Hello everyone!

Remember back when I said the winning city of the Racetrack promotion would get a gold version? Yeah, me neither. But a temporal copy of myself from tomorrow came back and told me I just spent a lot of time on it.

You will now see a new HELP RACETRACK. The old one is under HELP PROMORACETRACK. The new functionality is all exempt in the case of the Promo Racetrack, which remains the same. Incidentally, that one is broken for a few days. It needs a new set of pets.

There is a ton of information on the new Racetrack system in that file. To summarize, though: You won't see the betting stats any longer. Now you may RACETRACK SHOW <racer> and RACETRACK STATUS. Taking into account things like clues in the helpfile, type of track, conditions of the track, stats of the pet, etc... you can figure out what pet will win. Then bet as per normal. Once the race begins, you can see the 'true' odds. Your winnings will be according to those odds.

Here's where we get odd. This is a sort of test for some economic ideas. Gold bet on the racetrack is given to the owning city, minus 10%. The winning city also has to allocate funds to pay for any winnings. Essentially, though, this is a revenue generator for the city with only a minor goldsink property. (They can also enable it to pay out money to the first place winner!). Hopefully this incentivizes more gold changing hands.

I'll also look into adding other things to it, like Derbies, seasonal rewards, etc. Right now we're watching to see how it does.

Because technically someone could get really good and win all of the moneys. There is a great deal of concealed information, but there are no lies... so it could happen. No one will be punished for that, for now. It would mean I need to hit the drawing board again.

-T

I will refund Duiran if someone figures it out, or it breaks, etc.

Penned by my hand on Quensday, the 5th of Slyphian, in the year 467 MA.