TESTRUGBY.COM - Rugby World Cup Fantasy Rugby Game

Type: Fantasy Rugby Game Development

Played by thousands of crazed fans the world-over, this salary-capped fantasy rugby game  was launched in time for the 2003 Rugby World Cup. Way ahead of it's time, it was packed with fresh ideas and advanced features that have, to this day, never been surpassed.

20 years on we ask the creators (Stream Interactive) about the development of this groundbreaking game.

The Details

What is Fantasy Rugby?

Fantasy rugby games range from the very simple 'Pick the Score' games through to the more advanced 'Salary-Capped' games. TESTRUGBY.COM being the later, allowed you to become the 'Head Coach' of your very own 'virtual rugby team', where you get to build a team of super stars from actual players that are taking the field in real games. We would watch the games and record what the players were doing and reward or penalise them for their performances. If you had them in your squad,  you'd get the virtual points that they earned.

What was the purpose of TESTRUGBY.COM (TR) and who was it for?

TR was definitely built to be played by the 'fanatical' rugby follower. To play it you needed a certain level of dedication, especially if you wanted to compete against your peers. Winning it was hard and that's exactly the way we liked it. So really it was designed for rugby fans to who wanted to pit themselves against their friends to see who was the best rugby coach.

How did Stream Interactive get involved in the development of TR?

Stream had actually developed the first ever salary-capped fantasy rugby game - Fantasyrugby.com. We learnt a lot from that experience so figured that we could build an even better game.

What did you win playing this game?

Bragging rights was probably the biggest prize of all, we had a chat system built into it so you can imagine the passionate talk that went on. We did have sponsored prizes and cash prizes but the most sought after was our Hall of Fame. When you won the whole thing, you were among the very elite in the TR community.

Where did your fan base come from?

This game had a world-wide following but the majority of the fans were from South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, England, Wales, Scotland and France, with a growing number coming from USA, Canada, Argentina, Spain, Asia and the Pacific Islands. Our competitions were based around Super Rugby, 6 Nations, Rugby World Cups, British & Irish Lions tours and the end of year European rugby tours, so that's where the majority of the fans came from.

What did it cost to play?

Our games were free to play. Anyone could sign up, invite their friends to play, join an existing division, or just play by themselves... we didn't charge anything. Later on we introduced the ability to buy a few limited trades or the ability to 'Insure' your team from being invalid. When a round locked, you had to have a valid (full) squad to score points, sometimes people forgot fill out their roster so we charged a small amount to replace those empty slots with good players.

Can you explain the Salary Cap aspect of fantasy rugby?

Imagine being the coach of your own team, if you could... you'd buy all the best players and bundle them into your team... that Dream team could score a massive amount of points! But what if you had to work under a salary cap like everyone else? You'd need to spend your virtual dollars very carefully, buy a handful of stars (they are expensive), get some hard workers and some new talent that nobody else knows about. This makes the game more challenging and adds to the fun.

So each player was given a value... how did that work?

We valued the players in such a way that you couldn't just stack your team with the likes of Dan Carter, Brian Habana, Ritchie McCaw,  etc. If you did that you'd have to buy someone really cheap in another position. But the really cool thing was our player valuation algorithm which made a players value fluctuate up or down. Imagine a player having a dream game where they scored some tries, set up a few, made a heap of tackles and barely put a foot wrong. This player would score big! In turn, people would see this and buy them for the next round, this would push up their value, therefore increasing the value of their squad. Smart managers would use this to increase the value of their teams, giving them more cash to buy the best performing players on offer.

So TR was similar to a rugby sharemarket?

Yes you could say that. You have to remember that at some point you'd have to sell your best players, either when a bye round came along or if they got injured or dropped. Because everyone was selling them at the same time, their values would plummet, so it was like a sharemarket. Buy low, sell high and watch your nest-egg grow. Buying proven players after they came off a bye was a genuine tactic that most of our fans picked up on. It made TR a busy place on a Monday morning.

What about the rugby stats, how did you collect them?

This was the most important aspect of all. We collected 15 attributes against each player throughout a game. This was a huge task but we had a trained team that watched all the games, noted down the stats, then uploaded them into our website. This usually happened every Sunday after the weekends games. Our system would run a bunch of routines and spit out the results to everyone that had a valid team playing that round. It was mostly automated but it was still a time intensive task.

• Try
• Try Assist
• Line Break
• Go Forward
• Turnover
• Tackle
• Lineout
• Win Scrum
• Catch Kick
• Kick Penalty
• Kick Conversion
• Kick Drop Goal
• Miss a Kick
• Give Away a Penalty
• Lose Possesion

The Solution

When you launched back in 2003 what was that like?

The game ran like a dream and was very successful, it grew rapidly so we ended up running more comps and continued to increase our fanbase. At one point we were sending out our weekly newsletter to 50,000+ registered users. At that time, social networks were still evolving so we built similar functions into TR  which increased viral growth and added to the community aspect. Over time the rugby stats grew and improved so eventually the Rugby Wiki got better, more reliable and valued by search engines. 

Here are some of the games main features:

• Salary-capped fantasy game (probably the only genuine one for rugby, a lot more common for the NBA or NFL)
• Dynamic player valuations: Player values go up or down depending on popularity
• Player Trades: Buy and sell players
• Team Insurance: Buy insurance to ensure that you always have a valid team
• Stats game engine: Upload stats via the Admin interface
• Credit Buying System: Built to handle multiple mini transactions (trades)
• Game / Trade lock - When the round was closing the game locked until the next round was made available
• Divisions / Conferences: People could create or join groups to play in. These ranged from a few close mates through to organised and sponsored groups with hundreds of active users
• Chat system: Division, Friends and World chat groups
• Spy Mode: Check your rivals teams (after the round has locked)
• Rugby Forum: Advanced forum with administrators, individual profiles, topics
• Blogs: Written by TR Commish and regular gamers who had something to say
• Share your team: Create a snapshot of your team which can then be shared directly to your news feed in Facebook
• Rugby Wiki: A massive database of players, teams, rugby competitions, venues, trophies
• Newsletter (53K subscriber base)
• TR Facebook feed 
• TR Twitter Feed

What happened to TR?

The game's success was probably its biggest downfall. We originally created the game as a bit of fun and as a way of pushing the boundaries of our knowledge in design and technical development, but over time the workload of maintaining it started to impact our other projects. We couldn't drop the ball in terms of meeting our clients needs so we eventually mothballed the game. Even though it hurt, it was the best thing to do.

What's next for TR?

We never like saying never but at this point we're quite happy letting the game sit in storage on our servers. We're involved in other important projects like PD able and we're forever developing our streamSWEET platform (PD able and TR were built on this). This stuff keeps us busy so for now that's the way forward for us.