Ah, the big five-O. It’s an important milestone — frankly, there are too many candles to fit on one cake. For us, it means just about a year’s worth of weekly releases. Of course, our initial releases were internal to the FanFeedr team, but even so, the next release will mark the one-year anniversary of our development efforts.
After a month of heated FanFeedr Pick ’Em competition, we’re rolling out some changes this week that will make gameplay even more competitive:
Revamped game badges
New badge goals for better competition across leagues. Our original rules awarded badges for the same number of wins no matter what the league, which meant that NCAA leaders were well ahead of their counterparts in the professional leagues (since the NCAA has more games, thus more opportunities to win). Our new rules level the playing field (no pun intended), making badge awards more consistent based on the number of games in each league.
A new badge level. Since it will take more competition to get badges in some leagues, we’re adding a Coach badge between Scout and Manager to recognize newer players.
Pick prices also reflect the number of games. We’ve also changed the points required to make picks, so it won’t cost any more points to be competitive in NCAA Basketball than in the NFL.
Better Facebook updates. Pick ’Em posts to your Facebook profile have more information, and arrive more consistently, showing your Facebook friends just how smart you are.
Badges for picking special events. We’ve also introduced new badges for the Super Bowl and NBA All-Star game, with more to come.
Team logos for boxscores and Facebook posts
All professional teams for football, baseball, basketball and hockey, and most (if not all) for soccer.
Major colleges and universities, with more added all the time
As usual, we have more improvements in store across the board, so please stay tuned for news about new game features, improved Twitter integration, additions to our iPhone app, and other goodies.
To all of you who have played: thank you. To all of you who haven’t tried it out: it couldn’t be simpler (see?). We have also learned a lot, and as a result, we are going to make some changes to the badges and the points that you get. The Cliffs’ Notes version:
We changed the amount that you win per game to represent the “real” cost of the outcome (since we aren’t using lines.) That means that you can’t automatically double your points with each bet, but it doesn’t change that a win is a win.
We changed the badging system to make it fairer. There are some single days where NCAA Basketball has over 123 games in a single day. We factored that against the limited number of NFL games, the total number of games in baseball, and so on, so that the badge levels represent your skill level, fairly in each sport.
Net-net: you will see new badges on your profile as of tomorrow, and it will be harder to get the top badges. That having been said, you will find badge achievement more rewarding.
We are also going to introduce a “Top Badge” for each sport, which is the equivalent of being a Mayor in FourSquare. No more fussing about who knows the most about the NFL, you will have a single winner.
Please let us know what else that we can do to make Pick’Em more fun for you, by giving us Pick’Em feedback here.
We have made it so that our links work on mobile devices. If you want to follow your favorite teams on your Blackberry, Android, Palm or Windows Mobile device, just add follow the team on Twitter.
You can find your teams’ Twitter account by going to the team page, like this one, and clicking on “Follow on Twitter.”
Gaming
New and better badges, you can see them on the Leaderboard.
We added a FanFeedr Pick’Em page that allows you to pick all of the games on a given day. You can access this from any page on the service using the “FanFeedr Pick’Em” link above the search bar.
Adding a user’s winning percentage after their picks on the Leaderboard, so you can see who is a “volume” winner and who is picking accurately
Reduced posting a user’s picks to Facebook and the service so that you don’t get overwhelmed with updates (and neither do your friends.)
Service
Revamped our schedules pages so that you can see upcoming games and refer to past games as well, easily.
Fixed sharing by email so that the links work properly
