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Some random thoughts --
I think this game worked a lot better at a pace of two challenges a week. The other website I stole this from (whatifsports.com) requires a daily login because you are managing a virtual basketball/baseball/football team and you need to set lineups, etc. This message board doesn't really require that, and doing it three times a week was a lot of work. Also, the hours people get on really vary, so spanning a couple days for the challenges and giving people more than 24 hours to vote was nice.
One side effect of the above was that I had tried to plan out what the challenges would be in advance, but there were so many schedule changes I eventually threw it out. I wanted to get a good mix of the available early year sports, so I knew I would do football early on since it would be going away. For college basketball, I knew primarily Saturday and Wednesdays would be the big days for that, and since I was running on a Fri-Sun-Tue challenge schedule, I did do some hunting for feature games that would be off cycle. Once we went to the two challenges on Weds and Sun, that problem was resolved.
I also came up with the idea of giving the advantages for winning challenges. On the show, you get (typically) food, but that didn't apply here, so I thought boosts towards the next challenge would be useful. I was aiming for them to be about a max of 10% of a bonus and think I did fairly well at crafting them. I also wanted them to be interesting, and have various degress of risk-reward to them. Towards the end, I wanted to start making them a little more "attack" focused in an effort to heat up any brewing feuds. I also wanted to make them somewhat secretive so that you wouldn't know for sure who was doing the attacking... not sure that really came into play at all, and I would probably spend some time thinking of challenge structures and advantages ahead of time (and proofread enough not to put rebounds when I meant blocked shots.) For the challenges, I thought that it was important to mix the type of challenge as well as the sport. I also wasn't too worried about making any major mistakes in the challenge structures as far as valuing teams or players -- each Survivor contestant could take advantage of those inequalities as equally as anybody else, so it really came down to contestant preparation.
One of the early challenges to me was the number of people who weren't submitting challenges/votes... it weighs down the game and makes some of the eliminations pretty easy. Who wouldn't be able to get a team together to vote off Eaglo Jeff when he hasn't done anything in the game in the past week... it awarded teams by giving them a free pass just for having a non-player in their team. I think a lot of that was because people signed up for the game without really knowing what it was -- I think Eaglo admitted that, and I don't want to single him out here because several other people said the same thing. If we ever did it again, we would probably get less sign and bails. I did one of the single player challenges earlier than I was planning in an effort to give some of those people strikes and get them out of the game. These DQ'd people also made it more of a challenge to plan the merge timeline, but I think that worked out ok in the end.
The biggest mistake that I think I made was allowing early voting submissions. Someone, and I forget who at this point, said they would not be around to vote because they would be out of town but they also did not want a strike counted against them. I said it would be OK, as long as they provided two names in the event that the first name had immunity. I knew I had a problem when JORR sent in the vote the next time. We were at 8 players remaining, and I knew by then that JORR was a pretty intelligent player due to his hidden idol discovery prowess. He knew that the tiebreaker went to the earliest vote, and by voting ahead of the results being posted, he would be able to break that tie. I had set a precedent by allowing early votes, so to not allow it seemed to be the wrong thing to do. I then put in a rule that the vote would be randomized so that it wouldn't necessarily be the first vote played -- but really, the tiebreaker rule was broken. My apologies to shakes as he bore the brunt of this rule. I really like the suggestion that the rule should be broken by the score in the challenge. I would 100% adopt that rule going forward. I'm not sure how I would handle group challenge submissions, I'd have to give that some more thought.
One other thing I didn't fully think through was the merge from four teams to two. I had originally thought that we would just merge two sets of teams together, but the more I thought about it, the more i thought it was unfair. I assumed (and this may not be totally correct) that players were more or less forming alliances within their own teams and that once we combined, those alliances would be strong enough to force the weaker team out. For example, the Monkeys were down to just four players remaining at the merge -- if they merged with Shake That, then you've got a situation where Shake That can just pick them off one by one. I thought by randomly placing people in the two teams we would have a more even distribution of alliances, and create an environment for alliances to perhaps join together between the two teams. It would be interesting to see what would have happened had we joined teams together though.
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"All crowds boycotting football games shouldn't care who sings or takes a knee because they aren't watching." - Nas
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