Show HN: World Cup prediction challenge with friends
scoragora.com
scoragora.com
Scoragora is intended to be the best webapp for prediction challenges with friends and colleagues for the FIFA world cup. It's free, ad-free, focused on Brasil 2014, mobile friendly, and available in 4 languages. We tried to keep our UX very simple yet provide a lot of interesting features (tchat, email reminders, social logins...).
This app is our first webapp, and first time in nodejs. We are two young engineers freshly graduated in CS from a french engineering school (Ecole Centrale Paris). As we didn't learn a lot about web programing at school, we decided to build something to learn it, to have a lot of fun, and for the joy of building something significant (= that would be use by a lot of people that we do not know).
We are really excited to share it with you, any kind of feedback is welcome =) (and don't hesitate to use our uservoice widget if you spot a bug !). Eventually, we are thinking about making it a business, any clue about an interesting BM is also welcome !
Its called "PickUp" and it's Free on the app store. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pickup-league-play/id8837435...
When I woke up this morning, I was proud that England's opening match is on the 14th and I still haven't joined a World Cup pool. I normally lose my mind during the World Cup and become a fanatic, but this time around, I was committed to being productive throughout the World Cup. So, no pool for me.
Unfortunately, now I want to start a pool. This is a slippery slope that points towards painting my face, drinking pints, and screaming like a maniac. Excellent work!! :)
I was excited to see this posted, and hoped it would be what I had been looking for. My friends and I had not yet found a suitable World Cup prediction competition site.
I immediately signed up, and was ready to send off some invites, when I found that Scoragora wanted me to predict a score for each of the 48 matches in group play, a fairly tedious exercise. Further, upon completion, it is completely unclear whether the game will be calculating winners and runners-up from the groups automatically, whether there will be an opportunity to pick winners in the knockout rounds—basically everything after group play is a mystery.
Suffice to say this is not what I expected. I can understand some need for score predictions—most likely in the later rounds for tie-breaking purposes (perhaps the best way to handle this is to ask users to predict the cumulative goal differential of the winning side). But score predictions ultimately aren't the core functionality of a game like this. If I predict that Brazil will defeat Mexico 4-0, and my friend predicts that Brazil will win 4-1, I don't really care who was right about the score, we both rightly acknowledged that Mexico is a shambles at the moment (poor Chicharito—he's only 26!) and that Brazil ought to win.
The functionality I expect to see front-and-center is, simply put, predictions about who wins each match through the final. I truly can't tell whether that functionality exists in Scoragora right now, and I don't really care to predict 96 scores for the privilege of finding out. Moreover, I'm the geek in my group of friends, there's at least some chance I might fill out the entire prediction form to satiate my curiosity about how you've constructed this web app, but I'm certain none of my friends will have the patience to do so, so I won't be inviting them, and we'll conduct our competition elsewhere.
UPDATE: I've just tried out Yahoo's game, and theirs is structured almost identically (though a bit prettier), so maybe my expectations are out of line? I don't understand why the game basically resets when the knockout rounds begin. If i predict that Spain and Chile will get out of their group, and a friend predicts Spain and the Netherlands, and another predicts the Netherlands and Chile, there should be some benefit for the one made the correct prediction and some penalty for the two who didn't.
* I'll definitely provide more info on what happens after group play. We say in the rules that "Predictions can be submitted at any time before the official start time of the concerned game", and this is true for all the games, including those in the knockouts. We thought that the knockout rounds would be extremely boring if your predictions are already set with the wrong teams. And you already got penalized for making the bad predictions in the group play. So we took the decision to open the knockout for predictions only when the teams are known, as it seemed to us that it would preserve the fun until very late in the competition.
* regarding the score inputs, actually I think this really depends on people. with my friends we wanted this level of details because it makes it more fun to us. To use your example, if I predict 4-0, you predict 4-1, and the actual score is 4-1, you will earn a few more points than me.
The biggest request I have is for alternative rule-sets. The pools I typically participate in are a lot less involved - e.g. pick the winner & runner up for a each group and go from there. Going game-by-game with scores is too much for a lot of people.
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