IAAF Prediction Contest (Trackandfieldnews buddy league)

[Jnathletics]

I ended up 773d or something. By my calculation if Samitova/Galkin had won in Champsionship time (as did the victor) I would have finished second! Something's not right about a competition that can vary so much on one pick.

No you wouldn't have finished 2nd. Some of us in front of you also had Samitova as our captain. I bet quite a few had seen her potential CR points, also. So, a what if scenerio here can't account for others.

[Powell]

It would have actually been possible to pick 20 gold medallists from 20 different countries in order to score absolute maximum points.

Women:
Yekaterina Volkova (captain)

I wonder if even one of the 7000 participants had Volkova as the team captain :?

[ChrisIAAF]

Hi everyone

I thought I would introduce myself and ask for your feedback on this fantasy game. I work with the IAAF and was partially responsible for the planning and set up of this fantasy game (of course it was ontop of my daily role). As one of the more active message boards involved in this years game - I was hoping there may be some people willing to provide feedback on what format we could consider in the future.

The concept was thought of here at the IAAF, but the design and scoring was done by an external company.

Let me address one issue first before everyone brings it up.... Yes the scoring mistakes and a few trading issues detracted from the game. In a game like this it is crucial that the scoring is accurate the first time (doesn't need to be updated) and unfortunately that was not the case (resulting in hundreds of emails, espeically when it inolves Kluft who was selected on most peoples teams !).

So, assuming that the scoring is accurate next time....any feedback on the future of this game would be appreciated. Subject to internal review it is possible that we could bring something similar back next year.

feel free to give feedback on the current game or on suggestions for what you might like in the future. Post responses here or email them to me (I think you can find my email in the members list)

1) did the limitation of one athlete per country help or hinder the game? The other option is to have a budget, but that is more complicated (and it is a bit too easy in my opinion if there are no limitations on your selections)

2) We would have to look into rights issues - not sure we could do it for the Olympic Games

3) Would people be interested in a game that went for a season (eg covered the Golden League meetings and perhaps some others in 2008? )

I would see that each meeting would have its own winner, as well as an overall winner for the season...how would the selections and trading work? obviously single day meetings are different to a nine day championship

4) does a game that involves "trading" make it more interesting than a simple prediction game? If so how could that work for a whole season? As an aside the whole idea is that people stay invovled in the game and in the sport - rather than making some predictions and then leaving.

5) how important are prizes? Or is the friendly competition the main thing?

6) obviously next year with more time we would like to expand the rules and set-up into more languages making it easier for non-english speakers to participate - although we did have over 100 different nationalities represented.

Any other ideas or suggestions?

Please accept my apologies if I do not reply individually to each post/email - but I do value your suggestions of how we might make this better next year.

Thanks in advance for your assistance

Chris
IAAF

[Jnathletics]

1) did the limitation of one athlete per country help or hinder the game?

Keep it at one athlete per country. This was the best feature of the whole game in my opinion. (Even the relay selection of 1 per country was great. It added variety to the game.)

3) Would people be interested in a game that went for a season (eg covered the Golden League meetings and perhaps some others in 2008?)

Definitely Yes!!!! I think a lot of people would be interested.

I would see that each meeting would have its own winner, as well as an overall winner for the season...how would the selections and trading work? obviously single day meetings are different to a nine day championship

On selection; (might want to keep the same 20 athletes) or allow for 2 or 3 per event, since all might not run all the GL meets, have one male and one female as captain again, but give out bonus points for achieving the GL jackpot, World records, meet records, (maybe even national or area records? ), etc... I wouldn't allow people to transfer more the 2 between meets as people would do whole sale trades to try and win the meet title only.

4) does a game that involves "trading" make it more interesting than a simple prediction game? If so how could that work for a whole season?

Again, Definitely Yes!!!! trading makes it more fun and interactive. Still, I would limit how many trades can take place between meets, My opinion only allow 2.

5) how important are prizes? Or is the friendly competition the main thing?

Not very, but like a program or some other survenior from a meet could be the award for the meets, even a t-shirt is a good prize for me. I think the best prize might be an autographed program with a few of the top athletes in the GL meet.

Other suggestions ?

On scoring; what about different catagories.
Meet winner (total points from a given meet)
Overall winner (same as WC contest, best 20 athlete scores- one meet one event)
Men's overall winner (best 10 athlete's scores - one meet one event)
Women's overal winner (best 10 athlete's scores - one meet one event)

Combined GL meet winner (this would take the entries score from each meet and total them up for a grand total.) could have break out for men's and women's categories, also.

Please accept my apologies if I do not reply individually to each post/email - but I do value your suggestions of how we might make this better next year.

Don't apologies, it was a great game. Loved it and will be willing to play it as often as you have it. Thank you for all the work in setting it up.

[donley2]

Chris IAAF.

I think the concept was outstanding. I think the country limit and the trading make for an interesting and fun game. I think with some very specific clarification on the rules next time (particularly the details about when you can trade for athletes and still receive their points) this would be an outstanding game. The prizes are not that big a deal although having the one really nice prize is cool. Would it be possible at this point to make everyones teams visible (for this years game)? Some of us are curious how the top people ended up with their scores.

[mump boy]

agree with all the above. espcially ebout the rules concerning trading they were very unclear and seemingly arbitrary at times.

i slightly disagree about the prizes, while i would definitely still play if there was no prize i think i't a bit cheap when there were 7000 entants for only the first place to get a prize. there should be great prizes for top 3 and top 10 should get t-shirts. when jon ued to run his own prediction contests from his bedroom there were all kinds of prizes and merchandie from meets including programmes, signed t-shirts etc. so i think the IAAF themselves could give prizes that would be very much appreciated by fans, with very little expense or effort on your part

[donley2]

Chris IAAF.

Couple other things. For this years game, they never did get the buddy league averages correct. For future years, since a huge number of us are statistics geeks, statistic on who was picked as peoples mens and womens captains would be fun.

[ChrisIAAF]

Thanks for the suggestions - please keep them coming especially with regards to the format for a "season long" game next year.

Regarding Statistics - I think we could arrange to make the winners team and trades (after the 29th) visibile and will ask the developers to do this, and will send around an email to all participants once finalised. I agree that next time it would be great to have a feature to show which players have been selected in the most teams, and who are the most common captains - should be simple to do that - and also and easy way to see how many people were registered, it wasn't simple this time around

Regarding the buddy league average - I was confused as well. I asked the progammers how they scored it and their response you can find below. For me this does actually make sense as it protects you from people joining the league and not actually making picks - or not bothering to do it well.

A league's value/score is performed by creating the median of the different members' points.
In order to prevent leagues with large member numbers from having disadvantages, we discard one bad result per every five players.

Example: League "Super-11" has six members, so one low-scoring team can be removed.

Points member A 17
Points member B 12
Points member C 15
Points member D 9
Points member E 3 (discarded)
Points member F 12
Overall score = (17 + 12 + 15 + 9 + 12) : 5 = 13

Cheers
OG

Prizes - I agree that while not the most importat thing, it should be easy enough next time to secure t-shirts, memorabilia and the like for places 2-10 etc. I am sure we can keep an attracitve overall prize.

My thoughts for a season long game may also be something like this, but we have time to work on it if we get the approval....


* You pick an initial "squad" of 20 athletes (one or two per country again - which might be even harder for a golden league season which has less countries competing)

* For each individual meet you must choose 10 of your squad to be "active" and score points in the meet (definitely only one per country)

* You choose a captain (either at the start of the season, or a new captain for each meet??)

* Between each meet you could trade maybe 2 athletes from your squad of 20

* defientely bonus points for WR, Meet Record, GL jackpot etc


Chris

[Powell]

i slightly disagree about the prizes, while i would definitely still play if there was no prize i think i't a bit cheap when there were 7000 entants for only the first place to get a prize. there should be great prizes for top 3 and top 10 should get t-shirts.

I was thinking along similar lines, but I actually think there should be a lot more minor prizes. Make it top 100, even it's just official WCh key rings or pens.

[lapsus]

Regarding the buddy league average - I was confused as well. I asked the progammers how they scored it and their response you can find below. For me this does actually make sense as it protects you from people joining the league and not actually making picks - or not bothering to do it well.

A league's value/score is performed by creating the median of the different members' points.
In order to prevent leagues with large member numbers from having disadvantages, we discard one bad result per every five players.

Example: League "Super-11" has six members, so one low-scoring team can be removed.

Points member A 17
Points member B 12
Points member C 15
Points member D 9
Points member E 3 (discarded)
Points member F 12
Overall score = (17 + 12 + 15 + 9 + 12) : 5 = 13

Cheers
OG

Chris

First of all, thank you for creating a very interesting game that certainly kept my interest during the game because of the transfer possibility.

However, and not to keep nitpicking (although I guess that's what this board is for :twisted: ), the above formula doesn't match the reported averages either. Maybe there is some subtlety that I'm missing.

An example from the game: the best ranked team with 6 members (Team Undies) has reported average of 2299. Team members' scores are

1. ASAMWebber 2270
2. lashawn 2265
3. Sampo800 2035
4. EvzenHuml 2010
5. romper 1960
6. timhawkes83 * 1915 (discarded)

According to the formula above, you get (2270 + 2265 + 2035 + 2010 + 1960) : 5 = 2108

Thinking about the season long game, one thing to consider when drawing up the rules is that some events are contested much more frequently than the others, leading to a smaller pool of athletes to pick from and perhaps causing situations where everyone "has to" pick the same athletes to stay within country restrictions.

Maybe restrict picks so that some portion of the active picks each week would have to be in non-golden league events, and/or make the number of "active" athletes for each meet quite small - without making the number so small that everyone just picks the same "unbeatable" athletes every week?