I'm back (at least, sort of! ) with a new idea for the game, which would have a small but profound effect on the game.

The idea is to change the £250,000 from being a fixed jackpot to an accumulator, that increases in size each game:

Every game the £250,000 is not opened on the table, the value of the £250,000 increases by £1,000 in the next game. When the £250,000 is opened on the table, the value is reset back to £250,000.

Players who are in live play and win the £250,000, will win the accumulated amount, and the amount is reset for the next game. Players who have dealt and discover the £250,000 on the table, resets the accumulator for the next game.

The average increase in cost for each game (at most) is £45.45 - which, due to being in an amount that has only been won 3 times, have a negligible increase on the costs of the show. There are many effects that will happen cause of this change:

It increases the tension in a proveout with the £250,000
Players who have dealt will have a stronger incentive to swap the £250,000 away from the table
The more shows the £250,000 is away from the table, the more involving the game becomes
The tension with the £250,000 in play at 2-box
The potential to be the show's largest winner of all time
Also the potential to have the Banker's biggest victory of all time

Well, that's my idea for the day. Thoughts, comments? Who knows, anything could happen when the £250,000 is in the box.

No it isn't - the offers have to be higher with the jackpot in play, so that would increase the total winnings!

If this had come into effect immediately following Alice's game, Suzanne would have had a jackpot of £879,000 (as 629 games passed without a jackpot win before her). What would her offers have been like earlier in the game with that? And dozens of other games would have been fundamentally different as a result. I'm not convinced. That said, it would still be more affordable than it looked, and be a talking point...

I thought the idea was that it reset back to £250,000 whenever it was opened on the table (post-deal or otherwise), so wouldn't it have been £250,000 + the amount accumulated since the £250,000 was last on the table?

Oh I missed that bit. So yes, the most it would ever have been is about £325k in one of those long runs with the £250k not on the table.

I assumed the idea was for a jackpot that rolled until won in Eggheads fashion because for some reason I imagined Endemol might be desperate enough to try that one. :O

Anything that encourages a hypo-swap is a very bad thing in my eyes. I don't see that the gameplay needs any permanent changes to it really.

Of course, another gameshow (which is still airing) that features a jackpot rollover is the Endemol-produced BBC 2 show, Pointless!

A similar idea was tried on the US Millionaire about 10 years with eventual winner over $2,000,000, IIRC.

Yes, $2.18m. Hilariously, in one of the rollover games there was an error that saw a player wrongly given as having got a question wrong, he was invited back and played for his $1.7m+ rollover, and he won the jackpot.

So their question error cost them over $700,000. To top it off, the revised episode got shunted off against the Super Bowl. To put that in UK terms: imagine if the Llewellyn-Bowens had got their second £1m question, and the episode was aired against an England World Cup match on the BBC.

It's an interesting idea but I think the implementation would be very messy and ultimately confusing. You can't change the actual box value. That has to stay as £250,000. To keep it seperate seems to me to be a bit confusing, and it doesn't really add anything. What's the difference between £250,000 and say £300,000. Not much really when you get down to it.

By confusing I mean the fact that deal is at it's heart an incredibly simple game. 22 boxes. Offers along the way. Open the box. That's it. Ok, there's the occasional gimmick week. But the core gameplay stays the same. I don't like the idea of seperate accumulators and the like running alongside.

What they should do is add an extra £250,000 for every episode it isn't won. That makes things much more interesting and doesn't reek of desperation at all.

I actually did a game with four £250k boxes for h2005 before he played, hidden away from the forum - because I genuinely thought it was plausible enough as to warrant him having a practice game under such rules. The £250k win he actually saw was not that much less desperate.