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Deathmatch for Dollars?
quixado writes "You Play Games is an online wager service where you can bet and earn money for each kill or injury to opponents. You can even cap how much money you can lose in a 24 hour period. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is the first title. The press release can be found here. More info here too. And they said that spending days on end playing first person shooters wouldn't pay off..."
How will they deal with aimbots and other cheats?
I stole this Sig
A custom binary like seti@home perhaps?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
...frag the Boxing Monkey and win FREE Money!$!$!$ the horror, the horror....
id Software has always been on the forefront of gaming, ever since the original Castle Wolfenstien. It's no surprise that they now are the first to offer gambling based on this style of gaming. It's also a good idea that they decided to break up the cost per death/frag by skill levelled matches, however I wonder what qualifies a person to compete in a certain skill level?
I only have two questions now:
1) What legal implications will this bring about? Think about it: parents wanted to sue Wizards of the Coast and Nintendo because they thought Pokemon cards were a form of gambling.
2) Approximately how long until I lose (note correct usage of the word) my last $5?
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
Should it be a viable profession?
I don't see why not. If big dumb dudes can make millions by tossing a ball around a few hours a week, I don't see why a gamer shouldn't be able to make at least a few dollars by using his skills. 3D accelerator card makers may even pick a few of the best players to help promote their products.
Ultimate Arena already does that.
With the amount of stress some people seem to work up in a simple game not for money, I can't imagine how badly they'll freak out when a few dollars are on the line.
More OMG!1!!!!111 Yuo h4x0r!1!!!!1111 followed by ping floods no doubt.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
You want to cheat when playing for real money? We'll come to your house and shoot you with real bullets.
ITYM "your gay". If I ever saw "You're gay!" - that is, with proper capitalization, spelling and punctuation, I'd probably be so distracted I'd be 0wned the next second later.
I'm suprised ID let themselves get snared into this.
YPG servers are based out of the Netherlands Antilles, a haven for money laundering, major drug trafficking, and organized crime. A major problem for the Antilles at the moment is illegal internet gambling operations. Hosting servers there should raise suspicion immediately. Hell, doing almost anything in the Antilles should raise suspicion...
Other major problems -- RTCW does not have a FFA game mode, only team oriented game modes. This fits very poorly into a competetion model of you-frag-others-for-money.
Imagine how pissed off you're going to be when an idiot teammate does something stupid and costs you money!
Also, this will totally fuck up objective oriented games since players will be so worried with kill/death ratios (because deaths cost you money), that they will totally ignore teamplay (hell, *I* would!)
Quake3 or UT2k3 would be better choices -- not only do they have MUCH larger audiences, but they fit better into the competetion model they have, because Quake3 and UT2k3 have FFA game modes.
However, cheating is still possible, but it will come from dedicated cheaters, rather like it does in casinos. Casinos have an advantage though, first they are very rich, and can afford all sorts of checks and balances, and second, players/cheaters are physically present, and therefore can be ID'd. In the online world, noone knows you're a dog, so it will be harder to stop a dedicated cheater from coming back. If the dedicated cheater does not reveal his/her method, then it will be up to the PB team to try and stop it. The PB team have an advantage when the cheat is released in the wild, but not when its kept secret.
PB has the great advantage of being able to update everyones code at any point. So if someone does do a major number on the current PB system, they can simply change it and bingo, all legit users are now running the new code.
The big problem is punishment for cheating. How do you stop a cheater? Kick him out? So he comes back with a new account and continues. You need a way to identify a user. The problem is any ID system will be open to comprimise aswell. The big casinos come down to using people to recognise other peoples faces, and you can't do that online.
If this becomes a very big venture, with real (i'm talking $10000+wins), then the big boys will come along and try to cheat, you'll find they will succeed sometimes.
The difference between this and normal casinos is you aren't playing against the house, so it will be difficult to play and win $10000, unless you find some pretty stupid people. However, lesser sums of $100 or so will be possible. I don't think that these stakes are high enough for the big boys to play for.
Where real money will come from will be when they do have a "house". Playing against computers (the house). They'll have to do it so the house wins >50% like they do at casinos, but it could become very interesting.
In all I think this will become interesting, but not interesting enough to the big boys, so go ahead, play for a few dollars, if you don't make it worthwhile a user risk cheating against you, then they won't.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.