New Derby Website

[ChipDerby]

I don't like the idea of weighting certain movies or certain prediction times

[Legion Again]

20 minutes ago, Grebacio said:

Regarding deadlines: I think the current deadline is perfectly fine and I don't like the idea of having extra points because of being early

I think it’s pretty safe to say that the main deadline won’t be changing. Seems like you’d be on board for an optional early deadline for those who wanted to partake though?

12 minutes ago, ChipDerby said:

I don't like the idea of weighting certain movies or certain prediction times

I think it’s pretty safe to say that the main scoring won’t be changing. We can keep it as an additional stat on the player run sheet but if there’s interest from others in seeing it could be worth showing officially as well.

[M37]

On 1/11/2023 at 6:29 AM, Legion in Boots said:

I don’t think predicting earlier takes less skill — if anything I suspect it takes *more* skill. But it does take different skills, and it’s easy to see how people who are enjoying the traditional deadline might not like the change.  

I'll put it this way: one of the biggest factors for holdovers is the loss of theaters and shows, plus the Wednesday daily number setting a baseline. It takes a lot more work to guesstimate those figure on say Wednesday rather than waiting for the official numbers to post on Thursday. For new releases, obviously the Thursday number is vital, and while experienced players/BOTers can read the tea leaves in the tracking thread and get a good sense of where things are headed, again it takes an extra level of extrapolation.

 

If the end goal is to increase the player field, and keep them playing by being competitive, then I'm not sure adding those extra steps facilitates that goal. Think its better to have all the information available to everyone, with a 12-16 hour window in which to process it, where a decent player should be hitting 70/80%+ on all films (other than those screwy sub-$1M ones). The earlier the deadline, the more that disparity increases between people willing to grind it out and casual players, and frankly we could use more of the latter

 

On 1/11/2023 at 6:46 AM, Legion in Boots said:

I would love a new scoring rule (or, to be less controversial, a scoring view toggle/extra column 😛 ) that gave more weight to the higher grossing movies on the weekend rather than just 10% for all 10.

I would also like some weighted scoring, but while I think some of what you proposed is actually the most accurate and fair way to do it (and not just because I hate these sub-$1M predictions and missing on the Whale expansions dropped me from like top 3-4 to out of top 10) ... its just too complicated for a casual player (we can track it as a side game though)

An easier adjustment would be to weight new releases/expansions more, since they are (usually) among the highest grossing figures and the most volatile, which makes the game more competitive. Going over $30M/97% on M3G should be worth more than the same score on a much lower variance Black Panther. Or could weight by week of release (or week in game), which would make new releases (and week 2 titles) more valuable by default, but also devalue movies that have been out for a while and are either mostly predictable or have started that precipitous decline with more variance in scoring

I think scoring changes like this are more theoretical for now, worth discussing for future but not really urgent

[M37]

Finally getting around to this, have some suggestions ... and glad I waited, because some of these are already into the beta site, which looks really good!

 

Layout/Functionality

• Generally - more colors & graphics! ... which I see we've already got. One suggestion for the new beta site is while I like all of the added displays & stats, its a little cluttered as one giant display on the main page. Might be better to shift some of that to tabs/sub menus rather than the base display
• Allow player predictions to be more easily visible after game lock. Can it be set it up as a table, with titles on the top, players on the left, and be sortable (maybe even searchable if we get a lot of players?) by player name, and high/low for each title. Maybe even add some shading to represent how far from Derby average (for example: light blue for slightly above average, darker blue for more, light red for slightly below, and so on), or at least highlight (bold?) the highs and lows for each title. I see there is a prediction tab on the beta site, but nothing there yet
• Live scoring & weekly leaderboard! Would likely require manual entry on the back end, from Deadline Sat AM update and then studio estimates on Sunday (perhaps that can be automated/scraped from Numbers/Mojo?) Right now, we're using a spreadsheet, which is tedious but fine for <20 players, but not viable if the game were to grow. I see this mentioned as an option for manual entry to show scores, which also allows us to adjust for the sometimes less than great estimates (especially from Deadline)
• Even without live scoring, weekly leaderboard and overall standings could use an update - again, something more graphical/aesthetically pleasing. Would also like to see number of 1st/2nd/3rd place finishes listed - Seems like Andy is reading my mind! I like having the weekly winner pictured. Think it would be good to lean into an Olympics theme, with a weekly podium and 1/2/3 finishes counted at medals

 

Gameplay/Scoring

• One of my big requests: Move/shift to seasonal scoring as the default standings. Someone wandering in looking to play in like March has no hope of catching up for the year, so takes away incentive to pick it up and continue playing. Would suggest Summer (June-Labor Day), Fall (Sept-Thanksgiving), Winter/Holiday (Post-TG through Presidents Day), and Spring (End of Feb to Memorial Day). Busy during holidays? Traveling over summer? Just skip those seasons rather than fall behind and potentially stop playing altogether. Seasons don't necessarily have to be even 13 weeks each, but rather focused on ending on a holiday weekend, potentially adding some drama for seasonal championship, the kicking off on post-holiday weekend when people return to normal routine
• If possible, add ability to play/score less than 10 titles, for those weeks when we're really scraping the bottom of the barrel (looks ahead at release calendar ...). This may not be an issue long term as the release calendar fills back in, so understand if we just muddle through it for now
• Bonus standing points for weekly win and/or top 3 finish, rather than just inverse of standings. Beating out another player for a weekly win should count more than just edging them for 5th place vs 6th

 

 

[Legion Again]

33 minutes ago, M37 said:

Bonus standing points for weekly win and/or top 3 finish, rather than just inverse of standings. Beating out another player for a weekly win should count more than just edging them for 5th place vs 6th

Strongly in favor, important to apply this retroactively too 

[ChipDerby]

A few additional thoughts:

 

- I completely understand the frustration with predicting these sub $1 mil films. But that's going to be a moot point at some point because theaters are going to keep getting busier over time, it's just taken a while to get there.

 

- As for the deadline, I do not think it's necessary to allow people to have Thursday projections, specifically for new releases. I think a major part of why I started predicting box office was essentially trying to predict how audiences were going to behave for the film. I know it helps and increases scores, but I think it's kinda boring when everyone is all in the same range for new release movies because we all know ticket sales and thursday numbers. I'm not advocating for it to be taken away, I just wouldn't care if the deadline was much sooner.

[M37]

14 minutes ago, ChipDerby said:

- As for the deadline, I do not think it's necessary to allow people to have Thursday projections, specifically for new releases. I think a major part of why I started predicting box office was essentially trying to predict how audiences were going to behave for the film. I know it helps and increases scores, but I think it's kinda boring when everyone is all in the same range for new release movies because we all know ticket sales and thursday numbers. I'm not advocating for it to be taken away, I just wouldn't care if the deadline was much sooner.

The range of predictions for M3G this week (+/-% from average) was higher than for BPFW and Whitney (even more so if you remove the high and the low for each). The range for Avatwo OW in the Derby was $123M to nearly $170M. For Puss in Boots - with a full Wednesday opening - it was $9.9M to $26M.

 

I get what you're saying, that its "unfair" - or just less fun - for someone who can sniff out a breakout or bomb before the Thursday tracking has fully materialized and everyone else comes on board, but there is still enough nuance and uncertainty in that Thursday tracking and corresponding IMs that its not like all predictions are converging around the same figure.

[Legion Again]

5 minutes ago, M37 said:

The range of predictions for M3G this week (+/-% from average) was higher than for BPFW and Whitney (even more so if you remove the high and the low for each). The range for Avatwo OW in the Derby was $123M to nearly $170M. For Puss in Boots - with a full Wednesday opening - it was $9.9M to $26M.

 

I get what you're saying, that its "unfair" - or just less fun - for someone who can sniff out a breakout or bomb before the Thursday tracking has fully materialized and everyone else comes on board, but there is still enough nuance and uncertainty in that Thursday tracking and corresponding IMs that its not like all predictions are converging around the same figure.

Pretty natural that an opener would have a higher range than wk3+ holdovers — even if a lot of the leverage on anticipating them well has been diminished. Ideally the comparison would be to variance of openers pre-pandemic but there’s a huge player pool difference that mucks it up.

Edited January 12, 2023 by Legion in Boots

[M37]

1 minute ago, Legion in Boots said:

Pretty natural that an opener would have a higher range than wk3+ holdovers. Ideally the comparison would be to variance of openers pre-pandemic but there’s a huge player pool difference that mucks it up.

Sure, but my point was that variance is still pretty high even with the increasing precision of Thursday tracking. They're coming closer to the holdovers, but still not on par with them, as there's a fair amount of guesswork - and likely personal bias - baked in to those numbers. I pretty much had the Thursday number for M3G in my head since about Tuesday of last week, I just expected a more holiday-influenced frontloaded weekend, and wound up $6M (20%) off

[charlie Jatinder]

I just checked derby website and you have deadline of FRI 5AM? the fuck. it should close THU noon. you basically have THU actuals for new openers in tracking thread by then.

 

[AndyLL]

So... during the period after predictions close to actuals being entered I have the ability for users to enter estimates and see the results.  They can save their own estimates and see any other users saved estimates.

 

While I'll probably keep that I'm guessing players would prefer to have the ability to put in official estimates over the weekend and see the results like you do the spreadsheet.

 

So my questions are:

• Should any player that played that week be able to enter them?
• Should there be just one set of estimates that gets updated over the weekend or a set for each day?
• Any value for tracking final official estimates to actuals?
• Any reason to keep historical estimates?

 

[Legion Again]

I used the estimates feature this morning, was very convenient. I also logged in and saved them but not sure if I understand how to load them properly.

[M37]

21 hours ago, AndyLL said:

So... during the period after predictions close to actuals being entered I have the ability for users to enter estimates and see the results.  They can save their own estimates and see any other users saved estimates.

 

While I'll probably keep that I'm guessing players would prefer to have the ability to put in official estimates over the weekend and see the results like you do the spreadsheet.

 

So my questions are:

• Should any player that played that week be able to enter them?
• Should there be just one set of estimates that gets updated over the weekend or a set for each day?
• Any value for tracking final official estimates to actuals?
• Any reason to keep historical estimates?

 

I think the way it would work best would be something like this:

• Would be cool if Sunday Studio estimates could auto-generate, via scraping from Numbers or Mojo and showing up under the Estimates list. But if that's too much programming work, then we can enter them manually
• Players can input their own estimates at any time, either from scratch, or loading a Sunday (or any other saved) estimates and making adjustments. Could we be able to name the saved estimates though? So rather than just by Player, it could be for example: Sunday Estimates (by Legion)
• Don't see any reason to save estimate lists after the weekend?
• Instead, can an option be added to export the standings from inputted estimates as an image? This way, someone could put in numbers, generate the pic, and post it in the derby chat, showing both the estimates and the rankings (probably just top 10 rather than full list). Something like this (a little cleaner and maybe with some heading like Derby Week 2 [1/13-1/15/22]. Again, not a necessary feature, as we can manually work around it

 

One other thing: the window to enter estimates probably needs a bit more room, as the up/down toggle takes up most of the space and only lets you see 1 digit as you enter them (on PC, haven't tried on mobile)

Edited January 15, 2023 by M37

[TalismanRing]

On 1/12/2023 at 10:14 AM, M37 said:

 

 

Gameplay/Scoring

• One of my big requests: Move/shift to seasonal scoring as the default standings. Someone wandering in looking to play in like March has no hope of catching up for the year, so takes away incentive to pick it up and continue playing. Would suggest Summer (June-Labor Day), Fall (Sept-Thanksgiving), Winter/Holiday (Post-TG through Presidents Day), and Spring (End of Feb to Memorial Day). Busy during holidays? Traveling over summer? Just skip those seasons rather than fall behind and potentially stop playing altogether. Seasons don't necessarily have to be even 13 weeks each, but rather focused on ending on a holiday weekend, potentially adding some drama for seasonal championship, the kicking off on post-holiday weekend when people return to normal routine

 

 

We used to have Seasonal & Monthly winners.  Going back to that format while also keeping yearly etc should bring in newer players while also still rewarding long timers.