Many of you know that I founded a software company that I sold to Microsoft. But most of you probably don't know what that company did. It was a gamification platform called FantasySalesTeam which companies could use to award points to employees for achieving their internal metrics. Those points were placed on leaderboards and the twist was that everyone else in the company could build "fantasy teams" of the players. Very fun business to build and run. I became known as a global expert for gamification at the time; my title was Director of Gamification at Microsoft after the acquisition. I learned a LOT about how to motivate through leaderboards and prizes. One of the key things about leaderboards is that the top 20% will always want to compete. It doesn't really matter what the prizes are. There were always going to be 50-100 people vying for the top spots below; even without any $APE rewards. The bottom 30% will also always be the bottom. People that aren't that motivated don't all of a sudden become motivated by prizes; at least not easily. The target is the middle 50%. You want to move the middle. That's where you need focus. That's where prizes and rewards matter and yield the biggest "bang for your buck" in terms of engagement. Yuga hasn't seemingly figured this out. They tend to offer really strong prizes at the top and have them taper off meaningfully before they ever reach the folks who actually need the motivation. Adding 150k $APE to the Top 10 spots was essentially a waste of money; other than a hat-tip to the community to show they were listening to feedback. Yuga also has the luxury of creating things that cost less and can provide WAY more value than simply handing out money. Which is another thing that's kind of boggling about this decision. Rare game items or physical merch would have yielded significantly better engagement. And they already proved this years ago with the mobile game 🤷♂️ Yuga needs to hire an expert to help with designing their reward systems. They're just shooting from the hip right now and it's far from optimal. @dalegre @BoredApeYC