Bonus Calculation Suggestion

mm10583x

I have a suggestion for the Bonus system and I'm wondering what other people think.

Ostensibly, the bonus system exists to encourage people to seed more torrents more frequently but in practice it doesn't because it rewards you the same regardless of how much data you're seeding. When I first got my account years ago I would download a small file that nobody wanted and just leave my torrent client running 24/7 knowing that i would barely be uploading any data while collecting the same bonus as someone who seeds a lot of data.

So here is my suggestion - create an extra Addon bonus based on total data being seeded per hour. Below is an explanation of how this could be calculated:

Baseline bonus = .5 per hour
Example of Additive bonus based on total size of data being seeded per hour:

For the purposes of this example i'm going use 1 GB = 1000 MB but the site may use the technically correct 1024 MB per GB, i'm not sure.

So if i'm seeding 5 torrents and i've downloaded all the data for 4 torrents each of which is 1 GB, and only 2 GB of the fifth torrent (one of those torrents that has 30GB of videos), then the site registers me seeding 6GB every hour or 6000 MB per hour. A potential way to calculate the addon would be to divide this by 100,000MB (100GB):

6000/100,000 = .06

So my total bonus for that hour would be the Baseline of .5 + .06 = .56

I believe this would create significant incentive to seed more data more often by comparison to the current system or calculating it by number of torrents seeded instead of total data being seeded (there are many small size and low desirability torrents that can be used to game the system if calculated by number of torrents).

What do you all think? Agree, disagree? Why or why not?

I don't like it because it's biased. You might don't see it, but let me explain:

Since the most important asset in torrenting is your connection speed, if you have a reliable high speed connection you have seeding preference. That means you're being rewarded for something that's not a merit of yours, you are just expecting the system to reward you for doing the bare minimum which is to keep seeding your downloaded torrents.

What I think would be more fair in some sense is to reward seeders who are the only connected peers of a specific torrent. Let's say there's a torrent that was uploaded a year ago and you are the only one still seeding it, that makes you actually more valuable to the community overall.

Once someone requests a re-seed, the system could check how many people are actively seeding and if that number is below 3, let's say, it activates a upload multiplier bonus, this way whoever starts seeding that torrent in the next hours get either double or triple de upload amount or a fixed seed bonus reward based on the torrent size instead of the seeding hours.

Buffing the sbp multiplier woudn't be a good idea because it could be exploited by limiting your bandwidth to keep seeding for longer.