R50 tightens the competition

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
• Usual additions to content sources and sports coverage, with Winter Olympics news supplied by the AP.

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.

Until then, we thank you for your support.

Your friends at FanFeedr