SVNS Predictor no longer available on Superbru

Thank you for showing interest in SVNS and for supporting Superbru by joining our intended predictor game. Unfortunately, we have had to make the difficult decision not to proceed with running the tournament. Please find a full explanation for this decision below.

As many of you will know, we have been running prediction games for the World Sevens series for multiple seasons now. For this year, the tournament has been relaunched as SVNS with multiple unexpected format changes. We built the tournament as normal, but now that fixtures have been released for the first event in Dubai, it has become apparent that our game format is no longer suitable without significant additional development effort before kick-off.

Sevens tournaments are unique in that they consist of fixtures every 22 minutes, with the participating teams in knockout matches determined by the outcomes of previous matches often ending just minutes before. To deliver this, we have historically relied on automation based on previous results rather than manual updates as it's simply not possible to give players enough time to make predictions otherwise.

However, the new format includes a more complex knockout stage that would be harder to automate, and at the very least would rely on multiple (fairly high risk) manual interventions, often throughout the night, combined with automation.

The format would also prove harder for our players, as participation would require even more shooting in the dark based on projected fixtures, or multiple visits to Superbru, again often throughout the night depending on your time zone.

Unfortunately, we aren't currently in a position to spend the necessary time on developing additional automation in line with the new schedule, as our team are already occupied by a number of different projects including continued development of the new Superbru Rugby app which will soon include official Predictor and Fantasy tournaments for the upcoming Investec Champions Cup.

We can't in good conscience go into a long season knowing that are unlikely to be able to deliver the standard of experience our users rightfully expect. So, we've made the tough decision to pull the game.

We apologise for the disappointment that this will cause, particularly after initially launching this tournament when before the format changes were announced, but we hope you can understand our reasoning. We will still be keeping a keen eye on how the new format plays out over the 2023/24 campaign to figure out how might be best to run a game in future seasons. A Sevens Predictor for next year's Olympic Games is also very much on our radar.