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 The 13th game to be featured on the league website is now available. Premier League Pickem is the third game that doesn't revolve around a single deadline with a one-time prediction entry. It will be an unofficial game, participants will earn bonus points instead of direct championship points. Participating is simple, after signing up, submit your predicted score for each Premier League game before it begins. You'll receive a point for picking a team to score the correct number of goals, three points for picking the correct result (home win, road win or tie) and another point if you correctly pick the result and the score for both teams (a perfect game). Please let me know of any mistakes or of anything that needs clarification on the rules page or from the game otherwise. I'm looking for an assistant or two to help run the game this season by updating scores and maintaining the schedule with the correct dates and game times. If you're interested, reply to the game thread. Why did I create Premier League Pickem? A few reasons; enough that I can't pick out the most responsible, meaning this list is in no particular order: -A need to create more bonus points. Increasing the bonus point maximum to 12% of the leader's final total due to losing Salary Cap Football from the rotation last season shrunk the number of members earning the maximum amount of bonus points from 26 to ten. I would rather help fill that gap by adding an unofficial game than through any other method. -Potentially increasing the reach of the league, or at least the league's website. Prior to Premier League Pickem, all games on run through the league website were American-centric. This is the first game on the website to have an appeal to those outside the US and Canada that may not be interested in professional and college leagues of North America. Between all official and unofficial games, only four yearly games (Fantasy Formula 1, Fantasy Golf, Fantasy Premier League, & Fantasy Tennis) truly cater to those outside of the US and Canada anywhere near as much as they cater to those inside English-speaking North America (Belize and various islands excluded). The league will always lean toward the North Americans, but appealing to those in other parts of the world is a goal. -The relative ease with which I created it. It took me roughly two weeks, around the rest of the rigors of my personal schedule, to finish creating the game. That was possible for two reasons. First, I've created enough of these games now to have the kinks worked out of the process. Second, a decent portion of the programming was simply manipulating processes from MLB Day-to-Day Pickem. Without getting into the gory details, that makes my job extensively easier. -Speaking of MLB Day-to-Day Pickem, adding Premier League Pickem to the games list and website now means there will be a daily-to-weekly activity game on the website for the entire year. No single game could have filled that gap without taking me far longer to create. In order for the league to survive, the website needs hits. After the 2009-2010 review survey and past experiences, the easiest way to get them is by getting games on the website. -Sticking with MLB Day-to-Day Pickem, Premier League Pickem is roughly halfway between the programming needed for MLB Day-to-Day Pickem and NFL Pickem. -Bringing up NFL Pickem, if not for the NFL lockout it would have more than likely been my project for the summer, along with College Football Pickem and an NFL Survival Pickem replacement. With the lockout now, apparently, nearing its conclusion and the time frame it took me to complete Premier League Pickem, I've elected to try to get NFL Pickem onto the website within the next month anyway. I'll have a decision by early August as to whether or not the game will be run through Yahoo! this season. If you're wondering why I didn't just try to get College Football Pickem onto the website; due to the number of teams, subsequent increase in games, and the changing AP poll, among a few other things, it's much more difficult to program. I can use pieces from NFL Pickem to help bridge the gap. -While on the NFL lockout, the potential for having to increase the bonus point percentage this season should the NFL or NBA season be lost further exacerbated the first point I made. -Lastly, Premier League Pickem could potentially replace Fantasy Premier League in the future. I'm aware of the pitfalls of using Yahoo! Eurosport instead of the American side to run one of our games. If given the choice of one, I would prefer to have a roster-based game rather than a simple pickem game. That choice changes if the pickem game is run through the website. The change is still at least two seasons away from being possible, but it'll be in the back of my mind. There are two pieces of the game that won't be completed until after the season starts. The bonus points standings page and the team schedule strength page. Aside from those two missing pieces, the schedule in the system still [mostly] reflects the preliminary schedule the Premier League released last month. The new game times and dates beyond that preliminary schedule were only released a few days ago. I'm still debating as to how I'll give out bonus points, but I hope to have the total given out be similar to the number from MLB Day-to-Day Pickem. They'll almost definitely be given out for monthly standings as well as the full season standings. From there they may be awarded based on weekly results, correct picks totals, correct score totals and perfect game totals. I'll have a better feel for how to give them out once I see how many participants the game has and how much deviation is found in the weekly scores. |
Sections: Main, Fantasy Games | Tags: Games_Available, Premier_League_Pickem, Unofficial_Games, ASFL2_Fantasy_Games, Bonus_Points |