You want to play high stakes poker? Not here.

[magellan]

Balancing stuff is hard, and I had some thoughts about poker.
Right now a bet at one of the main stations is 50 cr, and 100 cr at one of the small stations.
Maybe that is too much, and would be more appropriate with 5 and 10 Cr. Seriously high stake games (100, 250,500?) could be reserved for places like Murchesons ditch or the pirate homeworld or maybe some of the human colonies.
What does the community think?

[Happy Corner]

I have always been completely indifferent to the poker minigame, and have never even tried it... and probably never will.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you threw the poker in there. It's a nice flavor thing, and something you might expect to see at a human space station on the rough-and-tumble galactic frontier (well, and exotic space age drugs with silly names). It's just that I'm much more interested in exploring and looting shit. I guess I'd be the kind of prospector captain who's all business and never fucks around when he's in town.

I'd say your ideas about the stakes are good. Keeping the stakes small at the main stations feels more logical (I can easily imagine most of the prospectors there would be poor themselves, and would shy away from high stakes), and it's less open to exploitation by players.

Making the high stakes games much more rare gives gamblers another reason to be explorers, too. Maybe the biggest games could be invite-only, requiring players to do a quest or have enough reputation first (with so much at stake, they wouldn't let just anyone belly up to the table, now would they?). That actually sounds like kind of a fun idea, a gambler searching for his invite to a legendary high-stakes game...

[magellan]

Actually the main Inspiration was "They played poker all the time on the Enterprise-D"
But your narrative fits too!

And trying to get an invite to that legendary game in a cave on an airless planet, with pirate kings, station commanders and megacorp execs attending, with incredibly high stakes, does sound like fun!

I guess I'd be the kind of prospector captain who's all business and never fucks around when he's in town.

Wouldn't your tribble make you a little more mellow?

[Arek_PL]

high stakes will be exploitable for people with some match skills (or google skills)
in rulette with some match its possible to get alot of starting money just make sure you never aproach 50 credits limit (IRL cheating like that will quickly be noticed) but poker is harder to cheat with so idea of searching for great game is nice and its new reason to explore

[felicityc]

I agree with jindog; just play and have fun Get your mind off the world and enjoy the game.
Why would anyone want to cheat? At anything. Theyre only cheating themselves. Cheats, Liars, Thieves; theyre all the same.

Cheating is really addictive. It's usually a way that people release tension and is often accompanied with other rather negative things like abused drugs. However, being an intel analyst in the past, I often challenge myself to understand and recognize the 'other side' of those things. Like- why would someone cheat? It doesn't feel very compelling to me, it doesn't feel satisfying. I had to study the Taliban in a similar manner. In shifting my perspective, I understand fully where the mistake lies, and it's not with anyone's character; anyone can be become a cheater if they just give it a try. You'll

It doesn't to them either. What it does mean is they gave up trying, and that's a lot more important than thinking of them as thieves. It means they're either taking advantage of that and helping others down that path, or have just succumbed to the pressure of life and in some cases it even becomes a 'well, everyone is cheating, so of course I have to cheat too', when that's very far from the truth. What I did learn from existing amongst such communities is they are identical to other negative-stigma communities; they are empathetic with one another and everyone else shuns/ridicules them, so even if they wanted to stop, once you get to a certain point people just scoff at you and no one asks if you're okay.

Of course, cheating in a single-player game with no one being harmed is totally meaningless to me in the scheme of things. I don't care how you skip steps in a game, and sometimes it's justified if it's grindy enough, my problem starts when it's also impacting other real players. Cheating at poker also is a skill, since poker is a game of trickery to begin with, not a game of luck.

You can try and 'game' blackjack with solvers, texas hold 'em would not be as efficient as that since there are far more possibilities, but really, blackjack is rather intuitive but the dealer always has a slight advantage. The hard part of gambling isn't figuring out how to keep going, it's figuring out how to stop when you're ahead.

Notably, I'm incredibly good at gambling when it's not real money, but the minute I tried a hand in Vegas I got dealer 21'd and went back to my room.

Anyway I found this site because I wrote a science fiction setting in 2015 (with roots to 2011) called Prospera and the main cast of immortal science-ego ascended gods were called Prospectors, so finding a scifi roguelike years after the fact is much nicer than finding out that 2010 tempest movie used the name Prospera so it's already been abused and thrown away into the forgotten movies den. Just wanted to rant about how cheaters need love too, or they'll never realize how much they're hurting people by cheating. Learning about cheating and how it's done actually teaches you basic fundamentals of the topic at hand, and teaches you the most simple exploits that can be observed and reacted to even playing clean.

I do highly recommend occasionally taking skill points in forgery, it may be useful, since no one takes forgery.
Magellan hasn't been on this forum for a year though so I don't suspect he is concerned with the stakes of poker in the game anymore.

[Spacehamster]

And I can't really tell anymore if that rnn generated text or not. Welp.