Show HN: World Cup prediction challenge with friends

http://www.scoragora.com/

by edelans • 12 years ago

26 26 12 years ago

edelans11• 12 years ago

Hi HN community ! I am the cofounder of Scoragora.

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 !

swah• 12 years ago

Nice, although I wouldn't cross using money. BTW, how did you porovide the page in my language?

edelans11• 12 years ago

We serve the page depending on the language of your browser. Default is english. We machine translated spanish and portugese, so they probably look really awkward sometimes... French is our native language, and english translation should be good. (we use node module i18next).

edelans11• 12 years ago

Regarding money, we didn't want to bother integrating it as well. We wanted to keep it simple (stay away from the hassle of paperwork for a gambling website), and user friendly (I always feel dubious regarding online betting platforms...)

gadders3• 12 years ago

Is this definitely going to stay around for the duration of the World Cup? I need something like this for my work tournament and if it gets taken down I won't be popular...

andrewcross2• 12 years ago

Seconded. I think I'm going to make screenshot backups just to make sure.

edelans11• 12 years ago

There are a few thousand users trusting us (and counting!) so I can guarantee I will do anything to avoid disappointing them !

mokkol• 12 years ago

Nice one! Going to give it a try with my family :)

rbonvall• 12 years ago

Hi edelans, very nice site, congrats! It would be nice if there was a public league so I don't need to join one.

edelans11• 12 years ago

Hi rbonvall, thanks ! I will add this tonight, front page.

Ryanmf• 12 years ago

I submitted a two point critique via the Uservoice widget, one was merely a UI issue, another I feel might be worthy of a wider discussion.

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.

edelans11• 12 years ago

Hi Ryan, Thanks for the uservoice tickets (btw, uservoice is really awesome). This is great feedback thanks a lot.

* 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.

hluska• 12 years ago

This is kind of ironic, though not necessarily in a good way.

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!! :)

joyinsky• 12 years ago

Hey, I can't submit my predictons.

Something wrong?

edelans11• 12 years ago

Hi joyinsky, do you happen to be in Brasil ? I realised that a js plugin was crashing in some timezones (tz_manager.js), I have to fix this...

vaeke• 12 years ago

I'm in Estonia, and my predictions are not being saved either =( I can see the JS error:

TypeError: c is undefined

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'rule' of undefined... tz_manager.js:9

unnu• 12 years ago

Where did you get the match data?

edelans11• 12 years ago

from the FIFA official website http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/matches/index.html ? May I ask you why you ask this question (not sure I understood it as you meant it) ?

andrewcross2• 12 years ago

Congrats on getting out there & making something!

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.

edelans11• 12 years ago

Hi andrewcross, Unfortunately managing alternative rule sets would have very important impacts on our architecture, we reasonnably cannot provide it for the world cup... But I hear the feedback for possible future versions ! Thks.

TySchultz• 12 years ago

Nice webapp! I find the ability to predict scores very interesting. I actually have made my own concept very similar to this but it is an iOS app. Instead of predicting the scores all you have to do is choose a winner. Join a league with your friends and have a custom leaderboard just for your league. Also there is a main league so you can compete against everyone in the app.

Its called "PickUp" and it's Free on the app store. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pickup-league-play/id8837435...

shiv86• 12 years ago

www.bracqet.com I created this site easy to signup and use. Purpose: Bracqet.com is a University of Technology Sydney, academic project designed to explore the network effects on a product with a high hypothetical viral coefficient. Viral Co-efficient (K) and is a quantitative measure of the average rate of invite sent per user multiplied by the actual signups per invite. Typically actual K > 1 is required to achieve viral growth and the eventual exponential "kick" in the number of user sign-ups. The fundamental premise of bracqet.com was that people would want to fill their brackets (who they are supporting) for the Football WorldCup2014 and publish it on to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, which in turn would induce their friends to do the same. Hence the product design was purely centered around achieving K > 1. This included premature scaling utilizing an HA Proxy load balancer and multiple web server instances to handle the hypothetical viral growth. To find out more about the results of the actual K achieved and the results of this experiment feel free to contact us at admin@bracqet.com. All data is used for academic purposes. Your contribution and feedback to this project is greatly appreciated.

Show HN: World Cup prediction challenge with friends

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