Bry: The basic idea is to take a pond as a tournament. Your final position is used to determine your "wins" and "loses", compared to final positions of other players.
The rating system for the pond games is still in a test mode. I'll try to do some experiments next week.
Anyway, no results will be lost and everything will be calculated from the very beginning.
So the most "unbalanced" game would be start with 1,000 points, and can get up to 500 bonus points - which is how many games will be towards the end of the game anyway!
There was an idea to have an option to set the starting points and the bonus value during the pond definition.
Anyway, it should be assured that no future pond game becomes unbalanced because of badly chosen parameters (e.g. starting with 50 points and bonus 5000). That's why this proposal has been created:
x = starting points (multiple of 40)
x/40 = bonus
The current parameters (20000, 500) follow this rule as well.
Anyway, it's interesting that even though almost everybody complained about the long runs caused by too many players, there are 6 new ponds with unlimited number of participants :-)