I can't believe you are going to give out .4 to someone who is basically scamming the site. There's someone who has played 95 games, and lost all 95. So it's basically who has the most time to kill. He's just joining games and losing on purpose, I've seen him do it to me. (betting low with a 2).
Some of this behavior is "abnormal" and unique to the beta. You won't see people intentionally losing games after launch. That's why we created an incentive so that we could see it now.
Maybe we should explain more about the process we've learned over the years to develop software and create startups.
We have a backlog of Leap of Faith assumptions. We rank order those assumptions based on risk to the success of the project. We then test those as quickly and cheaply as possible. There's much more to it than that, but if you want a good overview of the process we use, it's very similar to the "Lean Startup" by Eric Ries.
In that context, our first question was, "Could someone drain the faucet?" because that posed a risk to the concept of the site. We ran a beta on MainNet with a faucet a month ago and found that people were able to exploit the faucet. One person was so successful that they drained $10 USD out of the faucet before they hit the hard limit per user we set in the system. We kept the beta open and tweaked the faucet until we were confident that we had systems in place to limit exploitation. That led to better ways to monitor the velocity of the faucet, and better backup plans we can implement in case someone finds an exploit.
That's just one experiment, and we have hundreds in the backlog.
The tournament is not in place because we want to give people money
It's there to answer very specific questions we have. Take the win:loss, winning streak, and losing streak categories for example. We want to put a system in place that flags abnormal behavior outside of a "normal" threshold. We don't know where to set the threshold without real people on the website. We want some of them to act "normally" and others to act "abnormally" so we can build out a distribution. Hence, the leaderboads that incent "good" behavior and "bad" behavior.
The data we're collecting about player behavior will be used to make the site better, flag cheaters in the future, and work out any bugs before our launch. We've already built out some models of regular user behavior, uncovered a bug related to network communication problems that makes games get "stuck", and made changes to the site based on this tournament.
Everything we've learned is what we wanted to learn, and we're getting all of it for roughly $1,200 USD. That's what one of our Software Engineers makes in a few hours at his day job.
We're actually really happy to share this transparent way we think about the problem with folks - we just normally don't find people that interested in hearing about it. If anyone has questions about how we code, how we think about the structure of the platform, or what our goals are with MooCoin, let us know! We're doing something that we think is really special by creating a place where developers can create cool games and people can play them. We could have created YADG (Yet Another Dice Game), but we aspire to make something better than that. We're still in the early stages, so stay with us. I promise it will be a lot of fun!
Thanks,
MooCoin
