What we learned
The two halves came apart. The architecture delivered what it promised: built, run on production for a month, cost nothing, nothing bought again to carry the load. The game it was built to serve does not work, for a reason no further building would fix.
The playtest is where that was found. This page is what follows from it.
Which decisions held
| ADR | Verdict |
|---|---|
| 0001 Base Scoring Model | Held, and unbalanced. The curve behaved, but its additive chemistry term outgrew the pageview scoring it was meant to garnish. Players played for an all-Excellent board, not for points. |
| 0002 Language Scale Factor | No verdict. One edition, all month. It solves a problem the run never presented. |
| 0003 Closed Trading Economy | Challenged. The least-liked part of the game. Renewal went effectively unused (three uses against two hundred contracts) and Early Sell was spent during setup rather than played. Players asked for a stock market instead. |
| 0004 Scoring Engine Platform | Held, with the scheduler and the delivery path revised during implementation. Free, and both failures were the project's own code rather than the platform. |
| 0005 Contract Pricing | Held. The curve priced a 1,000-credit budget into real choices across two hundred contracts, from free articles up to 625 credits, and a team that spent badly kept a low-credit route back into scoring. |
| 0006 Article Genie | Vindicated, against expectation. Arrived mid-run to open scepticism and was received warmly, as a humorous and occasionally useful extra. The only feature that landed better than it was pitched. |
| 0007 Derived Team Credits | Held, and checked rather than assumed. Across 13 teams and 200 contracts: no negative balances, and no contract settled twice. Final balances ran 302 to 1,570 against a 1,000 budget. |
| 0008 League Invitation Codes | Untested. Nobody joined a league by code. |
Two are marked no verdict or untested, and that is itself the finding. A month of play tested the decisions about scoring, money and infrastructure, and left the decisions about leagues almost entirely alone, because the run was one league everyone was already in. The parts of the system that get a player from nothing to a league with their friends in it are the least evidenced parts of the project.
What we would do differently
Four, in descending order of how much they matter. Only the first is about the game.
- Attach the game to an event, or stop calling it a fantasy game. Fantasy formats borrow their rhythm from something people watch together, and Wikipedia's pageviews have no such moment. Not visible from inside the design, not a feature gap, and it sits under every other finding in the playtest. Everything below is small next to it.
- Ship the leaderboard before opening, not two days after. It was the first thing thirteen players asked for. Seeing other teams' line-ups was the second, and took until 14 August.
- Close the gap between buying and fielding. Two teams bought twenty and eleven contracts, then fielded an empty Formation every day for a month and scored zero with nothing telling them. Owning without fielding should not be a silent state.
- Decide what renewal is for, or remove it. Three uses in two hundred contracts is not a mechanic, and carrying one costs schema, rules and documentation regardless of use.
What is not built, and why
Decided against. Sourcing trends from Google search rather than Wikipedia. Several players thought it would make a better game and they may be right, but the analytics API costs hundreds of dollars a month, which ends it for a project whose whole cost argument is that it runs on free tiers. Wikipedia's openness is not incidental here; it is what makes the project possible at all.
Proposed by players. Two ideas came out of the run, offered as ways the game could be better for them rather than as requests for a backlog:
| Idea | Note |
|---|---|
| An auction for contracts, instead of a fixed price against the market | Rejected at the original pitch as tedious, then asked for after a month of play |
| Head-to-head competition: fixtures scored one against one, three points for a win in an all-play-all, then the top of the table into a knockout | A leaderboard turned out to be a ranking, not a rivalry |
Neither is committed to. Both are recorded because they came from people who had played for a month, which makes them better evidence than an idea from inside the project. Neither answers the question below, so building either now would answer the wrong thing.
Deferred earlier, still deferred: weekly and monthly tournaments, demand-reactive pricing, and a global season. That last is a season format open to everyone, and is not the seeded league named Global League the playtest ran in.
The open question
The premise still looks right. Wikipedia's daily trends are good raw material for a game, and nothing in the run argued against it. What the run took away is the shape: a fantasy-sport format cannot carry it, because there is nothing for it to be a fantasy of.
Planning stopped there rather than picking one of the proposals above. What comes next is game design, not another sprint, and it has not been done yet.
Related
- The playtest: the evidence this page is drawn from
- Requirements: the obligations the run tested
- What FantasyWiki is: what it set out to be
- Documentation index: where the eight decision records given verdicts above are kept