I have edited the sticky to reflect this:
As well as competing on an individual level, players will also be assigned to one of two teams. All player's scores on each team will contribute to the team score. Teams will have the opportunity to pick a captain before the end of March, and his team points will be doubled, but his individual points will remain the same. Think of the team game as a side game to the individual competition. We will need team names.
I think I stopped accepting pick lists around July this year. You would think that people who wait longer would have an unfair advantage, but that isn't the case, they just have less time for their picks to die. I'll probably stop around July again next year.
One thing I am going to do is make all of the picks private. People stole Martin Crowe from my list this year and I'm still bitter about it, he was only 53. If we make them private, people will end up with more varied picks. We'll have to set up some stuff that the mods can all see so we can check picks this year though. I didn't even mark down picks I had already added points for this year, I've done everything by memory.
I'd make it private until the end of jan. Cut it off then maybe, would be fun to follow along when a clebrrty dies to come here check the score aND see who's winning.
We will announce scores if someone gets a pick right, but we won't tell anyone who has picked who.
July is the cutoff point for submitting picks, so everyone's picks will be made public then. I would like to make them public now, but we had a bit of an issue last year with people stealing other people's more obscure picks, which makes the game less fun and also means it is very difficult to get the "First Blood" bonus points, as your pick needs to be unique to get the points.
Maybe after individual picks end, randomly assign people to one of X teams, depending on the number of people who participate. Create a late team that has some penalties applied for people who put in their picks after the cutoff date and group them all in there.