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Quoted from Popcorp

we know that this happened few times, but what IF the match gets wildcarded? hope there will be no problems returning items

and i think we should only bet for div 2+ matches, those are most interesting to watch i think

Won’t delaying everything be good enough?
I thought only prem, because I doubt that people actually care about div1+

Only prem + invite please. Maybe important fixtures such as LAN finals, play-offs etc.

I really hope you get Jon on board, as I said before I can help you anything you need, but I can’t think of anyone in the community more qualified to deal with the numbers part than jon.

I would also go for INVITE + Prem games only. Much more stable and more sustainable.

Quoted from Gentleman Jon

[…]
Playing bookie is definitely a risk :) It’s the way the cslounge guys run it so I’d assumed you’d go about it in a similar way. Ultimately the reason for offerring odds is a business case thing to secure maximum profit by increasing participation, so if you’re not running it for profit then you don’t need to worry about it much. You’ll just have quiet matches when one side is heavily favoured.

About accepting items and their value, it’s important to have those trades as close to the games as possible to ensure that depreciating prices don’t catch you out. Because scrap is the smallest unit you can work with as a physical asset it’s the smallest you want to calculate returns to as well, so it’s tempting to consider an idea like buying credits that could be used internally for more precise return calculations and so on. However your bots would still only have the actual metal in their inventories so if metal was repriced lower during this period you’d suddenly have loads of credits in the system you would no longer have the assets to cover- a tf2 credit crunch. Tldr, don’t implement a credits system if it occurs to you unless you’re happy to ignore external price indexes.

The main way you can still lock in a small operating profit for the service and ensuring it’s viability is by always rounding down fractions of scrap left over from betting calculations in your favour. This will be real items residing in your bots inventory so will build up as real assets to be used for whatever, paying for servers, in system promotions, etc. This builds up an auditing job that you may not like the sound of so you could always randomly distribute the extra scrap bits amongst the winners instead. However you already intend to only offer say 0.9 of the value with 0.1 as a house rake so it’s something that you’ll need to be able to monitor.

On the subject of high value items you could be giving yourself a headache . If someone loses a bud in a match bet and it needs to be divided amongst the winners there’s no easy way outside manual trading to break it up into smaller chunks. The solution is to have enough metal and keys in the system to be able to cover it, but even so you’d have to wait for a very high rolling but low participation match to ever get rid of it so you’d still probably need someone to be manually processing this stuff in the background anyway. Theoretically you might be able to set up an automated interface with tf2 warehouse to break down high value items, but a bot can handle metal crafting independently so it might be worth avoiding high value deposits and stick to metal. Also people will see a bills hat in the opposite bet list and get excited with no reasonable likelihood of getting it so it might breed some disappointment.

There’s quite a bit to consider, it’s worth going through it in your head looking at different scenarios and trying to break things before your users do it for you. Most of it is really boring stuff, but even without odds there’s a few ways of being caught out and the service running into trouble before it’s really started.

I propably shouldn’t accept promos, and what you pointed out is another reason for it. I don’t think anyone will miss them and it also simplifies conversions.

Anyway I want to make system work like this:
Each player has his own virtual inventory to which he can deposit or withdraw items from.
Team Fortress have some sort of currency so I am not going to accept as many items as lounges do, so it should let me keep two currencies: keys and metal.
Users will bet with items from their vritual inventory and I’ll show them expected profit in keys and metals and additionaly how it translates to one of the currencies at the current backpack.tf price.

I’m not sure about the last part, but I though that at the withdrawals I could just pay out with highest value items possible (keys -> metal) calculating everything using backpack.tf’s prices. Assuming that metal of the same value will be exchanged for keys as keys for metal this shouldn’t be big problem, right?

I don’t know maybe just breaking everything to metal at the deposit using one of the automated bots will be easier.

EDIT: Added you, maybe we could talk on Steam

Looks great cherry, real good.

I think you need to post this on the TFTV forums, it’s where most people often visit for comp/semi-comp news, and I’d sure as hell know this would get good feedback and some help from not just people who visit ETF2L (usually euro’s).

You’ll find yourself getting help from all around the world if needed to, also you’ll spread the word on this, which is great that everyone would know that this is going on.

Hey just wanted to let you know that I am posting update’s in my tf.tv’s topic @ http://teamfortress.tv/thread/17109/wip-saloon-tf/?page=3

And how would I do that? It’s going to be prem only, which already reduces risk of players betting against their team and shit teams won’t win much anyway so I doubt it’ll be worth it.