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Another FBG subscriber contest (1 Viewer)

Doug Drinen

Moderator
Joe mentioned this in an email a few nights ago. He's fascinated by the concept of the Wisdom of Crowds and no one has a wiser crowd than we do. So we're going to see what happens when we let you all build a set of community rankings.

The basics: you answer up to 50 WDIS questions per day. Answer them better than anyone else, you win cash.

Read the rules

Get started

Questions and comments? Post them here in this thread.

 
In, although I'm guessing my interest will wane over the course of the season (ETA: not because of any flaw in the contest, just that I doubt I'll be able to muster the energy to answer 150+ questions every week).

Is / will there be a link to the contest somewhere on the main FBG site? I didn't see it listed under contests or MyFBG...

 
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OK, I made my picks and submitted. However, when reviewing my picks it seems like there are several that don't match the picks I made. For example, I'm sure I picked Hernandez over both Heath Miller and Gronkowski, yet when my answers were displayed for review, the opposite was indicated. There also seemed to be at least one answer that I don't even recognize from from the list of questions that I answered, e.g. "Graham Gano - WAS over Sebastian Janikowski - OAK".

It's still early in the day for me, and I may have mis-clicked once or twice, but there seems to be a lot that doesn't match up. There doesn't appear to be any way to edit the answers.

 
Fired up for this. Thanks to Doug for making this a reality. :thumbup:

You guys let us know how it's working for you and if we need to fix things and then I'll unveil it to the masses tonight.

J

 
OK, I made my picks and submitted. However, when reviewing my picks it seems like there are several that don't match the picks I made. For example, I'm sure I picked Hernandez over both Heath Miller and Gronkowski, yet when my answers were displayed for review, the opposite was indicated. There also seemed to be at least one answer that I don't even recognize from from the list of questions that I answered, e.g. "Graham Gano - WAS over Sebastian Janikowski - OAK".It's still early in the day for me, and I may have mis-clicked once or twice, but there seems to be a lot that doesn't match up. There doesn't appear to be any way to edit the answers.
I submitted mine and had the same thing. I know I did not pick Alex Smith over Sanchez or Percy Harvin over Witten.
 
I didn't look at my answer summary, but I know that I had the same matchup listed back to back. When I would change the answer in one question, it would eliminate the answer in the other....so I probably only had 49 answers today (didn't count though).

 
Had 3 questions that were duplicates so I was only able to answer 47 of them. Looking at the "Submited" answers didn't seem to quite match up with what i put in.

 
Answered. Although I did not know that if you don't answer some on the initial list, you cannot go back and get more questions for those that you did not answer.

 
I didn't look at my answer summary, but I know that I had the same matchup listed back to back. When I would change the answer in one question, it would eliminate the answer in the other....so I probably only had 49 answers today (didn't count though).
I had the same problem.
 
Cool Idea. Please take this as constructive criticism and not as whining about a FREE contest but thats ALOT of clicking per week to remain eligible. If the goal is to weed out the casual guy and leave only the hard core clickers you may succeed. If the goal is fun for alot more people you might think about lowering the requirements.

Also I see you can answer questions 4 different days but only 55 questions today. In the future will all the picks be up the first day or will we have to check in and click 3 different days to get the required 125 picks in?

Again thanks for the free contest. Whowever wins this has my respect. :eek:

 
Once again, very sorry for the trouble. That's why we did an early morning Pool-only soft launch. Lots of moving parts here and I figured it was likely something would be messed up.

The good news is that the same screw-up was causing both the wrong answers and the duplicate questions. You shouldn't be served dupes anymore. As an added bonus, your answers will now be recorded correctly!

Just to be clear, all answers you submitted prior to 10:52 central time were deleted. So if you want in for today, you've got to re-enter. I apologize, and I greatly appreciate the patience of The Pool.

Now, on to some other comments....

The 50-per-day limit is flexible. If we think we can get more overall clicks by lowering that limit (and hence increasing the number of participants), then we'll do it. You tell me.

The once-per-day thing is so we can get a steady stream of votes throughout the week. If we didn't make you answer questions on Wednesday, then everyone would wait until Saturday (when situations are clearer) to submit their full weekly allotment. But we want to be able to produce rankings earlier in the week.

Finally, the fact that you're not allowed to change your vote... If you could, I think a lot of people would enter randomish picks early in the day (just in case they forget or don't have time to do it later) with the intent of changing them later. We don't want that.

Once again, sorry for the mess-up, and thanks for your patience.

 
Had one bad one.

- over James Starks - GB

Unfortunately I can't remember what player was in the group with Starks.

 
so the 'comments' section is ungraded, but if you want to leave a comment you can?

Thinking out loud since this is obviously in its gestational stages, maybe a way to add additional weight to the ones you are stronger on as opposed t just clicking and guessing. Like maybe pick 10/50 with an additional click that indicates extreme confidence (maybe like 2x pts? or something) for ones that you have more confidence in vs 'winning a coin flip on gano vs suisham for e.g. I think any weighting of picks would be too labor intensive, but say picking 10/50 that you have a higher level of confidence than others would make for some interesting data, as I would theorize the % correct among the 'sure picks' wouldn't be that much greater than the other picks. But I think it could provide some interesting perspective on how right many of us are with our assumptions. Food for thought.

Nice idea though. :thumbup: I look fwd to doing this as often as I remember :bag:

 
'Ignoratio Elenchi said:
Is / will there be a link to the contest somewhere on the main FBG site? I didn't see it listed under contests or MyFBG...
Where do we go to see our picks?
 
Love the idea, but 50 is too much. I'd be happy to do a quick 20.
I agree with this. 50 picks a day, three days a week is not something I'm likely to keep up with over the course of the season. Caveat for the conclusions drawn from this crowdsourcing experiment: you might end up with herd mentality on at least some of these. The collected wisdom of the population of FBG subscribers is almost certainly going to reflect some biases towards FBG projections and hyped guys in the Shark Pool, etc.
 
One suggestion: Since we are required to answer 150 questions a week, is there somewhere where we could see our running total for how many we've answered in the week so far? Then we would know if we can be more selective with our answers the deeper we get in the week.

 
Like some others above I had a couple blanks show up in the answer confirmation page:

James Starks - GB over -

Miles Austin - DAL over -

 
Thinking outside of the box here...but I think it would be a neat concept to do this in the preseason next year and create a user generated ranking system for rankings. It would be interesting to see how they match up against the experts.

 
Okay, a couple of thoughts.

[*]All of mine took, so that's good.

[*]What's the purpose of the "No Vote"? Is that really meaningful? If you apply this in terms of who you feel more comfortable with, I would actually eliminate that as option. Think in terms of Myers-Briggs or Keirsey personality type testing, you have two options and pick the one you are most confident in. Sometimes that "from the gut" instinct is the way to go and that sounds like what you are looking for.

[*]Comments section. If I am answering 50 questions, I am going to click and move on. I doubt I would want to spend the time to enter detailed comments on each criteria. In addition, if you are going to roll-up for the masses, then the comments are text that really can't be validated as better than someone else's vote with no comments. Not sure what you gain with this. I would also discuss how you would evaluate for deciding winners. If you have answered 150 questions and had 95% accuracy with no comments, is that a better entry than someone who answered 150 questions with 75% accuracy, but that person entered comments on each question?

[*]Someone mentioned earlier about possibly adding a weighting range for 2x a vote. Possible, but I am thinking in terms of confidence per pick may be of more interest. For example.. Arian Foster vs Rashard Mendenhall. When you select the player you would rather start, maybe there is a weighting such as: Slight Confidence, Moderate Confidence, High Confidence. This may be a way to add a whole other dimension to start with confidence factors.

All in all, I like the idea. This will drive folks to want to subscribe if you are keeping this as subscribers only. Maybe open it up to the general masses in Week 1 (no payout if you are not a subscriber) so they can get an idea on how it works and the value from it. Then after week 2, lock it down to subscriber only results and participation. I guess it depends on how many participants you get, but I do think this is value add from a business perspective.

Nice job guys and another reason why I will continue to be a subscriber for years to come.

 
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Thinking outside of the box here...but I think it would be a neat concept to do this in the preseason next year and create a user generated ranking system for rankings. It would be interesting to see how they match up against the experts.
Absolutely. The downside of preseason though is that we won't the immediate feedback we get on the inseason decisions. But I still think it would be useful.J
 
Joe - Are these "WOC" rankings going to be available in addition to the normal FBG rankings? That would be invaluable, because I completely agree with the concept.

 
Cool :)

Love this contest :pickle:

Actually yahoo had a contest that was similar some years back where they would have you pick which of the two players in a given game did better - I think it was usually for the Sunday Night and Monday Night games. E.g. this week they'd have total passing yards Sanchez vs Romo, total TDs Sanchez vs Romo, Receiving yards Holmes vs Austin, etc. I actually finished 4th :bowtie:

Hopefully I can continue that kind of success - not betting on it though :)

-QG

 
It's odd that you can only do 50 a day and need at least 150 answered to qualify for prizes. Means you need to do it for 3 out of the 4 days it's offered. Not everyone comes to the site that often. I'd recommend allowing the full 150 in a day in three rounds of 50 questions each, unless there is some technological limitation.

 
So will the consensus rankings generated perhaps be modified or weighted based on the track record of the person making the selection? That might be an interesting wrinkle or version to add.

-QG

 

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