Posts Tagged ‘status’

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.