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TV3 - 2007 Rugby World Cup Game
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The Rugby World Cup is said to be the third most popular television event behind the Soccer World Cup and the Olympic Games. TV3 secured the exclusive TV rights for 'rugby mad' New Zealand fans and required a fantasy rugby game to enhance the sports section of their website. Client
TV3 and FITsurfer Fantasy Games
Details
Having developed the hugely popular TESTRUGBY.COM game for the 2003 Rugby World Cup, Stream Interactive in partnership with FITsurfer Fantasy Games built the 2007 event on the same proven platform.
The client requested that the game be able to:
- Reflect strongly the 'TV3' brand
- Handle 100,000 players or more
- Keep gamers informed via weekly emails
- Serve up dynamically managed banner advertising
- Award weekly prizes
- Provide the latest rugby stats available
- Receive RSS sports news feeds
- Link fans to the latest up-to-date videos
- Link through to TV3's current TV schedule
The Solution
The game was addressed on 3 main fronts:- A 'skin' to meet TV3 branding requirements
- A hosting platform to meet all realistic demands
- A game based on the 2007 Rugby World Cup
Creating a look that showed the game to be under the TV3 umbrella while retaining the TESTRUGBY.COM brand was a considerable challenge. With careful planning elements from the TV3 site were able to be added to key spots on the site without interfering with the main TESTRUGBY.COM engine and game functionality. The result was a game that almost looked like a page from the TV3 website.
Perhaps the biggest challenge was devising a plan to ensure that the site would continue to run smoothly no matter what spikes in traffic may occur, and in the case of hardware failure.
The solution that was set in place saw an expanded network capability, and the game application spread across multiple servers. The hardware architecture was specially devised to allow for more servers to be 'hot plugged' if expectations were exceeded while doubling to provide load balancing and redundancy.
Establishing a game based on the 2007 Rugby World Cup required research into the draw and game schedule, as the normal weekly rounds wouldn't suit. Finally a series built on 7 rounds was devised and implemented. Adding to that a few new features were built in to raise the level of professionalism in the game presentation. This included registration methodology, prize handling and weekly game emails.
There were some very positive outcomes gained from the whole Rugby World Cup experience, most importantly all of the requests that the client presented met. The TESTRUGBY.COM game proved to be the most successful fantasy game to date.
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