Buy-ins and Betting

Buy-ins:

Looking at your 'How-to' page, I would say chitin/keratin and flint are more valuable than you have them listed.
Perhaps move chitin/keratin to the 100 category, and flint to the 300.
Thatch is possibly the least valuable. I would say at least doubling or tripling the quantity, or just removing it from a buy-in option.


Betting

Do we like the idea of buy-ins going to the winner, but betting being more personal? Like, a winning bet being matched by the server and given back to the better, and a losing bet simply being lost? I think this would be more akin to betting on horse races (from my limited understanding of how those work), where you put money down for the hopes of getting rich, and could even potentially have 'odds' to bet against (though this would require a small bit of work).

With this system, we'd probably see more material bets, and less unique item bets. (unless we could include a 'note' that we're putting up a unique item, and asking for 'x' back as the payout.  ie: the amount of metal to craft the tool. - this still encourages betting valuable items, but gives a payout that might be more useful)


The other option is more how we've been doing it, more Poker-style betting, where it all goes into the pot. If we continue with this method, we should probably have some system of announcing and matching the bet, otherwise there's not much incentive in putting in a large bet, other than generosity.

** for those feeling particularly generous, we could also have additional "buy-ins," where people just donate extra incentives to the prize pool.

After seeing what you said here, I have to disagree. I went in on my anky and was able to gain over 500 flint in about five minutes.

Chitin/Keratin are rated as they are because they are just a time investment, found in easy places (just killing the right animal), and weigh nothing. They are equal to charcoal because it is also a time investment. While you only have to let wood burn to create it, it weighs a lot more than chitin/keratin does and is the ingredient to an important resource. Chitin/Keratin being light weight and found practically everywhere (turtles, trikes, all bugs), puts them on a similar scale.

The items in the 100 spot are either very heavy or rare and are a bit of a time investment to collect. The metal is metal ingots as well, which will be edited to make clear that it is not raw metal.

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I'm curious to see what other people think of this. I personally like the poker-style of betting. Putting everything in the pot and the winner gaining it feels more natural to me. It also prevents a lot of book-keeping. I like doing all of this, but I don't want it to feel like a chore and math hurts Serenity's brain. I like the new rules under betting, requiring a type of bet to allow it through. Buy-ins will also go to the house to help keep the tavern running, create prizes, take care of dinos, etc.

I was only setting value of items based on effort to gather them, and it seemed to me that people were experiencing flint being a slower gather than stone.
Chitin/Keratin also seemed to be really slow to accumulate any quantity of. At one point I was trying to trade for keratin from Gary (who has had so much meat he was GIVING it away) and he only had around 70 keratin. But I don't know how focused his efforts on farming it were, only that it appeared to be a slower resource to gather. I personally felt like I was only getting a few keratin per kill, at most.

All of that may vary with different server settings though also.

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The betting wasn't meant to be math heavy. I think 'odds' are likely too hard to do, unless we had returning champions or something, because every contender is essentially unknown.
But, my proposed pay out system was:
I put up a rifle as my bet that cost 500 metal ingots to build. If I win the bet, I get the rifle back +500 metal ingots. (the bet itself is 500 metal, with my rifle as collateral)

And buy-ins are going to the House now? (I'm perfectly fine with that, just didn't realize that was the decided procedure)