Yes, Ruffhaus, "half-bet" was one of the first solutions that has been suggested, for the reasons you said. About the reasons (causes) of people not Taking Over CD-positions, in my Sat 28 Apr post there's a small recap of all has been said about it. After finding enough causes and put them in 5 Groups, we started find solution for Group 1 (CDed position are not worth the buy-in.) and the obvious generic solution is "Making the TO-price smaller". The question now is...HOW?
Several solutions have been proposed. The best (a bidding auction) has been discarded because Oli said it's not doable. "Half bet" has been turned into "Half bet with threshold" to solve some issues with the lowest worth positions. So, at the moment, there are 3 solutions still "alive":
1. All TO-prices are 0
;
2. "Half-bet with threshold"
3. "Comparison with original bet"
And this is a very small recap of what has been said about them (you'd better read previous posts):
1. Very simple and quite effective: most of CD-positions would be TOed in a while. But giving away a Country for free has some drawbacks, IE having one player in the game who has "nothing to lose" could encourage weird behaviours. Basically: if a position is not worthless, it shouldn't be totally costless. There's a reason why you pay points to play.
2. Simple and very effective in majority of cases. But it has faults as the pot of game raises, because a fixed thresold can be good for some group of games and bad for another. Basically: if you fix a low threshold it would be ineffective for high-stakes games and viceversa. Also, there are wide price- "steps" that create paradoxes.
3. You could call it also "60%-bet with a floating and progressive threshold". The threshold floats depending on how high was the original bet, so there can't be screwed positions that are expensive or good positions costless. Also, since it's progressive, there are no "steps" and no paradoxes. All TO-prices are always good and as much appealing as possible. So it's very effective in almost any case but.... it's rather complicated to explain how it works.