Bounties

	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 any 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 woudl 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.

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
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 just a bounty on a Pokemon time just better than mine to try an 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.