"The best player over the first 3 weeks will win themselves a GoPro Hero3 camera, with 2nd earning a Razer Kraken Pro Gaming Headset and 3rd-5th netting themselves iPod Shuffles"
These were the prizes of our Football Underworld launch contest we held back in April of last year and in such a short time we've come such a long way. Back then we had a user base of little over 100 users and of those I would estimate only about 40-60 were fully active. In fairness, before that point a lot of the features you see when you play now had been still in development (if you don't know the features I'm talking about because you don't play now, then you can download it on iOS or Android, or play it on Facebook).
So we set up a launch contest which ran from 12th April to 4th May, 3 weeks in which whoever could chalk up the most points in the Hall of Fame would take the top prize - a GoPro. Simultaneously we ran a series called 'Tycoon Tips', which were aimed at helping users to make the most out of their gaming - we still give occasional tips today!
The great thing about the launch contest was that it was the first time we were properly able to see how real users in a real, live environment would interact with our newborn system. Straight off the bat we had a good amount of interest from users who were keen to be the winners of the contest - after just 24 hours one of my friends, Tom Upton, was leading the contest with 3,017 points but being closely followed by a few others including Paul Abel. The following day we released a few a stats which included that 450 exhibition matches had already been played over those first two days - this was amazing to us at the time but to put it into perspective, 6,000 exhibition matches are currently played per day on average. As the contest progressed, Tom made a big decision to buy a large amount of gold bars from us giving him an edge in the days following. This was met by some backlash from one user in particular who had been keeping up with him, but we deemed that while Tom was getting a boost from buying gold bars it was in no way a "pay to win" mechanic - that is one thing we have sworn against from day 1 of development.
By the end of the first week, Tom had accrued 12,738 points and was pulling away from the rest of the table, for which the rest top 5 had completely switched (aside from Paul, who had dropped to 5th). Tom was also revealed to have had over 3x the amount of visits to the Prison of anyone else in just that first week - it was clear he was determined. An interesting thing, however, was that over the following week another of our users (Gonça Pinarbaşi) had overtaken Tom in League A despite his ranking dominance - this really showed us how open the contest could still be, as league success would bring a number of resources which could help catch Tom.
Entering into the last week, we released the updated top list of Prison visitors - Tom was on top still, but quickly being caught by a his recent rivals plus a new addition: Daniel Valentine. This didn't look to affect the outcome, however, as with 3 days remaining Tom was ahead of 2nd place by a massive 10,547 points. These standings ended up carrying over the end of the contest, and the final 5 were (in ranking order): Tom Upton, Gonça Pinarbaşi, Chris Beale, Michele Swalens and Lukas Amstutz.
We are definitely considering another contest in the future and who knows what this could bring?
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