Welcome back everyone. We are waiting for the starting pitchers to come through on the feed, and will schedule a full slate of contests shortly for Thursday's games. We got lots of feedback on the pitcher scoring system, and we decided to make one small change. We are eliminating the scoring for a pitcher loss (L). You used to lose 5 points for this, but now you will not be penalized. Many of our user's felt that the pitcher already receives enough of a penalty by not getting the 10pts for a win. We don't really think this will change the results of our contests very much, but if your pitcher has a good game, but does not get support, and your position players do very well, you will still have a shot in our fantasy contests with this change.
We are also addressing an issue with the current salary cap where pitchers and rookies are under weighted in salaries. Keep in mind that the current salary cap values that we use are based on actual player salaries per game and not on any performance criteria. We will be adding a "ranked cap" draft version where the salaries are based on average fantasy points/game for the season. This will have a huge effect on hot rookie pitchers (and all pitchers in general) where you may see their salaries go up 20x over what they are now. We feel this will make our contests even more challenging than they are now. We should be able to roll this draft method out in a few weeks, and it will be available for FB as well. When we add the live draft method we are working on, you will have (4) unique draft methods to chose from when picking a contest.
I also wanted to make a quick comment on Football. We came up with an amazing scoring system that we feel is the best Fantasy Football scoring system ever. It is not a huge change from what is traditionally used, but corrects the main flaw in the standard scoring system, and adds a few tweaks here and there that are huge improvements in our opinion. We realize that we are saying a lot here, but the feedback we have so far would lead us to believe that what we are saying is true. We are going to keep it a bit of a secret for a few weeks, as we don't want anyone (especially the majors) copying it this year for traditional Fantasy Football. We expect a ton of scoring system copycats next year.
We are still shooting for an August 10th launch of our FB product. The software team is asking for more testing time with the live FB stat feed, so this could possibly slip to the following week. If for some reason we don't start on the 10th, we will invite any user who wants to participate in Beta testing on Football to have access to a play money version (on our development site) starting on August 10th.
9 comments:
I think the fewer penalty points for fantasy games the better. Hopefully this will work out better for your players' teams. Looking forward to the fantasy football season. Can't wait to see how you've set this up. August can't come too soon enough for me! Good luck with the site and good job so far. I hope this site really takes off big! I'm telling everyone I can about this site.
One problem with taking the -5 out for losses is that pitchers are now worth even more on average than they were with the -5 for losses. I thought that part of the reason for the scoring change was downplaying the importance of the pitcher. There is a lot of luck involved when a pitcher gets a win or a loss. Why not remove points for wins and losses altogether?
Interested in the football scoring. I predict TDs are worth less than 6.
Also, you should announce the scoring change for pitchers more prominently. I didn't even know and I'm a pretty serious player.
-Justin
One enhancement request:
When listing the games for a contest, can you list the date for which each game will be played?
Thanks for the feedback guys. We almost did not make any changes because there was a camp that wanted it left unchanged. Eliminating the -5 for a loss we felt was a very minor change that would accmoplish what we wanted (reduce the 15 point swing between a loss and a win to 10 pts). We could have lowered the pts for a win and done the same thing, but negative fantasy points are not very popular so we took that approach. Pitching is not really downplayed other than pitcher scores will have a little less variance now allowing position players to count more which is what we wanted.
Justin,
We have a small warning planned for the registration page. I will see if we can get this up today. The scoring change will only change the payout results in a very, very small % of contests, and we wanted to make the change over the All-Star break, so we did it. For the football scoring we did not want to change the magnitudes of scores (so they would be consistant with what people are used to) so TDs are still 6pts. If you want to guess what we did, think about the flaws in the current scoring system, and how we could tailor FB scoring for what we are doing on this site, and you might get close.
DP,
All of our contests so far happen on the same day. This may never change (except NASCAR and possibly MNF). If we start scheduling multiday contests we will need to add time/date info to the event list.
I'm also predicting that TD's will be scored slightly differently and it could be based on how long of a run/catch it took to score that TD. I think the players who accumulate more yardage should get a premium.
Football season can't get here soon enough. I think this site will really take off for that season. How good will LT be this year? It's going to be expensive (cap wise) to play him.
FSL needs a discussion forum for it's members. Is that in the works?
Hey Blinders,
If all contests are for a single day, then some games and players are incorrectly listed as available. Take a look at contest 443.
The last game listed has Houston @ Chicago Cubs for a contest that started July 12. No Astros-Cubs game was ever scheduled for July 12. The first game of this series is on July 13.
I added Soriano to my team, assuming that his July 13 game stats would be included in my total. It was the last game of the FSL contest, and also an early Friday game.
It doesn't matter much to me for this contest - as I crushed the competition even without getting points for Soriano. But if I had bubbled out, then I would have some definite concern.
You might want to advise all players to look out for this situation if it's not able to be quickly corrected.
Keep up the great job!
DonkeyPuncher,
There was a pretty big error in our feed yesterday with the CHC/HOU game. That game was rescheduled for today, but was in the list of games yesterday from our feed (we think it was originally scheduled for yesterday, but not sure). We went through all of the contests yesterday, and have contacted those that may have lost prizes due to this error (mainly those with Soriano). All contests from yesterday are closed and settled, and will not include any scoring from today's game. The reason that yesterdays contests were not settled until 2AM was becuase of this error, and that lack of a box score being delivered from the missing game. We are adding a manual check to prevent this from happening in the future. Currently we can only schedule contests that start and finish in a single day. We will be adding some functionality for NASCAR, that will span 2 days, and will need to do the same for MNF if we want to include MNF with FB contests. Our main philosophy here is to run contests that are completed and paid in the same day.
I have another idea but it seems to run contrary to what you said about negative fantasy points.
Basically football players aren't penalized for using up opportunities. Anyway, whatever it is I'll be interested to see it.
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