Bounties

What is a Bounty?

A bounty is a reward offered for an accomplishment. In speedrunning, this would refer to someone meeting a goal time. For example, I could say: "I'm offering $50 to anyone that can beat Sonic 2 in under 15 minutes" - and that is a bounty.

Bounties have existed, and do still exist. There's been one on MM9 recently, and the SDA forums have had a bounty page for ages, but it's old forum, hidden away, and no one uses it. So the idea I'm having is to make a system like this more useable and accessible. This is all just ideas in my head, but basically I see something like:

There's a Bounty Tab on speedrun.com. There you can submit a bounty, or view all the current bounties up for offer. I might see a bounty for Pokemon Emerald, and get extra motivation to return to that game. Or I could submit a bounty myself. Submissions would be something like this

Game: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 | Category: any% | Goal: 14:59 or lower | Amount: $50 | Date until: May 17th 2016 | First to/Last Held: First to

"Last Held" meaning if someone gets sub 14:58, then someone else comes along and gets 14:55 before the due date, the bounty would go to player 2. There would probably have to be a length it couldn't go past (say 2 years) if this option was chosen. First to obviously just means the first to accomplish the goal.

Runs would obviously have to be verified by someone other than the runner, and the verification process is already setup on speedrun.com to do so. You might say that money might increase incentive for people to cheat, but I also think it would increase people's motivation to verify runs really well and properly. You could also add specifics to the bounty itself e.g. "must be on console" or "must be streamed" or "must use handcam" to prevent this is you wanted

Note: I have no idea if speedrun.com actually wants to use this idea or not, it's just how I see it in my head. No implication that this will be used there at all.

Potential Positives from this idea:

Increased competition between specific games

Incentive/Motivation for runners

Increased interaction from viewers (in relation to speedrunning itself, rather than saying hi to a streamer this means)

Rewarding accomplishment as a speedrunner

Increased awareness of lesser known runners who are good at games

Potential Negatives:

As a mass, people don't tend to like money involved in speedrunning, you could see people running just for bounties as *ahem* to use a buzzword/term "selling out" - but in my opinion this would actually be much better than focusing on donations from others, this form of "selling out" would require you to be really good at games and achieve things

Hiding strats - This could be prevented by adding a "must be streamed" option, so it's not that relevant anyway. I wouldn't have an option like that as a default though, to keep people who can't stream involved if possible.

Potential for people to scam money - This is my next point to talk about

There's two main ways it could be done. Someone submits the bounty, is contacted after it is beaten, and the money is transffered between just those 2 parties. The issue with this, is that people could offer up a bounty, and then not pay up. This wouldn't be as much of an issue on a lower scale, as is anyone tight knit within the community did that, they'd just be shunned and fuck off forever, and that would almost always be worth more than a light troll bounty. However, I would rather this idea be implemented on a more accessible level, where any twitch viewer for example, could submit a bounty if they so wanted.

The other way is that the money for the bounty has submitted along with the bounty itself, it is then held at the site and then payed out when the bounty is claimed (unless it is not claimed, in which case the money could be used to set another bounty, or sent back to the user.) The issue with this one would be the holding party, who it is, how can it be assured the money isn't taken, potentially issues with transfer fees etc etc. This isn't exactly my forte of expertise, so I won't pretend to know exactly how that kind of thing would work, but surely it's not enough of an issue to deter the idea.

All in all I see it as a better way to replace donating to a stream, not saying people wouldn't still donate, but I think it'd be cooler as a viewer to give incentive to a streamer, rather than just give them money. And I think it would definite increase between actual runners, I could definitely see myself putting up a bounty for sub 3:50 for Golden Sun All Djinn, but I wouldn't donate to Plexa just for getting it.

I think of the random twitch viewer who says "why does no one run Azure Dreams, I love that game", they could put a small bounty on it, and have someone (like Dugongue) pick it up for them. I think of the viewer in my stream who wants me to go play Pokemon instead of some superior Sonic game, they could place a bounty on a Pokemon time just better than mine to try and entice me back. I think of a runner that might be the only one who plays their game, they could put up a bounty to beat their time, to try and get more competition.

Additional ideas:

Have a system in place where you can add money to an existing bounty: eg you see a bounty for $50 by someone else, and you add an extra $20 to it, so if it is claimed it would be $70.

Tiered payouts: e.g. payouts to multiple people. For first to, this would obviously just mean the next person might get a payout too: e.g. a bounty for 1:41:59 or lower in 120 star, first person to get there might get $100, second $50, third $25 or something similar. In a Last Held bounty, it would obviously be split between eg who had the top 3 times and the end date.

Level payouts: e.g. payout $20 if a run is under 25 minutes, $50 if below 24, $100 if below 23 minutes. Could be implemented into both options

Make it so you can not claim your own bounty (so you can't set something so other people chip in more and claim it yourself)

Fine tuned ideas:

When selecting Goal Time for Bounty, if category exists on leaderboards, have auto tick option for "Beat Current World Record?" auto defaults to 1 unit of time (eg second, but maybe frame for games like smb) lower than best time

Make it so the bounty has it's own page where you can follow current results. Like you click on the bounty, it shows you if anyone has beaten the time, and what that time is (direct quote from Kniter)

Have a profile on accounts for completed bounties (whether it's on speedrun.com or not), eg a separate tab on accounts to show a list of all the bounties you have claimed (this would be relevant for speedrun.com for if say a bounty was for a specific run, like Must use Chikorita as starter in Gold/Silver sub 3:40 time, as that obviously wouldn't show up on the actual leaderboards)