WoKJ Needs Your HelpI am writing each of you asking for help.
As you may have heard, we just launched a Box Office Derby game as a new section of WoKJ's main site. We worked very hard to get this game created, and we're going to work harder to improve it moving forward. However, WoKJ's users are only a subset of those interested in the derby, and it won't feel whole if we're the only ones playing. Since we're proud of the game, where it's headed, and the time spent creating it, our goal is to raise awareness and get as many players as possible.
This is where you come in.
We're asking you to be our marketing engine, to
help us inform others who may be interested in playing. You may be asking yourself, how can I help? Our primary goal is just getting the word out, making sure everyone knows the game is available, and we're open to any ideas you have to that end.
If you have a blog, please consider writing an article notifying your readers about the game. Facebook, Twitter, any method you have of reaching other users who may be interested, we're hoping you'll use it. Other forums can be tricky. There are so many out there, and each has different promotional rules for this type of thing. We would really appreciate you getting the word out there, but not in a way that violates another forum's rules. If a specific forum won't allow a topic devoted to this type of issue, consider PMing any friends you have there that you know may be interested.
We just want to make sure people know it's starting, we're hopeful the quality of the game will do the rest.
We recreated the Derby because we strongly believe we are best suited to support, continuously improve, and ensure the longevity of a new derby game. We still believe that, now we just have to see if people are willing to play here. It's my hope that you will help convince others and get the word out.PrizesThe new derby will feature prizes for the quarterly and yearly winners. We haven't solidified what those prizes will be, but our intention is to make them available to anyone. If I had to guess right now, I would expect each quarterly winner to get an gift certificate to something like Amazon / Fandango / etc in the range of $15-20 for quarterly winners and $40-50 for the yearly winner.
If you have any suggestions, please feel free to offer them here or via PM.
Information you may find useful:When can users predict? The weekend of January 6-8 will be the first game of 2012, you can submit predictions now.
Where do we predict?If you don't already have an account, you must first register with WoKJ's forums. After that, just visit
this page to enter your predictions.
How do you calculate the winner?Consider the 'quarter' to basically be one giant week. Each movie available for prediction over that time period is weighted equally. If you fail to predict a given week, you get a 0 for all that weeks movies. The highest average score during the quarter wins. Each quarter contains all games where the start date of the game falls within the quarter.
For detailed information on how the derby is scored, visit the
How To Play page.
What's new?The basic game remains pretty much unchanged. What we've done, and what we will continue to do, is provide better tools to view and analyze the results. Some of the things we've done toward that goal:
- We added 'Relative Score.' The How To Play section has examples on this metric and how it's calculated. Basically, it's a score that shows how well you did vs. the Derby average, and it doesn't penalize you for missed weeks. A positive score means you beat the average, a negative score means you were below the average over the timeframe chosen. We will use this metric to rank the all time chart (so long as players meet the minimum games played requirement), and it's available to view on all results pages.
- You can easily sort by any column in the results.
- You can quickly search the results.
- We not only show the players score, but also show their score on holdovers and openers. Similarly, we also show their relative score on holdovers and openers.
- We added a graphical view of the derby's results as a whole, from week to week. For each week, the graph shows the high and low score, as well as the mid-50% of scores removing the top and bottom 25%. Sounds confusing, but seeing it as a candle graph provides a quick overview of how the community fared each week with just a glance.
- We will be adding a "User Results" section in the coming weeks when enough data becomes available. In this section, you will be able to select up to 4 players to graph against the average, as well as selecting the time frame you're interested in. We will then create a line graph comparing the selected users to the average. In the future, we will further expand this section so that you can also graph results on specific movies, holdovers, openers, etc, based on community feedback.
- We will consistently listen to feedback to improve the game. Since we personally develop everything in house, we can quickly react and create state of the art functionality at no cost other than our time.
I appreciate any help you can give, any word of mouth you choose to offer. We genuinely need your help, I don't think we can succeed without it.
