I'm told that we scaled back some of the content so that we could still get this out for the final two weeks of the NFBC season because we still had some tweaks with some other enhancements. But I like the information we're providing now and more is coming next season. We have more content now at a much faster speed, which is what everyone was asking for. If you see anything that still needs to be tweaked, email me at [email protected] and I'll forward that information to the IT department. We want this to run perfectly for you over these final days.
I'd like to thank the guys in the STATS IT department for their diligence on this project. It may look easy folks, but this is not an easy program to get perfect. I know we're STATS and this is what we do, but honestly collecting the data for Live Scoring is what we're known for. Displaying it is another function.
And that's the purpose of this post. Folks were calling out STATS for "the worst live scoring around" and blaming our guys for not getting this like other industry sites. I thought it was an unfair place of blame because STATS had always done exactly what I had paid for. Blame me, not STATS.
Why blame me? Well, let's go back in history to see how we got to this point.
In 2003 when I proposed the concept for the National Fantasy Baseball Championship, I couldn't get anyone to go with me on the idea. My bosses at Krause Publications believed me when I said this could work, but 2003 was not the time to take chances, not after we were in the process of being sold to F+W Publications. I pitched it to USA Today and even had meetings with them in Virginia, but their lawyers felt it was too close to gambling. The bigger media web sites were less interested in pay leagues as they were all going after as many eyeballs as they could get. I struck out on this idea for over a year and even WCOFF took my rules and ran a contest before I could.
Finally one person at STATS thought it was a good enough idea to say they wanted in. At that point, my boss at KP felt that if STATS liked it enough then we should go ahead and do it ourselves. So instead of adding a partner, we decided to go it alone and hire STATS as our back-end provider. That was our setup from 2004-09 in baseball and football and each year our main focus was on the web site, the back-end commissioner product and adding more and more leagues. We had Live Scoring that STATS provided initially, but I never paid STATS for a bigger, faster Live Scoring engine. It wasn't a top priority of the NFBC and NFFC and it wasn't something STATS had for us.
Remember, STATS is known for collecting all of the Live Scoring data that most every major fantasy web site uses. STATS is on the cutting edge of collecting data and sending it out in real-time. It's what we do better than anyone else.
But STATS does not have a customizable commissioner product like Sportsline or ESPN or Yahoo and never did. Back in 2004, STATS was what you called a white-label provider, someone who could customize a game for an industry company and run it for them. They did games for SI.com, NBA.com and others, while each time creating the back-end engine needed to run that particular game. For the NFBC and NFFC, each commissioner product or back-end engine as I call it has been customized just for our scoring system and needs.
The Live Scoring we used in 2004 was what we had each year after that and what we had this year. Again, I never paid STATS to make that better, faster, anything. It was functionable, but definitely not top-of-the-line and we knew that. As my expenses went up through the years along with the revenue, this wasn't a top priority nor did we ever have discussions about improving it before Fanball bought us in 2009.
The Live Scoring with Fanball was worse out of the gate as we didn't have the stats you folks wanted or in the order that you wanted. We got through one baseball season there before returning to STATS. During our late return to STATS in February of 2011, our primary goal was just to get the back-end working properly for 2011 and then we'd look to enhance the game software and work on other features. With many features added early this season, our two biggest projects on the To-Do list were going to be Live Scoring and Overall Live Standings.
But in May when the boards filled up with comments about Live Scoring being so bad, we made Live Scoring the main focus of this year's projects. We had hoped to finish Live Scoring and Live Overall Standings before season's end, but we just have a few tweaks with Live Overall Standings that have made it tough for that to debut in 2012. We apologize for that, but it will be ready yet this NFFC season and will definitely be there for NFBC 2013. Again, sorry, as we thought we could get both done by September.
Our Live Scoring needed to be totally rewritten rather than just add this or that there. The speed of loading the stats was definitely something that had to be addressed and we hope to add as much information to that page as possible without disrupting the flow of information. Again, this was a major project and it took a lot of time while we were also getting the NFFC and NFBKC ready. I know folks want me to apologize for running multiple sports, but trust me, Tom and I aren't full-time fantasy game operators with just one sport. There are plenty of contests out there run by people who own other businesses, but our job is to run pay fantasy games, create content where possible and be there for you folks 24/7 if possible. To do that and pay us handsomely
, we need to be the best high-stakes game for multiple sports.So we have new Live Scoring today. We'll keep tweaking it and adding to it as we go along. And we own the software, so every year we can just make it better and better. What we had before served its purpose when I was as cheap as possible paying STATS, but now it's time for better Live Scoring and we definitely have it.
Again, the next big project on the To-Do List is Live Overall Standings. It's not going to be ready this year, but it will be ready for 2013 NFBC. If you have other enhancements in mind, let me know. But we're definitely at a good point with our software and it's only going to get better. Thanks to everyone who worked on the Live Scoring project and thanks to all NFBC owners who were patient with us. Yes, I kept promising the new Live Scoring and yes things got pushed back as we tested it and tested it, but we didn't want to unveil something that still had a few bugs in it. It took time to get everything right.
Now let's finish strong in 2012 and watch these exciting MLB and NFBC races come to conclusion. It should be fun to watch all around. Good luck everyone and again, THANKS.
