My Bitcoin gaming project

[pythonista]

Hi everyone,

Happy to be making my first post in the forum. Ive been following it for a few months now when I bought my first load of Bitcoin, and was especially interested in the Urban Terror gaming website that was announced about a year ago.

I like first person shooters, so Ive almost finished creating a website where you can play OpenArena for Bitcoin.

Ive been programming for years, but wouldn't say I'm the best product designer in the world. Therefore I wanted to get some feedback on my project before I invested more time putting the finishing touches to it and then paying for web servers etc.

Here is the way it works. Users register an account on the website, make a deposit and get given an OpenArena server address to join. For each frag made, the winning player obtains 0.01 BTC from the losing player. It's more fair than the older project in that the losing player can then get his 0.01 BTC back by fragging the winner - the website only takes a commission when making a withdrawl. Users can look at their account to list their deposits and make withdrawls, as well as viewing their scores.

Ive restricted the weapons to the rocket launcher to make aimbots less useful, and Ive set the game server level to be wrackDM17 - a wide open level with almost no walls. But if the game server admins do see any cheating, they will suspend that player's account and distribute his funds to the other players.

I would also like to make the website support private rooms where you can setup games with your friends. That way if your friends are Bitcoin broke you can donate (or trade for cash) to them to let them play a game with you. I haven't implemented this yet.

So I wanted to ask the Bitcoin community:
-Would you want to shoot in OpenArena for Bitcoins?
-Would you play on my public OA game server, or would you prefer to wait until the website supports creating private games for your friends?
-Would you totally prefer I made my website host a different game, such as Hedgewars? (It has to be an Open Source game)
-Any general criticism about the project?

Thanks for any feedback.

[zuper]

It was better if you made a questionnaire for the market analysis.

[Chrithu]

Hi.

I'm a heavy gaming addict so I welcome any project related to bitcoin and gaming. The main problem I have with gaming as an opportunity to earn BTC as a player is how to deal with cheating. You need to make sure that your anticheat measures work or that you can reliably identify cheating by observing log files when someone was reported by other players.

Other than that your system sounds fair in case cheating can be dealt with reliably. My only concern though is that 0.01 BTC per frag is by far too much given the current value of BTC. Sure 0.01 BTC per frag sounds nice as an earning rate. But on the flipside of that coin you also risk losing 0.01 BTC when being killed. in my view that perspective will ultimately lead to any sane person staying away from your service.

But how to resolve that? Minimizing the risk also means minimizing the payout in your proposed system. Maybe think about making it like a poker table: Say you host a ten player match. Each player pays an entry fee of 0.001 BTC and the winner of the match takes it all (0.01 BTC). That way you minize the loss of any individual "loser" but still offer an attractive prize for winning.

Edit: Actually I just thought that you should also read up on matchmaking and Elo rating. If you follow my suggested system change you could modify the entry fee and payout based on players Elo rating. Like a player with high skill wants to enter a match with lesser skilled players: That reduces the entry fee and risk of the lower skilled players accordingly and increases his entry fee risk to reflect the difference in skill. This way high skill player can't go and milk low skilled players.

To answer your other questions on a more subjective and personal level: I'm not good at shooters so I'd probably not risk losing my money to better players. Any other shooter game I'd also not be interested in. What I'd find interesting to play over BTC would be thing like Magic the Gathering, Board games in general or Strategy games.


On a more general note I'd like to see F2P games accept BTC as payment without necessarily offering a way to earn BTC playing. There's enough other ways to obtain BTC.

[pythonista]

Thanks very much Chrithu for the feedback.

Yes I think I have some rethinking to do about the product. I just noticed another thread here where the general consensus is that almost all skill based games are basically impossible to provide for Bitcoin, because of the ease of writing bots etc.

I will take the transaction code that Ive written, and develop a different kind of service.

[yigh]

good luck!

[tbc]

I Like openarena. 

[InCoinsITrust]

I wish you luck with your project.