
Show HN: World Cup prediction challenge with friends - edelans
http://www.scoragora.com/
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edelans
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 !

~~~
gadders
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...

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

~~~
edelans
How can I make you more confident ? Emailing it to you for instance ? with a
"send me my predictions by email" button ?

~~~
gadders
That would be handy if I could grab a league snapshot or something.

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TySchultz
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...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pickup-league-
play/id883743542?ls=1&mt=8)

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hluska
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!! :)

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shiv86
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.

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

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

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Ryanmf
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.

~~~
edelans
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.

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andrewcross
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.

~~~
edelans
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.

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joyinsky
Hey, I can't submit my predictons.

Something wrong?

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edelans
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
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_

~~~
edelans
Yep, thanks, this was finally fixed this morning !

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unnu
Where did you get the match data?

~~~
edelans
from the FIFA official website
[http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/matches/index.html](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) ?

