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Big Win Sports August - Recap Well, as every month I will take a look back into Big Win Sports Apps and what happened during this period. Generally very quite and finally a longer run without big issues on Hotheads servers. In the final days of August the Soccer community got a new update which was only based on some goodies provided within the Friends mode, like overall score versus your opponents AND the crash bug seems to be solved finally. Good things but not really a big progress. On the other hand August saw a further dramatic downslide of participating teams especially in Baseball and Hockey. Overall the number of serious playing teams in all five major Apps dropped unfortunately by another 18% and so almost by 1/3 over the past 8 weeks. What should I say more - I think everything is discussed several times over here and it does not look really good. Let's hope that this is only a summer whole and not the end of a great idea just badly handled.
Enthon's Free Team Giveaway And the lucky winner of my heritage team with a wallet full of 6,400 Big Bucks is Clarence Sze from the Philippines. He was drawn randomly today out of just 8 participants which provided us with the required information over the past month. The winner has been notified by e-mail and after confirmation will receive the team password. Have fun and thanks to all participants. Spicing up Big Win Sports Having my concerns about the future of the Big Win Sports Apps I like to offer my opinion about a couple of things about the apps and possible improvements in the future. Let’s start with the Big Rush Pack Hothead implemented some months ago in most of the sports. I know that the interest in Super Star players went quickly down and just increasing the number of contracts as recently done by Hothead might delay the meltdown but won't avoid it. What is the problem? With regular 80+ player promos the number of 90+ rated teams excessively increased, especially in Basketball where it is hard these days to play versus a <65 rated team at all. Most ot the time you end up facing eight or nine 80+ teams in a PRO10 on a regular basis. This is not limited to Basketball and surely dominates Hockey already. Just a matter of time and number of promos held by Hothead and we will follow the same path for Soccer and Baseball. Saying this we all agree that for teams above 95 rating the Super Star players have no real value anyway because of the fact that for any position certain skills are more important as others and I am sure that my 99 rated Basketball Shooting Guard (14.8 point average across 11,000 games) cannot be over-powered by a 105 rated Superstar with lower ratings in the key skills required for this special position. Therefore “No deal” for most of the teams opening the packs anymore. Well, nevertheless the implementing of the Big Rush Packs was a masterpiece also maybe not intended by Hothead at the time. Why? – It is easy now to quickly spice up the whole game, keep players going and interested on the long run simply in using the mystery pack for implementation of other cards and options in an easy way. My ideas are for instance…
Another idea I followed up was the fact that I am becoming more and more bored of my team but do not like to spend massive Bucks anymore to find just another similar player in a Big Player Pack. Therefore I like to make a most likely unpopular recommendation to Hothead about restricted player life time in general. I don’t think that on the long run this immortality (Fountain) will help the community to stay interested. If you reach a team level like my one most of the promos are just boring and you play always the same excellent players for the rest of your Big Win life and there is no reason to change them. We all know that reaching a 100+ rated team may not encourage you seriously to look for an upgrade to 101 or 102 hence there is no big difference in the outcome for your matches. Note that I won the most of my trophies with a 99 (94) rated Basketball team. I personally like to get challenged in the future in being forced to re-built my team on a regular basis. Therefore the idea is to limit the lifetime of each player to a random number in between 3,000 and 5,000 games and apply over his career an increasing skill bonus based on gained experience through matches. Please note that an average life of 4,000 games still gives you 8-12 weeks real time before you have to replace finally retiring players. To implement such a system Hothead must replace the Remaining Contract Renewals by a lifetime match count which starts at zero (0/4553) if you pull out of the booster. To level the extra costs I would remove the contract cards completely by the life time restriction. This would level the investment in extra Bucks for being forced to build up a consistent replacement roster avoiding the contract cards costs. The experience based skill bonus might look like this:
Such a system requires you to play up new players a long time before your potential stars will retire. Otherwise your player rating would drop by 10 points if you replace let me say a 100 Shooting Guard with 4,000 games (+ experience skill bonus = 106) by a 100 Rookie with zero games (=96). And how good would it be to have a +6 skilled Senior on the bench for important matches! To eliminate cheating, all game stats should be restricted to trophy and event games only, not countingFriends Challenges and Quick Games anymore! There are seriously people out there playing there own weak second team 5,000 times a month??? I assume that such a dramatic strategy change would force us to plan, build and rebuilt our teams to a certain but not excessive extend, avoid constant overflow of 95+ teams just created by buying 5 or 10 packs during an 80+ Promo. Well my first suggestion to spice up the Big Rush Packs might be easier to implement but the second idea looks much more promising on the longer term but would require a general make over by Hothead! Random? Trying to review some observations I had made before, I checked during the past months the outcome of the teams chosen as your opponent by the Big Win Sports server statistically. The result was somehow expected but discovered some interesting facts: Playing a match where if you win you will take over the lead in your trophy:
Final three matches in a trophy:
No chance anymore:
Success celebration:
Cherry picks:
I like to keep this observations without any further comment so that you can make up your own mind about the results. Scouser's wins third consecutive title!!! The defending Champion Scouser's set all records in our monthly Basketball event. After another thrilling 7 games final series win over THE FORSAKEN he collected his third title in a row and is now triple champion! Time to say goodbye After winning 450 Trophies and 8,650 matches I finally pushed a last time the "Pain" button to start my my final Hockey match as bigwinapps.com. Enough is enough and it is time to take long service leave and what could be a better day as being 5th on the All-Time ladder and No Use For A Name got his 600th trophy! I am not talking about a retirement, you should never say never again, but the past months had been just a big win pain watching the result calculating engine makes me sick all day long. So I decided to end my career for now and focus on other sports and apps hoping that maybe in the future somebody in Hotheads management will realize that losing so many regular players and observing dropping numbers of participating teams in the weekly events might mean something. However, funny was that I made my final match versus a team called "Fuc*king game". Not a joke guys and my first good moment for a long time in Hockey. Well good luck to all the brave teams still going on and my deepest respect about your unbroken spirit. See you around - Enthon Random? Trying to review some observations I had made before, I checked during the past months the outcome of the teams chosen as your opponent by the Big Win Sports server statistically. The result was somehow expected but discovered some interesting facts: Playing a match where if you win you will take over the lead in your trophy:
Final three matches in a trophy:
No chance anymore:
Success celebration:
Cherry picks:
I like to keep this observations without any further comment so that you can make up your own mind about the results. Enthon’s Big Win Sports Gift 2013 Dear visitors of bigwinapps.com, Running this webpage for more than six months now I thought it might be time to reward one page visitor with a special FREE gift. Therefore I decided to give away a Big Win Sports Basketball team for free! A screenshot of the team can be found further down for information. However, the team has an average rating of 98, collected to date already 36 trophies and 1,500+ Wins and comes together with an account filled up with 6,373 Big Bucks’ – Yes you are right plenty of Bucks to play with too. This special activity ends on 26th of August 2013 and the lucky winner will be randomly drawn out of all participants receiving afterwards the team password via e-mail. Who can participate?
How to participate (Read carefully)? Send an e-mail to enthon@bigwinapps.com with the following information using a valid e-mail address as sender:
Expecting a huge amount of e-mail traffic during the next weeks, please kindly note that ANY participation e-mail which does not provide the required content described above, will be straight deleted without notice and cannot get the team as a gift. Furthermore I am not in position to answer hundreds of confirmation requests, so if you like to have a prove of acceptance activate the read confirmation option and I will confirm if your entry was accepted. Good luck Enthon Up for grab -- "Enthon’s Heritage"
Big Shit happens again After a frustrating total crash of the game servers yesterday, this morning all gamers just faced the same trouble again. I do not know what I can say without getting rude but it is just a big joke how customers get treated during the past couple of days. Well, I am sure the guys at Hothead working hard to get it up and running again but quantity is not the same as quality and there are really Big problems not solved at all. Anyway, Hothead started the weekly events anyway which provides us with more BIG WIN error messages to watch. By the way I do not hate you, I am just a frustrated and never reimbursed customer.
Nevada Dogs joining Immortals Club The Nevada Dogs Football team joint yesterday a very exclusive group of Big Win Sports teams in winning 1,000 trophies. Congratulations! Impact Cards and Match Engine – How it might work How the “Match Calculation Engine” works and to what extend the big impact cards influence in real life the outcome of a match is surely “the” biggest secret to date in Big Win Sports Apps. Hothead never confirmed anything substantial and keep those things hidden and blurious, so what you will find in this article is just my opinion but you might review your match results in a different light in the future. Well as you know I am a fan of statistics and true believe in the strength of statistical analysis to identify behavior patterns of systems. In the past 8 months I collected hundreds of match stats in my several Big Win Sports databases. Sounds like CSI Australia or better BSI (Big Win Sports Scene Investigation), however I like to talk a little bit about how Hotheads secret engine might work. Please note I will mainly relate my examples to Hockey but it is in my mind the same principle behind all the sports apps the guys provide. This might be easier to accept if you recognize two important factors: (a) Player Skills are similar at all sports and (b) big impact cards have more or less similar effects across the different apps – Means Hothead most likely uses the same mechanics developed in the past. Well let’s begin with some predictions how the game calculation engine works. I assume that the system is based on sequences of game plays leading towards a point before the next sequence starts. If you look in the different skills available for all players, independent from the specific sport, they seem to be all quite similar. There is scoring (shooting or catching), passing, tackling/stealing (defense) and player speed/run away (mobility) skills. Skills? We know about skills, they are shown on our player cards and can be boosted. With those simple principles I would say we got the already the basics and the game plays relate directly to the skills our players have! So for instance, if a Hockey player tries to pass the puck forward the game engine just calculate if he was successful or not using his skill level for passing and further defensive skills which might influence the outcome. Whatever the result is (sequence ends) the game engine just goes to the next step maybe a shot if the pass was delivered and the receiver is close enough to the goal. Considering that this sequences are transferred later into pre-defined game plays to provide you with the option to watch a game it can be easily observed on your screen. If you assume that a Hockey Defender which get the Puck near the blue line will try to finish with a shot on goal where on the other hand a winger plays often another pass to the center or try to skate closer to the goal potential next sequences to be calculated are expectable. Looking into Basketball this is exactly the reason why the Power Forwards is not doing a lot of 3-Pointers, he is just not in the right position based on the preset game instruction for his position implemented into the Big Win Apps. I believe that there is no random factor inside the calculation and also if your player has 100 (or more) skill rating for Pass generally the chance for completion is always below 100%. OK, let us assume that I am correct in how it works; now it is easy to understand in which way Big Impact Cards influence the game respectively any sequence attempt. The cards simply increase or decrease the available skill level for your players which attempt a certain play. Saying this the level of influence of each Gold or Blue Card is surely different and the maximum bonus is fixed. During my detailed Basketball analysis I have proven that playing Rainmaker and Focused at the same time does not accumulate the effects and my figures in Soccer around On Target and Super Strike and Hockey confirm those results. Well, all regular players have already found out that each sports require different skills or let me say there are skills which have more impact as others on the outcome of a match. This explains why some cards are better as others. Getting back to Hockey and another example: Winning defensive or offensive draws requires in my mind the skill Stick Handle increased by a bonus if you play one of the impact cards “Defensive Draws” or “Offensive Draws”. Well, this is the perfect world and I am sure that I generally discovered the system correctly also if I like to mention that players position (mobility) is another factor how the game play sequences are progressing. Of course, running sequences like that might led to a pretty bad outcome anyway if most of the decisions made by the game engine will be against you, but the likelihood is quite low if not intended and implemented in the software. Anyway, there is still one important question open. How does Hothead manage the upset losses were cards and player skills seems to be completely ignored. We all are losing matches on a daily basis which we should not for all reasons if the match engine would apply only skills and impact cards to determine how the game goes forward. Means there must be something else behind the scenes we have not discussed yet. Some kind of manipulation? In my mind the answer might be very easy to find – If the game engine simply applies under certain conditions (random or intentionally triggered at some point) a general rating bonus/malus to all players of your team before the match calculation starts. Imagine the skills of all your players will be reduced by 50 or 75 points before a match starts! This would explain why a 100 rated team lose versus a 42 rated one despite any impact cards played and for sure the terrible performance of your players during the match. Real life experience easy implemented and very frustrating for all of us at some point! Finally I am sure that pre-defined criteria trigger such skill drops for your team and not only just one random chosen match from time to time. Finally watch your matches and make up your own mind. Is your team really treated always in the same way and who controls the outcome of your trophy hunts? 1,000 Trophies SupportRCheat! is the first team which recently passed the 1,000 trophies won in Basketball and is therefore the only team in Big Win Sports ever reached such a mark. Congratulations! Brazil 2010 wins Soccer Event Final After a long and exciting week and 8 rounds of competition with great matches and two close Semi Final deciders, Brazil 2010 won the final with a goal in last minute by 2:1 versus the hosting title defender bigwinapps.com. Thanks to all participants and congratulations to the winner. Next event planned will be for Basketball and registration ends in two weeks time. Name your team! I am playing for almost 7 months all kind of Big Win Sports Apps and made a lot of “gamer” friendships during that time with other team managers. Especially in our forum very funny conversations gave me always a good feeling, which is by the way the main reason I am still playing. Not even knowing the majority of my daily competitors on the ice, grass pitch or floor, I developed a lot of respect for most of the teams I am battling on a regular basis. What I realized is that the team name is certainly your business card out there and a very important part for your identity within the player community. There is a lot of respect I put behind some of the names or should I say the brand those people created, on top of the leaderboards or not. This is for instance certainly the biggest factor why I never played a B-Team to win additional trophies using the shortfall in Hothead’s system in penalizing strong teams in Amateur trophies. Well, I just do not like to show up with a 39 rated team, not even in Hockey, and take the burden of not getting a better outcome to keep my identity. Saying this I like to tell you my thoughts about team names in general in looking at groups of gamers out there in Big Win – First we find a group which nobody likes really and in my mind Hothead should take more action in eliminating teams named intentionally showing a racist background or other extremely inappropriate intensions. Well, let’s ignore those less gifted human beings and take a quick look on the heaps of Bulls, Heats, Spurs, Real Madrid, Bruins and Dream Team’s out there. Oh guys, it is good to show your sympathy for your favorite team but playing in trophy’s with 4 or 5 "Heat" teams is boring me to death. At least put something special behind in it like "*** Heat #1" or use other special character to create your own and unique identity out there. On a longer run and if you are successful it will create your own brand recognition value for you and your Big Win team. By the way a brand to remember is not really if you use a number of underscores to name your team like “___” or “_____” which shows not much creativity and fails completely. This brings me to the group of people renaming there own teams every single week. Well same thing, who cares or will remember you at all guys – Nobody. Another bunch of gamers like to find some friends and including the friends code in the team name. Fair game for some time and if it makes sense, means not includes “xx” in the code and asking for “Add me” – ????. Alright, finally my five cents on the table for endless names which are not even completely shown on leaderboards. Well shorter is sometimes better and if we cannot see your name you might be not recognized as you deserve. So good luck and spare us from putting another 5,000 “Heat” teams in the competition after game 7!!! Scouting opponents teams by Merchants I guess it might be helpful to explain how (and why) I scout opponent Football teams and my own players on the active and inactive rosters.I once used a platinum RB "Sweetness" and he seemed to be unstoppable in his games against bronze, silver and gold opponents I eventually found the sky-cache player directory on my rooted Android phone, found the data file for "Sweetness," and was able to open it as a text file with Root Explorer and figure out that I had *lucked* into boosting his agility to 105 by placing a platinum boost on a 97-rated agility. After I discovered the sky cache players folder, I wrote a program in visual basic (on my PC) to read all the active and backup players' files, and to output the skills and some other player info into a CSV file. This provides me with a quick method of properly assessing my players' actual and hidden skills, along with the potential skills of the rookies that I draft... The same information (except for hidden skills above 100) can be obtained by using the game's built in VIEW TEAM function... This is currently how I collect the statistics and skills (but not hidden skill values above 100) for Opponents' teams: I "SCOUT" the opponent using the SCREEN CAPTURE function. For my Galaxy Note, running Android 4.2.2, I press POWER and VOLUME DOWN at the same time, or use the screen capture command on the Note's special stylus. I save the info and later view the screens using a picture viewer (QuickPic) or by copying all the screenshots from the PICTURES>SCREENSHOTS folder to my PC. STEP 1 --- PRESS PLAY > select 3 cards > PRESS PLAY (wait for opponent). The game creates an *old* MATCH TITLE SCREEN and an *old* VIEW TEAM screen. Do a SCREEN CAPTURE of the MATCH TITLE. Time used 2 extra seconds. The game has already been played, and the stats have been added to the Big Win server and the opponent teams' players, but I don't know the outcome yet because I am still looking at the *old* MATCH TITLE SCREEN. Instead of using "back" to "Exit Game" or "Skip to End" or "Watch Game" to see the outcome, go to Step 2. STEP 2 --- PRESS the BINOCULAR icon that says "VIEW TEAM" and view the *old* VIEW TEAM screen for the OPPONENT's TEAM. Do screen capture #2, then either hit *back* to get to the MATCH TITLE SCREEN or start checking out one or more individual players and SCREEN CAPTURE the players' SKILL and STAT screens and capture any or all of them. Each player takes the Galaxy Note about 4-5 seconds to capture the SKILLS and STATS (each screen is 1280x800, approx. 750k). So, for the entire team (screen captures #3 to #48), it takes about four minutes. STEP 3 --- From the VIEW TEAM screen, press BACK to get back to the MATCH TITLE screen, view the game or skip to end and take the last screen capture (#49). OUTCOME: In about five minutes, I scout all the opponent players and team information. Of course, the thing that takes time is typing that information out if I plan to use it to analyze something. Nowadays, I play about 80 games and scout one or two opponents a day... Why scout an opposing team? Here is one example of a useful SCOUTING exercise that any Big Win player should be able to do, because it appears as if every Big Win player will eventually get a chance to play the infamous 4-rated GOLD MINERS team. Scouting the GOLD MINERS team can be a valuable lesson for you, even if you have to manually write down the 23 players' skills and stats. Every player on the GOLD MINERS team is really bad, rated either a 4 or a 5 on the basis of being worth 1/8th of each of its original bronze skills, due to expired contracts, injuries, and retirement. Nevertheless, because of the uniform bad skills of every player and the fact that every player appears to have played every one of the thousands of games it has played in the *SAME POSITION* - it is easy to discern the DEFENSIVE needs of *every Big Win team, regardless of its rating* by using the GOLD MINERS' *vast* experience on defense. Since everything is equal, GOLD MINERS' stats can tell you which Linebacker is in the position to make the most interceptions. Since everything is equal, GOLD MINERS' stats can tell you which Linemen have to make the most tackles. I can usually tell which teams have figured out these two important lessons (or lucked into them), by positioning the team's best defensive linesman in the sweet spot. and placing the best "hands" Linebacker in the sweet spot. I am not going to spoil the fun, by posting the "sweet spots" -- since they are rather obvious if you SCOUT the GOLD MINERS or if you SCOUT other teams that appear to know what they are doing with their defense. Big Win Sports JUNE recap As every month I took a look into the stats on the leaderboards to identify which Sports are hot and which ones became less interesting for you. The figures below show that the Soccer App established itself as second force in the Big Win Sports Universe and that the recent upgrade of Big Win Baseball at least signals some positive trends and might draw soon even with a heavily starving Football. Compared to last month and despite the fact that Hothead rolled out weekly events all Sports are showing signs of stagnation.
Oh, and by the way, thanks to 6700 visitors which showed up on my page last month; an increase of about 50% compared to May.
900 Trophies and tired Congratulation to "The Red Jihad" Basketball team for reaching as first Big Win Sports Team ever a 900 Trophy lifetime record. Unfortunately one the greatest team ever decided to retire from the daily battlefield afterwards! We will miss you mate and there is still one mission to accomplish - A spot in our competition Hall of Fame for Basketball. So hope to see you in July....
Scouser's wins Basketball Play-Off Week Event June The first Basketball Play-Off Week ended Friday with an exciting final in between the Indiana Pacers and Scouser's. Having lost during the Swiss rounds Scouser's was able to return the favour in the finals and catched the title with a 4-2 series win in Game 6. If you like to know more about our competitions, register for the upcoming events or take a look at the results just visit our monthly competition section. Big Win SOCCER update Quick matches are back in the game and might be re-established in Basketball and Hockey too in the future. The game engine looks still reasonable and not random as for Hockey all the time. Thank you Hothead for not changing this one. Another point I recognized is that the number of injuries has increased and very positive, the colors of the kits are looking much better now. Before you had a very low number as you can see from your stats but now I had 8 out of 20 matches with injured players. Of course you have to aquire a whole new team if you like to get the chemistry bonus in the future. All positions are specialized now (Central Defender, Right Forward, Left Winger...) except your goalie. So for the most of us 1 out of 11 to date and a long way to go to find and skill up 10 new players. Therefore it is time for a new player promo...! I guess after the Soccer release it won't take any longer before Hothead start a new player promo. This is a happy day for me as natural born German and really hating to play on Hockey in the past weeks. Sorry, but it is what it is and also if I am currently ninth on the All-Time Trophy Hockey leaderboard I am most likely going to retire soon. Just to painful and annoying for me based on the odd result calculation, which is far the worst in Hockey. Have fun guys and I hope to see you soon for a good match of real "Football".... Oh, I forgot - here is the epic moment or the epic team which made it first on the leaderboard. Well done Gabriel!
Host team wins the title Our first monthly Hockey Play-Off Week finished today with a 4-1 series win by the BigWinApps.com team. In a pure Australian final the two time champion "Hockeroos" won game 1 by 5-0 and set the pace early on. With two tie games in between the next three wins went all to the home team but always just by one goal difference ending 2:1. With a 3-1 series lead both teams matched up for the potential final match. After a dominant performance by BigWinApps.com in the first period putting them ahead by two goals, the Hockeroos recovered in the second and equalized before the final period (3-3). Early in the final period the Hockeroos took the lead equalized and countered by two BigWinApps goals and another equalizer. A goal festival and 5-5 with 10 minutes to go. Another Hockeroos penalty time provided BigWinApps the final goal in the match and a 4-1 series win + 4000 Big Bucks. By the way we watched all matches with our Boys on TV! Best teams in Big Win Basketball? A good question and not easy to answer. Is it the team with the highest team rating? Certainly not, but this depends mainly on how much money you have invested in getting high rated players in your team. Is it the number of match wins your team collected? Not really because of the fact that some teams just played for ages friendly matches and PRO trophies avoiding the tough competition in AMATEUR comps. Is it the match winning percentage? I guess to a certain extend this is a good indicator but also influenced by the type of matches the teams mainly played in the past. However nobody might be puzzled about the team with the best winning percentage - The Red Jihad of course. However we need another additional factor to find a better answer to my question or let us adjust the question itself first. Who is the best managed team in Big Win Basketball? In this case we should include in the review the Trophies won and I decided to calculate a Games per Trophy factor to answer it. Well let's see which frequently playing team has the best / most efficient game play. The answer was a bit of a surprise for me. Olympiacos BC, currently 16th for All-Time Trophies, is by far the most efficient managed team in Big Win Basketball! What is your secret mate?
Enthon's Review - Friends Challenge Mode All players of Big Win Basketball and Hockey have already learnt about Hotheads new Friends Challenge Mode implemented within the recent update and planned for the other sports too in the near future. After playing around with the system for some time and using it to run our Hockey Play-Off Week competition I thought it might be time to share my thoughts about this new feature with you. To be honest, losing the old Friends Tournament system was quite a shock for me. The system gave us and fellow gamers in the past a great platform to run our monthly competitions in a nice and easy way. I think the main reason for Hothead was to stop the excessive usage of the system for running fake events with dummy teams to cash in 100 Bucks for the winner on a regular basis. I guess some players funded their whole team with that strategy cashing in 600 Bucks a day for playing just three matches with the prime team and 9 other so called B-Teams filled in to activate the price scheme. From a commercial perspective certainly a valid point for Hothead to stop this mis-use but at the end I like to mention that those players put a lot of effort into their daily routine in deleting and re-loading all the teams over and over again. Well, at the end I had preferred if Hothead just removed or reduced the amount of Bucks granted for the Friends Tourneys but kept it in place as an alternative for community events. Anyway it is gone and this article is intended to focus on the new friends challenge mode. Let’s start but not really focus on the graphics issues still inside this feature. It happens all the time that after I played a challenge my team name and the team colours are replaced by my friends name for up to two or three of the following matches. This is disturbing but not a serious problem and I would expect that Hothead will fix it earlier or later. The handling of “Friends” is easy and the screen looks organized also if the scrolling through a long list of friends will take some time. Friends: You have to connect using a 9 digit unique team code which is proper implemented and easy to do. The problem is how to get team codes. Not much options if teams are not renaming themselves to find some friends or using our Team Code Board to publish a code. I think this let the system a bit down and restricts the exchange of codes to small groups like our Forum members. However, if you made finally some friends the whole thing get a nice momentum. First of all the matches do not reduce your energy bar, at least for now and I hope this will be a permanent feature. Another very good thing is that you can take a look at all time on your friends teams and players, his/her trophies won and overall rating plus a photo if the account is linked to Facebook. By the way I do not understand how this works and if you know it, just give me a clue. So at all a very nice and well prepared new playground provided by Hothead. The main thing I am missing is a field showing still the team code of your friends. This would help if you for instance delete a team out of your friends list and like to reconnect later on. Furthermore a real highlight would be to see a head-to-head score for all the friends too. Finally the best idea was to include the option of sending over a short message within your challenge request. This provides us with the first ever option to interact a little bit with each other. Unfortunately it works just in one direction and I like to see this extended by an answer option after the match is played. Everything else works perfect to date and we are able to battle our friends on a daily basis, if we like. Let’s see how my BIG WIN FUN RATING would be for the new friends challenge mode. Well to define this I like to take into account my recent experiences in using the system but taking also a look forward. Unfortunately I have the feeling that after some weeks it will get a bit boring as soon as the first hype for our new toy is over. I already had to decline some of the challenge requests I get every day and will use the system in the future most of the time to battle my forum mates and of course during our monthly play-off weeks. Saying this I decided to place two ratings today, one for short term and one for long term fun.
4840 visits in May Our webpage is now almost 5 months online and the community is growing day by day. In may we hosted more as 1800 different visitors and most of them twice or more. More as 14,000 pageviews only in the past 30 days shows that there is still demand and we happy to provide you with up to date information about Big Win Sports Apps on a daily basis. Thank you very much for your support in the past and hopefully in the future. I prepared some stats to give you a bit of a traffic overview.
New feature "Team Codes" Pin Board To help the community in connecting easier to each other I decided to implement a Pin Board with submitted team codes on this webpage. A quick link has been placed in the menue on the left hand side of this page as well. For the love of the game, Enthon. Big Rush Booster - Recap Finally we got yesterday the promotion every player looked forward to, since the new updates for Hockey and Basketball were released, the Big Rush Booster Pack which should include Superstar players. Saying it straight - Well done Hothead! I liked it overall. Before the promo I was curious about what we would get for 10 Bucks. What we found in the one card packs was a decent mix of Platinum Skill Boosts, Big Contracts, Gold Players and Gold Impact cards which levelled in a good way your investment to get one of those "magical" star players. That the star players are restricted to one contract was a bit dissapointing but early known and posted in our Forum and on Facebook. Therefore every player was able to make up his own mind about investing Bucks to get one of those. Considering the restricted lifetime of the Star Players they do not have a big game impact on higher rated teams and the performance but I decided to start collecting them instead of use the cards actively in my team for now.
As already mentioned I would like to see at least one or two contract renewals for future Star Players to include them for a good amount of time and I hope Hothead takes this on board for future promos. Another nice to have would be the random spreat in of one or the other 80+ platinum player as well which would make thing even better. Being always critical about the progress of my most beloved past time game I like to introduce today the Big Win Fun Rating which will always appear if article are directly related to the game play or specific features. Saying this, I like to rate the Big Rush Booster Pack with 4.5 out of possible 6 stars. Well done guys but there is some room for improvement!
100+ points possible in Basketball matches Without an update Aussie Mavs provided us with an amzing score in beating the Heat in six overtimes 104-100. So finally the question is answered if you are able to reach a three digit count on the scoreboard.
101 rated Football player discovered I am not sure if Hothead already started to sell Star Players in Football but I got the screenshot below of another 99 rated team which includes two 101 rated players. Well at least we know now for true that there are 93 base rated player cards out there, or this is another fake by Hothead to keep us spending money and Bucks in promotions. However with the new update it won't be any longer something special considering that Star Players will be introduced and a 5+ rating bonus for player in correct position as well.
Recording Big Win matches on Android? On of our Forum members mentioned that there is a great Android app for recording Big Win Sports Mastermind Two weeks ago bigwinapps.com started looking for the BigWinSports Mastermind, or the gamer with the best teams in all three major sports (Basketball, Hockey and Football). Based on the winning percentages of the team we found our Mastermind - It is with an overall teams match winning percentage of .776 IT'S OVER 9000!!! Congratulations! - You are the best of the best. By the way as only competitor I came in second with a percentage of .748. Major Big Win Sports changes announced by Hothead Hey Big Win Nation, Big Win Mike here with some exciting news from Big Win Sports! We have a bunch of new updates coming to our sports in the near future, including some brand new features! We are happy to finally be able to bring all of the great features from our recent game Big Win MLB and introduce them to into our sports line up. Our newest card pack is the BIG RUSH PACK, which will be a special promotional pack available for purchase for specific periods of time. These packs contains the chance of finding a Superstar Player (rated up to 100 out of the pack) which is the highest rated player ever to step on the field. Will you be able to find a Superstar? We are also pleased to introduce position chemistry to many of our games. This new mechanic will increase your team's overall rating by +5 if you have the correct players in each of the correct positions on your team! Our Big Win game will also include a new uniform pack, allowing you to more easily purchase the gold and platinum uniforms found in the product. New game modes will be brought forth to our older games, including Trophies, Events and Friends mode to our library of products! We do not have exact dates for the launch of these updates but expect to see Big Win Basketball and Big Win Hockey first followed by additional sports thereafter. Thanks for playing, and good luck in all of your matches! Well it seems this might be the end of the Friends Trophies system which is a bit of a shame hence we had really a lot of fun running our monthly tournaments. I am still checking what the Friends mode means in detail because of MLB Baseball, which already includes this feature, is not available in Australia to date. And by the way, the feedback by our Forum Members on MLB Baseball was overall not very positive. So let’s wait and see. Listed below are the announced features coming to each of the apps according Hothead! BASKETBALL, HOCKEY, FOOTBALL, SOCCER BIG WIN HOCKEY & SOCCER BIG WIN SOCCER Just ridiculous or normal insanity? As you may know I am a very curious person and beside my daily tournaments I am always trying to test out ideas around Big Win Sports. For this reason I am running several "loser" teams in the Basketball comps to check out for instance how much wins (by Hothead decision) you are still able to collect with a 9 rated team, playing no impact cards at all. By the way the answer is approximately one in eleven matches, which is a daily Hothead Joke itself. However, this article is not about Hothead's worse result calculation system, it is about the ability of such a team to win a real daily trophy. The simple answer is yes!
I send my "Happy to lose" test team yesterday into an Amateur 10 trophy to see how they would perform. Well, as expected I played only 39 or 40 rated teams so still 30+ rating points better opponents but to make things more interesting I played in all games three gold cards. Funny result, 8-2 and the first trophy for my potential Losers. Well, in my mind this should not happen at all and again I am requesting a general revision of the game calculation by Hothead.
It is just customer hostile to upset good teams and seriious players with this kind of trash. But so far nobody cares in Vancouver as for the card glitch issue still annoying the most of us. Of course it is always better to run a new promo or event instead of fixing the obvious game issues. The ultimate team Epic is not the word to describe the Nevado Dogs, All-Time Trophy leader in Big Win Football. I never played the guy but I had heard in our Forum that he is running the only confirmed 98 rated team in Big Win Sports Apps history. Well, there was another promo and he did it. I don't know how much Big Bucks he invested but certainly he owns the best team ever now with a magical average rating of 99. Yes, you are right, 24 players with an average rating of 99, the ultimate team as long as Hothead will not introduce players with base ratings above 92. By the way the team includes 100 rated LM and RB too. So here it is - THE team...
Ultimate yes, but not unbeatable as I recognized just a couple of hours after the release of this article. I met the Dogs in an Amateur Bowl and won our first match by 20-9. Well, at least a great chance to screenshot all of his amazing players. I will surely put them up pretty soon but this is another story. Epic Promotion Fail
The 80+ player promotion ended recently and the most of us regular players invested a fair amount of our Bucks to improve the teams. Certainly everybody will be happy to see a 92 shining at the overall rating circle of a player card just pulled out of a Booster pack, but sometimes a closer look let us break out in tears. The Red Jihad provided us with a real example of an epic fail his 92 rated Point Guard, already equipped with three Strenghts Add Skills. For sure not the right skill we would look for in a Point Guard but finally at least on of those rare 92 base rated players and a good story to tell. Bad luck mate, maybe next time.
Funniest team name poll During the past month the Forum members collected funny / clever team names to vote finally for the best ones found to date. And here are the top three: 1. AFRO CIRCUS 2. I WIN YOU CRY 3. SHOW ME YOUR TDs Fake teams gone - Good or bad? It seems that Hothead finally took on the critics about running large number of fake teams mainly in the Amateur Tournaments for Basketball, Football and Hockey and stopped this activity almost completely. Well, the result is that the top teams have to play each other more often now, sometimes three times in a row and this is heavily discussed in our forum. I prefer personally to battle a trophy out against the best teams instead of losing the majority of my games against Hothead's Ghost Teams. It is harder now, but really interesting and finally totally fair. Thank you Hothead! You collected the first plus points for a long time with me. I hope really you are now reducing the other manipulations around final games in a trophy and upset desaster as well. For the love of the game and your customers. Do not forget we are still there.... Undesirable Hothead recently banned me from posting further comments on there BigWinSport Facebook page. By the way my past comments had been always quickly deleted anyway. It is interesting that you cannot find a lot of critical comments on that page at all. However Hothead has the legal right to censor the postings and keep there pages clean as snow on the indeed beautiful Canadian Mountains. If anybody else has encountered the same "treatment" please let me know: enthon@bigwinapps.com. Also the comment "Thank you" delivered the following funny result:
Doomed? Strange title for an article I know, but the question mark might become more clear if you read this story to the end. Well, I am sure most of us frequent players ran into very strange opponents from time to time, which I am calling the “Pensioners” or “Rehab-Party”. The teams are normally rated in between 9 (lowest I have ever seen) and 29, appearing occasionally in all Big Win Sports Competitiions. They normally host heaps of players already out of contract and injured as well. Additionally more advanced ones send also retired players back into action providing really hilarious team views full of guys in wheelchairs or resting on a walking stick.
Most of those teams and the players showing record breaking stats. For instance 13,000+ Losses (Halifax Highlanders) or as a Soccer Forward 632 goals in 9,672 matches.
Well it is not really hard to beat the teams and I had never one of the famous “upsets” against those poor guys, but I wonder… A.) …if this is a bug? B.) …some kind of an all-time record attempt? C.) …just bad luck? D.) …or another type of fake teams operated by Hothead?
Answer A would be possible but not likely, maybe Hothead can give you an insight. B is surely an option but I it is hard to believe that so many coaches are not aware of the fact that there is no all-time leader board for lost games or worst player stats but there is one for Games played. C is not realistic at all and would indicate a huge number of coaches still trying in a very brave attempt to turn the tables after 6,000 loses. Saying all this, I would identify indeed option D as the most reasonable explanation. Hmmm, may I recommend to rename all of those poor dummy teams to “Doomed” for better identification. Finally, and please, if there is somebody out there who runs such a team and falls into category B or C please let me know and I will update my conclusions. And by the way there is an option E....? For the love of the game – Have fun! Big Win Review - "Black March" turns Grey Hi all gamers and "diddy"! I think it is necessary to update this article for two good reasons. Firstly the originally claimed issue with the gone fans/coins for losing games was obviously just a problem with my devices. The other one was based on the fact that Hothead ran a half price Locker promo just before adjusting the prices in Hockey. As we all know it is not always obvious when a promo ends. In good faith and struggling as all of us with the lack of information provided by Hothead to the customers I expected that the prices going back up after the promo to $50.99 but they stayed at $25.99 for a Locker and for now. My revised view on Hotheads activities in the past weeks: Negative: Trophy prices went down for Basketball and Football Real money costs went up for a Locker of Bucks in Hockey from 20.99 to 25.99. Low 30+ contract rates and upset loss rates still as high as ever. Customer communication almost not existent Upset rates ongoing high Matchmaking randomness still in doubt Positive: The March Basketball event had an appreciated price scheme and a decent number of games to compete. There is a chance that Hothead joined our Forum but we await a kind of confirmation. Overall still a grey March with lots of rain and a few sunny days for us players. I like to keep my simple advise: Don't ask what your customers can do for you, ask what you can do for your customers. Hope this makes a more neutral article and I will try to improve in the future to provide you with the information we are unfortunately do not get by the Software provider itself. Big Win SOCCER - Walkthrough Day 45+ released Sorry for the late delivery but finally you will find my last part of the Walkthrough over here. As before it is based on Soccer but can be easily adapted to any other Sport as well. So get you Platinum team without spending money - It is possible and you can do it! The strange thing with the seven contract renewals From time to time we have faced a strange behaviour, in fact to our advantage, that after a fountain you suddenly have a player with seven instead of six renewals before he retires again. Well, surely a bug but at least a helping hand....
Hothead makes big changes in Football, Hockey and Basketball Recently Hothead changed not only the time to complete the 20 game tournaments in Football, Hockey and Basketball to 24 hours, it also reduced the whole price money scheme for Football and Basketball to the already heavily discussed Hockey setup. Means from now on you get just 200 respectively 100 Bucks for each Pro Trophy Win and 50 / 25 for the Amateur tournaments. Those again not pre announced changes will surely turn around the tables in both sports to the benefit of real money investing players because of the fact that it will hard from now on to play with three gold cards in each game and win enough money in tournaments to finance such a strategy. The completion time change is not that bad in my mind especially for occasional players like me, which do not have the time to play 8 cups per sport a day. Discussions about this changes have already started in our Forum and your comments would be highly appreciated. Maybe Hothead can now get back to a more reasonable 30+ contract insert ratio to buffer a bit this heavy impact on "No real money" players? Hothead reduces contract cards ratio in Hockey too Well it became obvious that Hothead again turned on the money maschine in pushing the Hockey team coaches to buy finally the expensive Big Contract Booster too. The 30+ contract cards before available in Bronze Booster dropped dramatically in the past three to four days which was firstly discovered by one of our Forum members and after counting again I can confirm that the insert ratio has dropped down by almost 60%. Another big hug for Hothead and our special thanks for making it again harder to survive without paying real money. Using anyway a reduced price scheme for the trophies it seems this is not enough in pushing around customers. But there is still hope if they are able to understand the word "customer focus" in the future. Showcase Showdown without spending a Buck? Most of the Forum members already knew that I used the actual Football event to test the success of an alternative strategy. To follow my thoughts I have to mention that good often winning football card combos are more rare as for instance in Basketball. They are restricted to one or two combos and focussed on two Gold Impact key cards usually. To get to the top of the ladder in such an event you need to buy therefore more Big Impact Card Booster and my expectation is that you have to spend approximately 6,000 Bucks to get a 90+ wins result. As we see from the preliminary event ladder below this will barely get your team up into the top 25 still investing massive Bucks on top of your potential price money. The Nevado Dogs, all time bowl leader and the only team we know as rated 98, made it so far to 8th with a 95-5 record and finally no chance to win the event. Therefore I decided early to try a different strategy in playing 100 games using a cheap and simple card combo to see if I am able to reach the top 500 for 500 Bucks price money. Well, the combo is mentioned in the Forum if you are interested in and I finished the event two days ago with a good 79-21 record based on my 94 rated team. I won't make it into the top 500 but most likely into the top 1000, gaining hopefully 100 Bucks for my effort. No Bucks wasted at all and a good understanding that increasing your bankroll through such an event is impossible as seen before at the two Basketball competitions held in February by Hothead. Only the winner, maybe this time the "Wildcats", will cash in properly. The rest of the top teams just burned Bucks for honor or fun. I finally decided not to play future events anymore if there is not a better price scheme offered rewarding the investment. Bowls and Trophies changed to 12 hours for completion Today Hothead suprised us again with one of those unannounced changes in the game play of BigWin Football and Basketball. Despite the fact that the majority of the players are comfortable with the former 8 hours to finish a tournament, the time to complete the required games has been changed to 12 hours. Well, I suggested that before but I do not believe that this had any impact, so what is the reason? On the other hand I was right in predicting that the number of active players per trophy becomes to low, where everybody steps out if he cannot win the trophy and just starts the next one. Lots of Bucks for us but not a good thing for Hothead through to lower amount of money spend. Big Events really Big, or the new Vegas is in Canada? I like to take a look back on the first Basketball Big Event which was held by Hothead last week. By the way my congratulations to the winner, impressive result and for sure an amazing team performance. However I am still puzzled about the large number of players investing 4,000 - 5,000 Bucks just for a small chance to get the only price really worthwile to play for, the 50,000 Bucks for the winner. It seems that everybody else just wasted his/her bankroll if not playing for the honor to win this event primarily. I accept this reason, but all the others who thought this is a good chance to make tons of Bucks announced for grab should simply check the bankroll now. I mean the price scheme was from the beginning just rediculous. compared to the wins you had to gain to reach at least a top 50 spot. At the beginning I guessed that more than 90 maybe 92 wins will get you up to the top 10 but in fact 90 wins just made it into the top 50 at the end and gave you 1,000 Bucks price money. Assuming that you had to play the 100 games with 3 Gold Cards each to get your shot on the top spot the investment was at least 4,500 Bucks for each team or for the first 100 teams 450,000 Bucks. At least 200-300 more teams spend for a reasonable time more expensive Gold Cards too which makes surely another 900,000 Bucks in total and much more for the remaining 200,000 participants. What a week for Hothead plundering the teams accounts and refilling the own treasury chest. Well done guys, good move - At the end you collected surely 2 to 4 Million Bucks and you paid out less then 140,000. Like Las Vegas the winner is always the house! What a rate of investment return of > 2,000%. I am really looking forward to the Football event coming up surely soon. If you not play just for the honor maybe you should use a calculator before you start playing and compare your chances. The other and more appreciated option would be that Hothead is providing us with a serious price scheme for the next events. At least doubling up all prices plus 500 Bucks for place 101 to 300! Anyway, new updates and events are like a box of chocolate. You never know what you get! A look on the new Basketball App Update Being tired from watching my Football and Basketball teams losing game by game today and from wasting my Gold Cards to always get a kick in my bu.. from Hotheads "well and fair balanced and non manipulated" game engine, I like to take a look on the new Basketball App Update. Well, one of the good things is surely the higher loyalty bonus, 5 Gold Impact Cards so far per day (+3), but as often nobody knows what might be possible due to a lack of information provided. I like very much the more insteresting skip to the end of the game mode which gives you a nice quarter by quarter progress with the last shot in close games a bit delayed (+1). The other option called "Highlight Mode" shows mainly 3-Pointer or end of the quarter shots. Not really interesting for me but I had some good feedback in the Forum, therefore I grant (+1). Starting the app provides us know with an initialization screen for whatever reason the app is just starting slower (-1). The revised Big Events section let assume that finally something is coming up, hopefully (0). What I like the most is the improvement in the trophy overview screen which is just cosmetic surgery but increases my wellbeing (+1). Well, we all don't know how the tweaks in the game play will turn out, but I cannot get worse as it is. Maybe next week we have a better understanding and I will comment over here again. For now and mainly for the cosmetic surgery undertaken I would say a good update. Quick Take Off in BigWin Sports Just $21 for the stairway to heaven... And that's what it is - Enthon's tips for all new players or those who could not manage to survive successfully. As you know if you are a regular visior there is a hard and painful way to start in any BigWin Sports without spending real money but you need a lot of patience and some luck. But there is always a smooth way and I will tell you how to quick take off and a strong team in Enthon’s Quickstart Guide…. BigWin Sports Forum now has a German part too! Unser Forum hat nun auch einen deutschsprachigen Teil fuer alle Fussballfans aus meiner alten Heimat! BigWin Sports - Contract Card Changes! Maybe you have encountered some amazing changes. Just short time after I released my inside views on contract cards (Link to the full article) it seems that suddenly a shortage of 30+ contract cards can be detected in Bronze Packs. The last days I opened massive number of booster across all sports and the insert ratios dropped down significantly. I asked Hothead for a statement and received this first answer after a couple of days: "Hi Enthon, We have many promotions going on and one of the was 30% more contract cards, that promotion as since ended. Thanks," Does not answer my question about Bronze Packs but maybe the e-mails are not read at all? Or this is just pointing me gently into another direction to buy just more big contract cards packs? Well, I was not satisfied with the "answer". That is the problem with "Customer Service" which are using standard e-mail text blocks instead of reading the question and try seriously to help. I do not know but I will learn soon, hence I asked my question again.... Let's wait and see.... Please provide me with more of your experiences hence this is most likely not a "random" thing anymore. |
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