@erictwillis Hi Eric, I'm one of the Co-Founders here at Victiv.com. While the game is the same, our vision is to provide a better, more engaging fantasy sports experience through a concentration on our product.
One area where we really separate ourselves is once the football games kickoff. We have multiple interactive, real-time dashboards to help you visually follow all of the action of both your rosters and those of your competitors. We have a $5,000 freeroll on Thursday that you can enter free to fully experience the website.
Or if you need help drafting your roster, we've created the VICTRON, which takes in slider settings as a user's suggestion of what statistical categories matter the most when putting together a fantasy roster. The VICTRON then balances those stats and suggests a starting roster for you to tweak.
Our 14 developers and designers here in Austin, TX are still pushing hard (normal business hours are 8am - 3am) to bring a host of new features and game types that we hope will significantly differentiate Victiv.com from our competitors.
Hope to see you in the beta!
@mattprimeaux How are you guys determining salaries? How is Gronk (coming off a major injury and may not even be ready to start the season) demanding a higher salary than Jimmy Graham? That's insane!
@erictwillis Hi Eric, good eye and points. Let me counter...
In the above chart, what we see is the following:
Gronkowski [39 games since 2011] Average 13.4 points & 20+ points in 11 games (28.2%)
Graham [57 games since 2011] Average 11.3 points & 20+ points in 7 games (12.3%)
Gronkowski averages 2.1 more fantasy points per game when he plays, has a higher ceiling, and is more than twice as likely to post 20+ fantasy points in a given game. Based on that assessment, we suggest that Gronkowski is priced fairly compared to Graham.
The counterargument, of course, is that Gronkowski is fragile. But we're dealing with daily fantasy sports pricing. We would contend you're correct in a diminished value for season long formats given relativity to Graham's solid track record of starting in games.
But, when Gronkowski is on the field, he consistently outperforms Graham (who consistently outperforms all other TEs), hence the pricing difference for our format.
Our Chief Information Officer, Earl Mitchell (our resident physicist and previously a Director at Wolfram Alpha's consulting arm) has spent significant time building a set of salaries that are algorithmically geared towards being as predictive as possible of actual athlete performance --- there is no systematic bias across positions. The algorithms are retrained regularly and the methods used are state of the art. We're extremely excited to be offering what we feel will be the sharpest regular season salaries in the industry.
TL;DR --- Gronkowski is better than Graham, historically, in a daily fantasy sports variant. We know this because our resident physicist says so.
@mattprimeaux I rode Gronk to a FF championship in 2012. I understand his value. However, that was years ago. I've always felt Gronk was the best TE in the game. The problem is that he's always injured. The guy has had 8-9 surgeries over the last 3 years. Though NE just traded for Tim Wright because they love to run 2 TE sets, I think the second reason is to have a backup plan for Gronk. Football is too dynamic of a sport year to year to really value data from 3 years ago. There are players that were studs 3 years ago that can't even make the field now. Gronk hasn't played all pre-season and it's still unknown whether he'll take the field in week 1. I think the huge flaw in your valuation method is giving value to 2011 stats. If someone pays that salary for a player who likely won't suit up in week 1, they're crazy.
So several things pop out to me about this:
1) The design. It's certainly much cleaner than the design on every other daily fantasy sports site, but the really muted colors don't grab my attention or make me feel any emotion (which they certainly should, especially since gambling relies so heavily upon emotion).
2) The logo. I really, really like it. Simple, unique, memorable.
3) It's claim that it's "a new version of fantasy sports." This just isn't true. Daily fantasy sports is a well-established market at this point. Of course, that doesn't mean that there's not room for more players in the market, but it's incorrect to claim that Victiv is pioneering a novel concept.
4) The video. It flashes on my browser for a split-second and then disappears, so I can't watch it. (I'm using the latest version of Google Chrome for Mac.)
@maxwendkos I agree with you on the design aspect. It's extremely clean and I like that. I prefer sparse designs with lots of whitespace. However, as you've stated, it's kind of bland that I feel like I'm in a financial dashboard or something.
@maxwendkos Thanks for the feedback Max.
1. Our goal was to start with a minimalist, clean design framework. The game already includes so many complexities, that we didn't want to add to the burden of choice through additional stimuli.
We're still installing animation and transition items on the early pages; however, once the games kickoff, that's when we really feel the website comes to life. We're providing an in-play visual experience that you cannot find elsewhere. I've posted a picture here of what the Dashboard Overview platform looks like for a split second when one of your players scores.
We remind ourselves every day, this is just the start. We've built a team that's passionate about the game and is incredible from a technical standpoint. We look forward to bringing our full vision to the market.
2. Thanks!
3. I'd say that the term "new" is relative here. Is the game unique? No, at least not the one that we're releasing right now. Is the game new? Depends. There are over 40 million American and Canadians that play fantasy sports; however, a fraction of those are currently daily fantasy players. The market is certainly still in its infancy, so it's new to many fantasy sports players.
That being said, your point has been taken and the design team is already throwing around new adjectives to utilize in replace.
4. That's not how it's suppose to work. Could you email beta@victiv.com so we can quiz you a little further to try and fix that issue?
Thanks for the feedback! Would love for you to take part in the $5k freeroll for tomorrow's NFL games and give us your impression of the in-play experience.
@mattprimeaux Thanks for your response, Matt.
1. Clean is good because it makes the website easier to use, but that screenshot you shared still feel really boring to me. When I'm playing fantasy football, I want to feel excited.
2. You're welcome.
3. Cool.
4. Sure.
@maxwendkos Since you're unable to view the videos, we've posted them here, as well:
http://www.vimeo.com/victiv
Happy to review any suggestions from our users on how to improve the experience. Experience and engagement are our #1 priority, so would be remiss of us not to ask for recommendations!
@mattprimeaux My biggest suggestion is just to use less gray and more color. You can do this without sacrificing the clean look you want to achieve.
EDIT: A good place to start might be some articles on color theory.
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