't be accepted. Basically anything other than requiring a captcha. Those are frustrating to fill out themselves, let alone with a race to finish it.

- A program to auto-fill a captcha is an easy enough feat, and would only increase the distance between botters and clickers, easily destroying the website's thrill.

[demoniality]

edited post due to above edit

[Coinme2]

It's a little worse than that. The wallet id you are referring to belongs to the user name "BitPotato". I was on for a good part of the day yesterday/last night. They got every reset potato!

Yeah that guy's a real tool (lolol)

A captcha or daily quota per ip would save customers and your business bitpotato, you have to realise this.

While your moral crusade against 'Guzer' seems to be a little extreme, do realize the following:

- I use that address for BitPotato, CoinBomb, LTC Treasure, and other gambling games. Yesterday I won two potatoes, one of which did not sell. Today, I won a cheap spud, and am likely going to lose the Gold potato today, since someone is locking it out to prevent buyers.

- A more eloquent solution to the botting problem would be to give each address a cooldown. Have it so it can only be clicked every 100ms, and anything more wouldn't be accepted. Basically anything other than requiring a captcha. Those are frustrating to fill out themselves, let alone with a race to finish it.

- A program to auto-fill a captcha is an easy enough feat, and would only increase the distance between botters and clickers, easily destroying the website's thrill.

- Look into keyboard macros and having them simulate clicking when held down. I'm not a bot, I'm always there, but I'm not playing with a mouse either.

 Do you not go by the username "BitPotato"? 

[Twerka]

There is another problem here.

"We are pleased to announce that all Potatoes now have a starting price of less than 2 LTC!"

He changed it without any announcement. So If you had a 97 LTC god potato, or a 59 Rad potato, resetting the fresh potatoes to 2LTC makes the expensive ones impossible to sell.



Whoever who bought the SPUD was before the price drop. But after the price reset all others potatoes has more profit, for less price.
All who had a potato before the reset, lost his coins.



Almost 2 hours of downtime made it worst.

[Deathdisguise]

Do you not go by the username "BitPotato"? 

Nah, "Bit Potato" is the initial owner of every potato. It's hard coded into the website. Sorry, I thought you were speaking sarcastically.

[demoniality]

the other issue is, the botters seem to have an advantage when clicking on a potato that has finished payment verification vs those that have expired. now the starting price is so low those few non-botters that do win a potato when they have expired earn 2ltc at most. So the earnings have actually be skewed further in favour of the botters.

[Deathdisguise]

the other issue is, the botters seem to have an advantage when clicking on a potato that has finished payment verification vs those that have expired. now the starting price is so low those few non-botters that do win a potato when they have expired earn 2ltc at most. So the earnings have actually be skewed further in favour of the botters.

That's true, fighting the verification timer is annoying, because unless you know when that 6th verification goes though, it's really hard to focus your clicks for the full duration. Adding in a 'Finishing Payment' timer to give everyone a heads up would be handy? MOAR TIMERZ

[Rave]

Is this game for bots only or do I really have a chance to grab one of these? It says "Verifying payment..." and then jumps directly to "Waiting for payment...".... -.-

[demoniality]

That's true, fighting the verification timer is annoying, because unless you know when that 6th verification goes though, it's really hard to focus your clicks for the full duration. Adding in a 'Finishing Payment' timer to give everyone a heads up would be handy? MOAR TIMERZ

Is this game for bots only or do I really have a chance to grab one of these? It says "Verifying payment..." and then jumps directly to "Waiting for payment...".... -.-

Exactly it's a bot fest. Fix that and the site becomes amazing for everyone but the 'cheats'.

[BitPotato]

It's a little worse than that. The wallet id you are referring to belongs to the user name "BitPotato". I was on for a good part of the day yesterday/last night. They got every reset potato!

Yeah that guy's a real tool (lolol)

A captcha or daily quota per ip would save customers and your business bitpotato, you have to realise this.

While your moral crusade against 'Guzer' seems to be a little extreme, do realize the following:

- I use that address for BitPotato, CoinBomb, LTC Treasure, and other gambling games. Yesterday I won two potatoes, one of which did not sell. Today, I won a cheap spud, and am likely going to lose the Gold potato today, since someone is locking it out to prevent buyers.

- A more eloquent solution to the botting problem would be to give each address a cooldown. Have it so it can only be clicked every 100ms, and anything more wouldn't be accepted. Basically anything other than requiring a captcha. Those are frustrating to fill out themselves, let alone with a race to finish it.

- A program to auto-fill a captcha is an easy enough feat, and would only increase the distance between botters and clickers, easily destroying the website's thrill.

Exactly. Thank you for your input. The issue is that there are services and programs that will fill captchas, and if we use a captcha system even if it is all users competing, it's a race to fill out the squiggly letters to get the potato. We used to have a click limiter on the potatoes, but we realized it was only making it harder for legitimate users to get the potato over botters, so we've removed it. We're still working on Version 2 of the site. We've experienced a lot of delays, mainly that our backend programmer is still attending college. We plan to implement a sort of sub-captcha system, that will require input before you actually grab a potato. We're also still looking vigilantly into potatoes responding to multiple users with the send addresses. When a potato gets locked, only one user should receive the "Potato is almost yours!" message. From recent emails we fear this bug may still be occurring on a smaller scale. We're setting up a distributed test network to test hammering the server for requests on locking down a potato.

[BitPotato]

Thank you for all your feedback! We really appreciate it! Also in response to some of the posts concerned about the starting prices of the potatoes, none of your potential profits have changed. A potato selling for 50 LTC will still make the same profits regardless of the starting price for the round. We haven't lowered any profit margins for the players.

[BitPotato]

the other issue is, the botters seem to have an advantage when clicking on a potato that has finished payment verification vs those that have expired. now the starting price is so low those few non-botters that do win a potato when they have expired earn 2ltc at most. So the earnings have actually be skewed further in favour of the botters.

That's true, fighting the verification timer is annoying, because unless you know when that 6th verification goes though, it's really hard to focus your clicks for the full duration. Adding in a 'Finishing Payment' timer to give everyone a heads up would be handy? MOAR TIMERZ

We're going to be adding in a display for the number of verifications on the current payment, as well as the current amount paid. The verifying payment timer does take a significant amount of time, we do wait for 6 verifications. Currently, six verifications allows for the lowest amount of transaction fees. Coinbomb for example only waits for two verifications to switch owners on a bomb, but I believe they wait for six before they pay out the previous user, sending coins that only have two confirmations causes massive transaction fees. We prefer the previous owner to get their payout instantly when the potato changes owners, so there isn't a concern over whether or not the payment is coming. Your suggestion, to make a static countdown timer when the potato switches owners may be a good idea. On that note, we are addressing the issue with timers desyncing over time on the website. The site is intended to be fully functional without ever having to refresh the page, so any gap in this functionality is basically a bug that we need to fix. To be more specific, it is currently known that:
-Timers desync by a couple seconds by the time they run out without refreshing
-The display for the send address sometimes does not properly fade away once a payment has been sent, requiring a refresh to get back the input bars
-When a potato is grabbed, it should immediately update to display that it is locked and which user is trying to buy it. This happens most of the time, sometimes it does not.

If you have any other suggestions, or are aware of any other front-end usability issues, please let us know!


Best Regards,
The Bit Potato Staff

[CoinBomb]

We payout any winners fees instantly, after the buyer's payment has been verified (different numbers of confirmations depending on LTC or BTC).

[demoniality]

There is another issue i noticed whereby when i am clicking away on a potato in anticipation for previous verification to complete, about ten minutes later i feel too much time has passed. I refresh the page and the potato is ten minutes into the next verification already! It's like i'm in a parallel universe. In fact this happens nearly every time meaning i cannot buy a potato that has completed payment verification unless i hope the site updates the potato to inform me 'grab it' so i can reactively click on it. But with bots this is a non-occasion.

edit: this time the potato sold twice whilst i'm still seeing it verifying!

[Twerka]

3 issues so far:

1) You changed the price of the potatoes to 2LTC when the rest were still over 30 or 50:

2) Site was offline for almost 2 hours.
3) The consolation for the Silver portato is 15%, I paid 21.53, but received as consolation only 1.05LTC. I think you messed up the site a lot.

Keep the coins, I don't care.
I simply not playing here anymore.

[saudibull]

All these same games are starting to come out more often than new alts.... 

[dman99]

Ever since the decrease in initial price I've been incredibly active on this site and having some great luck.  Awesome job guys!

From a technical aspect, I've analyzed the JavaScript of both Bit Potato and Coinbomb.  It's always interesting to see different ways to approach the same problem.  I will have to say that BitPotato's code is better at ensuring you always have updated data, but at the cost of being more heavily dependent upon the server.  There are definitely ways I can see to avoid the "Duplicate winner" problems mentioned with the existing data.

I can also easily see ways to minimize the message sizes sent by both /potats and /grabit.  Especially with /potats; there seems to be a lot of unnecessary data being transmitted with every query.  If a lot of this data were served up by a different script (maybe query it every 5 minutes or so) and only the time critical data were served by /potats, you could see the message size decrease significantly, meaning less load on your server and much quicker responses.  Message size is everything when dealing with AJAX since these messages will be transmitted thousands and thousands of times.

One small change which I would suggest: consolation prize amounts is still really unclear.  I would say instead of showing a percentage, show the current consolation prize for the potato.  So, instead of a potato saying "40% consolation" it would display" Current Consolation: 3.1 LTC" or whatever.  This would clear up a LOT of confusion.