What if a third party (SRC, PayPal) facilitated the transaction?

For a bounty to be published, the requestor has to deposit the money.

When a claim to the bounty is made, there could be a holding period for the reward, and if the bounty is, after some study, in bad faith, then the site denies the claim the transaction.

Plus the site could take a small cut for its costs.

Edit: no I'm not reading other posts, just submitting my2c.

I'm biased in this scenario since I've yet to encounter an issue with cheating and the speedgame I run is an MMO, which makes cheating very difficult. Currently, we utilize the game's premium currency as a method of incentivizing other runners and have already taken steps towards a "bounty" system within our community. The only current issue we see right now (we're just rolling out this new system) is that we can't sustain our prizes over time.

However, this is where it brings up a point: we can grind for hours (or spend hundreds of dollars) with a potential to lose all of the MMO's premium currency to a cheater, but we take this risk regardless. There's already been some good points already discussed/asked: leaving the requirements up to the person putting up their money, multiple verifiers of the bounty submissions, where is the bounty money held, can the bounty be something more than money (ie. premium currency in an MMO speedgame), etc., but at the end of the day, it's whether you'd want to take a risk and put your money up for grabs. Risk vs reward.

Granted, if I'm placing money on something, people better be satisfying me to get my money.

@pentaleks if you want to assume the worst in people, then assume it's easy enough to create an account to post a bounty and then renege without consequence. A trusted third-party escrow service is the best way to ensure payouts are real. I don't know if the community of bounty offerings or seekers is really that big to support it. Someone would have to maintain a database of money per goal, be aware of possible overlaps for combining pools, and allow for withdrawal after some time deciding what to do if the person who made the bounty is unreachable for confirming a video or explanation meets their requirements.

As for cheating, yeah, that's going to be a problem to figure out. Even with live events, unless the person offering the bounty is present, there's another level of trust for the people at the event. Imagine some TG level of collusion coming out if this got big.

I think if it happens the description on the video will have to say I want to collect the bounty because you cold have unsuspecting people just submitting a WR and getting told no because they for example didn't stream it. That is if the guide lines are in place. ^_^

@ZenicReverie we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars kept in escrow over years. This not only raises risk of everything being stolen but also could have legal implications. It's not easy to implement as the idea makes it sound.

I'm not saying it's easy. Actually, quite the opposite of what I said.

This feature would allow for more community interaction on site (cough privatemessages cough) so def. a +1 from me.

BUT I do have to wonder, how will there be an insured way of payment for those trying to claim the bounty. Everyone can just claim to want to give away XX$ for Y and then never deliver. would there be some sort of holding account (idk a SRC paypal account) you have to pay the money to first so it can then be distributed to the claimer?

I would think the hit on one's reputation and credibility would be enough if you didn't pay out, but I guess that only applies to "more well known" speedrunners.

I don't think bounties have ever been that big of a deal. Not much of a need to implement a feature supporting them other than maybe a new forum section for bounties. For accepting the claim, it's up to the people posting the bounty to decide on their standards. In terms of what guarantees the bounty being rewarded I think would require a third party holding funds to distribute to the claimer, which isn't something this site should get involved in for a myriad of reasons. As for payment there's plenty of payment services like paypal, venmo etc. that will transfer funds for you. Not really an issue.

I think there might be some issues given the possibility of cheating with the website having a feature to facilitate financial transactions. I mean, it's one thing to have a forum area where people can talk about doing bounties etc., but if someone doesn't come through with something, that liability shouldn't fall on the website to make someone make good on their bounty, or be liable to return monies in case it's revealed someone cheated or something.

First of all, I really like the idea of skip/glitch bounties, and I don't think cheating will be a serious issue with them. Any member of the community can independently verify the skip's existence and usefulness. The only potential issue I see with that is, what exactly counts as a skip? If you clearly define the requirements, say, any new glitch or strategy that results in a measurable time save in a speedrun, that should cover most stuff, but you still might have some weird edge cases, like what if a new skip saves 5 seconds, but wastes 10 if the RNG is unfavorable and is only 10% consistent, does that count as a useful skip? What if the skip consistently saves a single frame in an otherwise fairly unoptimized game? What if it only works on a certain version of the game that typically isn't used?

As for WR bounties, as much as I like the idea, I think cheating would be a serious issue (sure, doesn't happen that often now, but throw money, or even the possibility of money, into the mix and you'll start seeing it a lot more often). Even though verification standards will be a lot higher for bounties, that also means people will work harder to make their cheated runs look legitimate, especially with the promise of a monetary reward if they manage to pull it off. It's also worth noting that not everyone is capable of streaming, so anyone who can't stream would be automatically disqualified from bounties if performing the run live was a requirement.

I think no matter what you're likely to have instances of verification being too strict and people not getting the reward even though they deserve it, or not being strict enough and giving it to someone who doesn't deserve it. For leaderboards the risk of accidentally verifying a fake run is acceptable and easy to resolve, but if you give a cheater money, that money is gone.

For those who have mentioned live events as a potential solution, consider that people can cheat in plain sight, see: https://tinyurl.com/ybwyztjl I think handcams might be a good potential solution, but the previous comments show that even that might not be a great solution.

One creative solution might be randomized input squences. If inputs are being tracked via handcam or another method, we could have players make a sequence of moves (generalized for most input methods, such as ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA) that updates every 24 hours or so on speedrun.com. The player will have to make that sequence once or multiple times during their run, during cutscenes or loading screens. They must also submit the run with the sequence, DAY OF. If the sequence updates on speedrun.com, their run becomes invalid.

Example Bounty: Sub 1hr Any% of Super Mario Odyssey. The player starts a live run with (preferably) a handcam or a widget that shows controller inputs on Twitch. For every loading screen, the player must enter the randomized sequence updated on speedrun.com at 12am, for instance: ↑←A→↑↓A. Best case scenario, someone builds a controller input tracker that interfaces with speedrun.com and can verify that this code is entered correctly. @Pac and others, does this sound possible?

Edit: Lol guess not. Worth a shot :)

That idea is...well not good. Some games have no loading screens, loading screens that take almost no time or cutscene skips. That means for all those games, doing that random input would lose you a lot of time over the course of the run especially if you get nervous and forget it.

Plus, what happens if you start a run at like 10:50pm and by the time you finish it’s 12:30am. Now that run is completely invalid because the random sequence changed. Now you’re punishing people for the times they stream at.

Also, time zones really butcher that idea too because each time zone will be affected differently unless you standardize it at 12:00 across all time zones (very hard).

EDIT: just thought of something else - people can use so many different controllers on PC, especially with emu. Not every controller has an A button or an X button so not everyone can do the same input unless you account for multiple controllers.

There’s also games like Pokemon that rely on holding inputs during loading screens and other places in order to manipulate RNG. So doing this would actually sabatoge the game and ruin the run.