I think that the fantasy game "as is" has run it's course. It was intended to attract members but I seriously doubt that it does that. I think that the game needs a rethink. I know people enjoy the game but running it is another issue.

Vote here please

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I have a dream.... (Martin Luther King)

When we ran a Google ad it did attract new members who just wanted to play the game. These game players weren't interested in posting to the cricket discussions so we stopped running the ad.

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I was attracted to this site by the Google ad and am still here but I'd say you're right in most cases.

Richard, what is it in particular that you don't like about the fantasy game? I think it runs ok though it could be done more formally as too much is left up to an individual to score and create games leaving it all a bit ad hoc.

I played it once or twice and it was a bit of fun, but it wouldn't have attracted me on its own account and doesn't retain me now. It's quite a lot of work for Richard, I imagine, and I am sure I wouldn't be able to take that on. On the other hand, there are some people out there who like this stuff ... Best I can offer is a "no opinion" really - meaning I won't miss it if it goes, but am unlikely to be a player if it stays.

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In the beginning I did the competitons and I enjoyed doing so, but now I have so little time. I find the scoring a chore and I make a lot of mistakes, both in choosing players and scoring them. Basically I haven't the time left to devote and this shows. What's needed imho is a stand alone competition such as "battrick" which has faster servers.

The idea of the competiton was so that anyone could run it, which is good, but it needs dedication. I didn't/don't want to be a moderator or to moderate the fantasy forum , despite persuading Admin to create it in the first place.

Anyone with over 50 posts can run a competiton. The idea was "Services to attract posters, values to keep them"


What I find difficult.
1) Keeping up-to-date with the player database, their positions and roles (keeper,allrounder,bowler) hence the suggestions of having a player with position,team,type, eg
Matthew Hoggard (bo) (eng) (test)
With the fast changing world of ODI cricket and the inclusion of Ireland and Holland in the ODI areana, and the fast changing squads of many international teams (Zimbabwe,Englandetc)make knowing who does what ' no mean task'.
2) Scoring (right information in right box for right player) (d smith is it devon or dwane? yusuf youhana and mohammed yusuf? abdur/abdul razzaq,razzak,?)
3) Finding the time to input the data and update.
4) People who choose a team and then forget to change it before the start and then I have to give them a nudge (or forget to). People should look at the squads (as should the creator when choosing who are the players in pool, something I didn't do well.)

Ideally a team of posters need to take turns at running these competitions. The world cup was a "bridge too far" for me as it's dragged on and on (and on) and it's been difficult to find the time to sit in front of a screen and type it in. I've been really scared of making errors (and I've made them anyway).For me to score One ODI has taken half an hour on average and times that by 51! Ideally I'd like a programme where you could cut and paste the information from a scorecard and the scoring calculations would be automatic and the data base filled in automatically. (Sounds simple but would be difficult) and work would be minimal.
51 matches is a lot. I should have perhaps done the super 8's seperatley from the groups.

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I have a dream.... (Martin Luther King)

Richard, I'm afraid you made this game more difficult than was necessary.

A minimum of 21 players is needed to create a game - you included 252 players. The size of your reports must be enormous making it difficult to find players to enter their match results.

It was not necessary to create a report for every match as not all players can be scored on each report. It was only necessary to create a report for each round. I believe there are only 11 rounds in the whole competition.

Had you structured this way and used far less players it would have simplified and speeded up the scoring process. It would have also made the download of the game far quicker. I've received a complaint that your game takes far too long long to download to see managers scores. I have broadband and it takes far longer than any other game to download. Please remember for the future for any tournament such as the World up or ICC Champions Trophy that only one report be created for each round of matches - not every match.

The same report can be edited to input scores from different matches. The benefit of this is that fewer reports need to be created and it's far easier to find players who haven't yet been scored.

I enjoyed being a game creator because it forced me to discover what roles each player had so that I could place them in the appropriate categories. The tedious part is inputting the match results into the reports to produce a score for each manager. For this reason, it would be ideal to have a team of volunteer scorers. It's crazy to expect one person to score all the matches in a World Cup.

In future, a game creator should ask for volunteer scorers before committing to creating a game with many match reports. I can give temporary editing rights to scorers.

Moving on to the Battrick issue: I've requested the Battrick owners to create a version of their game for our site but they declined as they're too busy developing the game for their own site. I'd like a Battrick league for just our members but they can't or won't do that.

To develop a similar game from scratch on our own servers will be costly but is a project I hope WAT will be able to afford in the future.

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I think fatsy game is running well but the thing is the creator we need more game creators. i enjoyed as game creator and participate in it. but as i am busy in cricket prediction so i was unable to participate in some games. But i think it is good and better. It should go on.
i think there should be something new in this forum to attract people in this forum because i seems people didnt like to post much in this forum as of not being so attractive.

I agree I used too many players.Some of the players I used were not even current ODI players. This shows the time pressure on me when creating the game. I wasn't aware that the numbers could influence download speeds which I mentioned in the bug reporting post. I don't understand the round idea. For me there were four rounds, Groups,super 8's quarters and finals.Did you mean have world cup competiton group A, B,C,D and then Super 8's and then quarters and then finals ? Players would have a lot of choosing to do. With 16 teams playing there were a lot of players. Or perhaps even do it on a match by match basis.

Certainly a learning point for future games would be for a creator to limit the number of players and for example to choose no more than 5 players from each team and to use the squads as a guide for competitions such as the world cup. Later this year we will have the 20/20 world cup and so this could be an aim if the system is working.
Players couldn't choose a team of just australian or english or whoever, they would have to have at least 3 nationalities.

My apologies for the downloading times. I suppose I could throw out players that haven't been picked? Would that stuff the game?

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I have a dream.... (Martin Luther King)

Richard,

I also did a World Cup 2007 game called World Cup Early Prediction. I created it in January 2006 and 32 managers took part. See my thread here. I will score it shortly.

Notice that I selected only 52 players. All the players I selected I had hoped would play all 9 matches in the Group Stage matches and the Super 8 stage. How did I go?

Here is the full list of 52 players with number of matches they played including both semi-finals.

Player - number of matches played including semi-finals

Stephen Fleming - 10
Brendon McCullum - 10
Kumar Sangakkara - 10
Scott Styris - 10
Daniel Vettori - 10
Graeme Smith - 10
Herschelle Gibbs - 10
Jacques Kallis - 10
Michael Clarke - 10
Mike Hussey - 10
Ricky Ponting - 10
Adam Gilchrist - 10
Mark Boucher - 10
Shaun Pollock - 10
Kevin Pietersen - 9
Brian Lara - 9
Chris Gayle - 9
Dwayne Bravo - 9
Jacob Oram - 9
Chaminda Vaas - 9
Glenn McGrath - 9
Muttiah Muralitharan - 9
Andrew Flintoff - 8
Shane Bond - 8
Andrew Symonds - 8
Justin Kemp - 8
Charl Langeveldt - 8
Makhaya Ntini - 7
Corey Collymore - 7
Shane Watson - 7
Andre Nel - 6
Andrew Strauss - 4
Inzamam-ul-Haq - 3
Mohammad Yousuf - 3
Rahul Dravid - 3
Sachin Tendulkar - 3
Shoaib Malik - 3
Virender Sehwag - 3
Kamran Akmal - 3
Mahendra Dhoni - 3
Harbhajan Singh - 2
Naved-ul-Hasan - 1
Shahid Afridi - 1

Shoaib Akhtar - 0 (knee injury)
Stephen Harmison - 0 (retired from ODIs)
Boeta Dippenaar - 0 (named in the provisional squad but not final 15)
Damien Martyn - 0 (retired)
Geraint Jones - 0 (overlooked)
Brett Lee - 0 (ankle injury)
Irfan Pathan - 0 (in squad but not selected in any match - why????)
Abdul Razzaq - 0 (knee injury)
Marcus Trescothick - 0 (stress related illness)

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You'll see that I created only 11 match reports - one report per round (not match). To work out how many rounds were scheduled I asked myself how many matches would a team play if they qualified for the final? The answer is 11. 3 Group matches; 6 Super 8 matches; 1 semi-final and 1 final. That's 11 matches.

From the players list the only teams in the Group Stage I have to check are:

Australia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, England, West Indies, Pakistan and India. 8 teams from 16.

In the Super 8 stage I can ignore the Pakistan and India players. That means I can ignore 20 of 52 players in the report.

For the semi finals I need only check 24 players.

As you can see, by limiting the number of players most likely to participate in the Super 8s I made the scoring process so much easier. Of the 51 matches in the tournament I only need to check 46 scorecards since 5 matches involved two minnows.

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