Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

So this isn't strictly a videogame, so it might need to be moved to off-topic, but there is a website called Saltybet where you can place bets (fake money often referred to as Saltybucks) on fighting matches that are played out by AIs in Mugen, the fighting game that incorporates fighters from hundreds of different games.

It's a rather interesting concept, and it's fun to watch Ronald from McDonalds fight up against one of the many variations of Ryu from Street Fighter, or a Gundam face a Guilty Gear, while betting on who you think will win for saltybucks, slowly climbing out of the salt mines (the term for being poor in Saltybet).

Anyone follow Saltybet?

Salty (the creator), recently installed a huge update that divided the characters into tiers, and fights only happen within tiers now. Before, fights could happen across tiers, so there were tons of extremely lopsided matches, while now there are generally close fights with high potential for upsets, which is a large part of the fun.

My 2 biggest gripes with the roster Salty uses are:

Too many characters have excessive health/do excessive damage. (ie - any dbz fighter)

Some characters have glitchy hitboxes or no hitboxes at all which makes the character in question invincible.

Salty bet is fun four about four hours. Then you realize that some characters are brokenly overpowered (DBZ in general except Android 18, Ash, Sakura etc). It ceases to be funny or exciting at that point.

d00d. This is the coolest thing I have ever seen.

I feel like I've stumbled upon some alternate 4chan universe.

OBAMA


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I actually feel like my IQ is being lowered. And I love it.

It gets funnier with fellow crazy people in Skype or Teamspeak. I certainly wouldn't hang around there every evening or even every week, but once in a while it can be very entertaining to watch something so stupidly random.

That is strangely entertaining. Chat is hilarious sometimes.

Still, it feels kinda embarrassing, like I should alt+tab it when someone enters the room

 AWesker1976 wrote:
My 2 biggest gripes with the roster Salty uses are:

Too many characters have excessive health/do excessive damage. (ie - any dbz fighter)

Some characters have glitchy hitboxes or no hitboxes at all which makes the character in question invincible.

This is indeed still a problem, but it's a lot less of one now than before. Before who fought who was completely random, so curb stomps were common. Now that they're in tiers, based presumably on a combination of their underlying stats and win/loss, there are a lot more close fights, and pretty anything not in S tier (aside from DBZ) is going to be a reasonably decent fight with fair hitboxes and the like.

It's still an issue because S tier ranges from "mildly better than A tier" to "straight up invincible" with all sorts of wacky in between. I think the best solution is to have an SS tier for those guys, characters like Duane, Rare Akuma, Dark Donald, etc.

On the whole though, I feel it's a lot better than before, and I'm not just saying that because my saltybucks total is rapidly approaching 100k.

Ok, sorry for the massive derailment here, but I was curious about this Dark Donald character you mention and I found this jewel. You have no idea how hard it was not to burst laughing in the middle of the office.

Warning: 1 bad word

The chat is the best part of this thing. These guys regularly crack me up with their quips.

I'm finding it's not necessarily true that DBZ always wins.

I actually gamble real money on real fights in real life, and the same principles seem to hold true here. It's usually better to bet on the dogs because the payout is disproportionate to the actual risk. Meaning, you can lose your bets more often than you win, but still make money.

So far I am making money betting against waifus and against DBZs. Waifus especially tend to attract really wacky odds.

Generally, I'll check the chat to see what direction the bets look like they're going, and then bet against that.

So far I'm losing about 80% of my bets, but I am still way ahead on the balance sheet... all it takes is one win at 200:1 odds...

Yeah, betting does tend to overstate that favorite. Mixed with the recent introduction of matchmaking, upsets happwn a lot more often, so 10:1 upsets or better, which were happening maybe once every couple hours before, now happen maybe once or two an hour, if not more.

And the general rule when I started was to never bet DBZ, which held pretty true for a while. Then they added a few guys like Goku Z2, and some other imbalanced characters, and they became better bets. Now, with tiers, they tend to be decent bets since their beams are likely giving them an advantage over fighters of similar skill.

Waifus are tough to gauge now, but their fearsome reputation from before makes them favorites usually when it's close.

Anyone else see the Castlevania tourney last night? I was kind of disappointed the finals wasn't Trevor Belmont v. Dracula, but it was a pretty sweet tourney nonetheless.

Damn you for introducing this thing to me!!!

Waifus are definitely over-rated at the moment. I wonder if the lines will move to adjust, or if people will still keep betting based on reputation. So far the vast majority of my winnings are against waifus haha

I wish there was some way to know the odds ahead of time, but I guess that isn't possible. I find myself getting really disappointed when it turns out I've bet on a favorite. Like, right now, Thunder Mask is favored against Goku Z2 at -320 and I am on the wrong side of it, unfortunately. Yep, Goku just won. Damn. I would've felt better about that loss if at least Thunder Mask was the underdog.

So far, general guidelines emerging. Bet against:

Waifus
DBZs
Disrespect
Fan favorites (any well-liked, cool, or easily recognizable character)

Just from reading the chats and looking at the odds, it seems like people are more interested in picking winners than actually making money.

All this "all in" stuff is just crazy talk. Never, ever bet more than 10% of your total bankroll, but 5% is more like it unless you know you have a really good bet.

Like, right now was just Super Dust Amiba (or whatever) vs Goku Nex... Amiba favored 721:1... people talking about ALL IN on Amiba... please. I still put $10 on Goku, because if you've got to bet $721 to get $1, you're making the wrong bet anyway, no matter how likely you think the win is. Mathematically speaking, you've got to be right 99.986% of the time on that bet just to BREAK EVEN. Forget about making a profit. That's a "no value" bet.

EDIT: And yeah, I watched that Castlevania Tournament. Cool stuff. As soon as I saw the guy who ended up winning it, I thought no way was I going to bet against him with all those invincibility frames during his supers. He won me a bit of money. Favored, but not as favored as he should have been with how broken he appears to be.