the other issue is, the botters seem to have an advantage when clicking on a potato that has finished payment verification vs those that have expired. now the starting price is so low those few non-botters that do win a potato when they have expired earn 2ltc at most. So the earnings have actually be skewed further in favour of the botters.
That's true, fighting the verification timer is annoying, because unless you know when that 6th verification goes though, it's really hard to focus your clicks for the full duration. Adding in a 'Finishing Payment' timer to give everyone a heads up would be handy? MOAR TIMERZ
We're going to be adding in a display for the number of verifications on the current payment, as well as the current amount paid. The verifying payment timer does take a significant amount of time, we do wait for 6 verifications. Currently, six verifications allows for the lowest amount of transaction fees. Coinbomb for example only waits for two verifications to switch owners on a bomb, but I believe they wait for six before they pay out the previous user, sending coins that only have two confirmations causes massive transaction fees. We prefer the previous owner to get their payout instantly when the potato changes owners, so there isn't a concern over whether or not the payment is coming. Your suggestion, to make a static countdown timer when the potato switches owners may be a good idea. On that note, we are addressing the issue with timers desyncing over time on the website. The site is intended to be fully functional without ever having to refresh the page, so any gap in this functionality is basically a bug that we need to fix. To be more specific, it is currently known that:
-Timers desync by a couple seconds by the time they run out without refreshing
-The display for the send address sometimes does not properly fade away once a payment has been sent, requiring a refresh to get back the input bars
-When a potato is grabbed, it should immediately update to display that it is locked and which user is trying to buy it. This happens most of the time, sometimes it does not.
If you have any other suggestions, or are aware of any other front-end usability issues, please let us know!
Best Regards,
The Bit Potato Staff