This is commonly brought up. There are a bunch of reasons why its not winner take all. Here's a summary as far as I can remember:

1) Endless circles of attacking the leader. Endless games.

2) 1/7 players winning leads to lots of frustration over never gaining points. A good indication of this is when I first put the changes up for this month and the tourney points were used on regular tables. They reward first much more. And it wasn't fun to play game after game and constantly loose.

3) Deal making is an interesting part of the game.

I agree early flagging isn't good. But rewarding only first is not the greatest way to solve it since it hurts the game in other ways.

i agree Ryan, 2nd and 3rd should be rewarded as well.

currently the scores for the places are like this (0 tables for simplicity)

7th -50
6th -35
5th -25
4th 0
3rd 25
2nd 35
1st 50

i think the loss for 7th is too big and the win for 1st is too small

my proposal would be

7th -30
6th -30
5th -20
4th 0
3rd +10
2nd +20
1st +50

by giving 2nd and 3rd smaller shares, players are more motivated to fight for 1st instead of flagging early. it has been more like that in the past months. i think it worked well. thoughts?

shevar i think that's brilliant

I appreciate the reply Ryan. I see your point and I don't know if I have the solution. Hopefully you'll figure it out someday. I'm glad that you agree that early flags aren't very fun. I agree that deal making is an interesting part of this game. The nature of deals is key though. I think that the "placate to the early leader so he'll give me a high position" deal isn't all that interesting.

SHEV THAT IS PERFECT!
The loss for 5th - 7th shouldnt be so severe. Often players get a good stack early in the game but wont make a competitive move to win, because they may fail and take a huge loss or even if they succeed there is no guarantee they can hold a high position. It pays to be risk averse, then you end up with a bunch of 2-3 territory people that want to stack up and demand a lengthy and boring fight for position later in the game.

Also reducing the amount for second place, it will create a bigger incentive for #2 or #3 to try and win. Currently you would only get a 35% increase while potentially risking a 200% decrease.

The biggest gameplay problems with kdice are:
1) Endgame: The horrific crying for finishing last, endless boring games with everyone waiting so people can avoid 5th or 6th place...
2) Early flags lack of competition because the risk for trying to win isnt worth the penalty for failure.

I's not sure but I think some dom calculations might compound the problems. Anyway dom is complex start with Shev's recommendations first.

make it so after, say, the 10th round, anyone with 1 stack loses buyin/10 per turn (which doesn't go to the winner, not to encourage farming), 2 stacks buyin/20.

this will keep people from sitting around doing nothing waiting for some kind of windfall.

Awesome idea rigor!
I was thinking that 1st and 2nd place dom score should go down every turn by round 20, because if 1-2 cant make people flag after 20 rounds they obviously arent dominant.

The entire table should lose points for long boring games.

I think maybe there shouldnt be zero sum games, perhaps (+5 points at 0 level, decreasing for longer games). Maybe at 500 level games this would be the difference between a game being net positive +200 or net negative -200 for a long manufactured boring game).

I think this was going somewhere....

I like shevars idea.

im glad you like my idea (even though it isnt mine, since it has been like that before), but the person im trying to convince is somebody else...

So what do you think Ryan?