For anybody paying attention, here we have an interesting phenomenon with @everythink. He started using the bot recently, and then instantly paid me 5 Steem, even before he started earning curation rewards. I set it up so someone who has no curation rewards gets his payment ratio capped at 0.025, but then as soon as his first curation reward came in, his payment ratio jumped up to something insane like 138.
Is this a bug? Almost. It allows a new account the ability to buy a first-place vote for almost free, but only a very new account. An account voting first with high curation rewards will see the free benefit decay away very quickly.
Another way to think of it is that this allows an account to "pre-pay" their voting slot. I do not recommend that anybody do this. Of course I can't prevent you from sending me money, but if you pre-pay my bot, you're assuming that the bot will be around for a long time. I have never made any guarantee of this, and any money you send me in expectation of future curation rewards is entirely at your own risk.
Have you examined impact to others in the pool? I think I performing worse that my stats when I tested by random voting. My active voting is much higher than current (about 300% more). Are you planning changes?
Unfortunately my curation rewards are low as well, so your drop in rewards can't merely be explained by the pay-to-place system.
I have not analyzed the impact to others in part because the changes are very slow (any individual change takes 3 days to propagate through to rewards), so it's difficult or impossible to figure out exactly what changes had what effects on rewards.
I have some major changes planned, but I'm about to become very busy in the rest of my life so it may be a while before I actually get a chance to implement the changes.
To see a lower limit on how poorly you could perform, check the curation rewards of my @philipnbrown account. I always vote that account after all of my clients, so it's guaranteed to have lower curation efficiency than anybody else. To see the upper limit on performance, check my @biophil account. I always vote it first.
Thanks for response. I appreciate the upper (@biophil) and lower(@philipnbrown) voting data; it is very helpful. Clever idea for discovery. I guess the lower returns are the result of the whales voting earlier then.
Weirdly, right now @biophil is not the upper limit. For a short time, @everythink will be the upper limit. This is due to a weird bug somewhere in somebody's system that caused my @biophil account to vote last on every post for a couple days. I've fixed the bug, but it will take a few days for @biophil to be good again.