If I remember correctly, when Bustabit was still called MoneyPot, it had a faucet? Why did they remove this feature? I was very active on this site, and the faucet helped to fund the experiment. I might confuse this with some other site, but I can remember something like this?
The few Satoshi's being handed to people via this faucet, cannot bankrupt a site?
Yeah, we used to have a faucet and it was no doubt instrumental in making bustabit take off. However right now, bustabit has 408 players online and AFAIK is currently doing the most volume of any bitcoin site (see:
https://thebitcoinstrip.com/leaderboard.html) so I'm not really hurting for business.
I think when I did have a faucet, faucters took up a disproportionate (80%? amount of support tickets, normally because they would create a whole ton of accounts to use the faucet, and then need help recovering passwords (and even usernames!) or complaining about getting muted in chat for asking for money, or complaining that they can't withdraw for free etc.
So even if the faucter made business sense and would end up making more money, I'd rather have a bit of a less stressful life and leave it out. I also believe a lot of the fun of gambling is risking money.
That said, I'm going to re-add the faucet for
trial purposes, so someone can come to the site and see how it works before they decide if they want to bother depositing or not. The way I plan on doing that is through a faucet-claim limit per ip address, the ends up permanently blocking that ip address from the faucet.
Understandably there are a lot of people who want to purely use a faucet and gamble without any risks, and the great thing about the bitcoin scene is there are whole bunch of reputable sites that offer generous faucets.
Ah, thank you for the detailed response. I can now see why you stopped the faucet and given the same situation, I think I would have done the same. I would supplement it with small "money drops" administrated by Mods to incentivize activity and funded by the site owner. You can decide on the budget and then distribute this to people who would be willing to do this. < Just make sure they get a % for their effort, to retain them >
If people know that a site have small "money drops", they would stay longer
and possibly gamble more? These drops will also go towards "active" users, not all registered members. ^smile^