Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’

So in any game, or life really there is one simple concept. That is the concept of “risk vs reward”. It means exactly what it sounds like but the concept is a little more important than people generally give it credit. It is a trade off between what you could possibly get and what could possibly happen to you. If you buy that new car chicks will dig you more (reward) but your wife might hate the payment and seek some dude with a fancy car (risk).

In games this concept is usually embodied with points or simply death. If you bum rush that room room with a bunch of guys in it you may come out on top like Rambo and be all the more respected by your similarly nerdy counterparts, however if you run in and get shot in the face chances are they will think less of you.

Which brings us to sports where this concept is by far the most prevalent. The suicide squeeze, the home run swing with two strikes etc etc. In order to capture this feeling of reward and the let down of the risk I had to try to find a way to mimic this in predict-a-play. I came up with the concept of bonus scoring. So you during every at bat you will pick a base prediction. This choice is between the possible outcomes of that at bat such as single, double, triple, home run, etc. Each of these choices will have a point value which has been determined by the stats gathered in my previous posting. This in itself has a bit of risk vs reward, but I couldn’t stop there. There are all these secondary things that could happen during an at bat for instance a RBI, stolen base, wild pitch etc. Now these things don’t happen all that often with the exception of RBIs. So there is a large amount of risk vs reward. For the values I decided to make them modifiers instead of just assigning a point value. What this means is that an RBI will give you a 25% bonus lets say on whatever the base prediction was that you picked. Here is an example:

Your picks:
Base: Double (25 pts),
Bonus: RBI (+/- 25%), Error (+/- 100%)

AB Result:
Double and an error (no RBI)

Score:
43.75!!!
Correct double prediction + 25
incorrect RBI prediction -6.25
Correct error prediction + 25

So see what happened there? That is risk vs reward. The total points possible was 56.25 but because of the incorrect prediction it nocked you down some while still rewarding the other correct predictions. That also means had you only picked double and an error and the error didn’t occur then you would have had 0 points so you really have to be careful when you are playing with the bonus predictions.

Status Update
The code is coming along nicely I am starting to work on the administration panel now and will probably have it completed in the next couple of weeks. I still can’t get around having an administrator watch and score the game live due to the lag in feeds from MLB and other sites, but I think I will talk about this in the next blog update. Beta sign ups are right around the corner so make sure to stay tuned and subscribe using the link on the right.

I used to play…

Yeah yeah that is what they all say. I don’t remember really when the obsession started of hitting things with a bat and chasing after said things, I just know that as I get older that obsession is only heightened. I am sure the man to blame for this obsession is my father, and I thank him for that. He is also partially responsible for the game that I know baseball fans and sports fans everywhere will know about in the coming years.

One afternoon we were having lunch and we were reminiscing about how cool of a park the Oakland Coliseum was to watch a game. I apologize to those of you who are not in the California Bay Area and cannot relate to that, just imagine a girl or guy you are extremely attracted too and now imagine they are ninety five years old. If you’re still attracted to them and you aren’t ninety five then you’ve got issues.

Anyways, the Coliseum had something a long time ago where you could rent a device and play along with the game. My father and I were talking about how fun it was. You could predict what you thought was going to happen next. You would earn points for that and they would show the leaders up on the big screen during the game. At 12 years old I thought that was just about the height of technology and it just wasn’t going to get better than that. What I didn’t remember was you had to shell out like $15 and a deposit of $100 and leave your credit card with them just to get the device, so it faded away.

And then… along came the internet. I since then have been searching for that feeling, the fun that I had as a kid playing along with baseball and my friends and family. I can’t to this day believe that something like this doesn’t exist in the capacity that I think about it. Sure there are other sites that you pay for, you can predict scores and such and even fewer for Baseball. What I want is to create a site where you the fan can play for free and have a better experience doing it.  I am talking leagues, leader boards, live smack talking. All perfectly accessible so that you can play along while watching TV or at the game on a mobile device.

This blog is just the beginning. The site will expand. With my goal of taking over the fantasy sports world as we know it, why pick what players are going to be good, when you can actually play the game like a manger does. I chose Baseball because it is my first love when it comes to sports, but I plan on eventually branching out to other sports.

So for now this blog is here to allow me to rant during development and to keep people who are anxiously awaiting this type of game like I am informed on how the development is going and when they can get into beta. So stay tuned.