by CHARLESBELL » Tue Jun 10, 2008 9:31 am
[quote:2c47751c5d="urishade"]After reading more of the negative respones to my post and hearing for the upteenth team that all my sample sizes are too small it occured to me that I just don't play the volume of teams that other owners do. I went into some recent leagues and clicked on the owner profiles of several guys with ratings over 1000 and found that they almost all have played more seasons in a particular year than I have played in my life. Overall I have only played 25 teams, which is a pittance compared to some of the owners in this community.
As such I am beginning to understand why people are so blase about bad luck and teams coming up short when everything seemed to be going thier way. Basically if a season doesn't work out there are 5-10 other ones going right now with more to follow. I tend to only play two seasons concurrently so the time invested vs. the outcome is very great for me and thus why I get so disturbed by some of these outcomes.
But I do find it fascinating how many people tell me off considering that this is supposed to be communal thing. Everyone is here because they like to play Strato but if you don't like to play as much other people do then those people will tell you to shut up and quit whining. In other words play more seasons and the bad ones won't hurt as much and/or the luck will even out. It is your fault for playing too few seasons and having so much time pass between final results.
It is like a little game unto itself for a lot of these owners. How big of a Strato nut can I be? A mini contest in a way to see who can shrug off the most terrible finishes, profess the most blind love to TSN & HAL, and prattle on about how the non-believers are the spawn of Satan and should be banished. So I do enjoy antagonizing the populous and it is not that I am without success in this game as I have never won fewer than 76 games while once winning 99. But people seem to dismiss my opinions because they run contrary to the standard ethos of the mighty Strato.
It is as if the very idea of me bringing in different ways of thinking about the game and how the results are determined is blasphamous. I get the feeling that a great many people of this board take enormous pleasure from putting down others and showing how strong and without fault they can be. So I do enjoy bringing happiness to so many people on this board who can sound off at me and go to bed each night knowing that they are a better than at least one person in life.[/quote:2c47751c5d]
Maybe a different viewpoint would help.
I'm a player like you, Urishade. I play 2-3 teams max at a time, and a dozen or less each 200x season, depending on how much pain I want to inflict on myself in the Player's Championship. :-)
So each and every season gets a lot of my attention, and I cheer my team's successes and lament their failures every day.
Maybe there are owners who feel as you stated, who don't care enough about their teams to worry when one tanks unexpectedly. But I think they would be in the small minority. As a community I think the large majority of us care about our teams, whether we have just one or twenty. I also think that we share the frustration and pain of failed teams, both those who simply come up short and those who we had great expectations in that raise our hopes and then dash them in unexpected ways. Sharing those on these forums will generate sympathy and similar stories.
Where this divulges is that you seem to believe that a simulation game like Strat "must" always and perfectly mirror the stats on the card and that the law of probability and statistics doesn't apply. You've been given dozens of examples both in strat and in the real world of baseball where great teams collapse, bad teams (on paper) win, and crazy and unexpected things happen. But you claim there is something wrong with the game when this happens.
Strat is a simulation. I don't know if you play the CD-ROM game. Many strat gamers love to play simulated past seasons where they go so far as to ensure that not only is every roster and team schedule exactly as in real life, so are the lineups and the starting pitchers for every single game, mirroring to the maximum extent what really happened. Then they run the simulation. It's truly astonishing how close the numbers can come to what really happened. The simulation is really that good. HOWEVER, it is not and never can be a perfect simulation - because probability and statistics is about the law of averages, not the law of absolutes. Probability and statistics inherently tellls us that everything can - and will - happen, but over many, many, repetitions we can predict how often those things occur, knowing that the least often occurence will still happen sometimes.
An analogy would be the lottery. Lotteries make money because on average nearly everyone loses. But when we bet the lottery we are betting that the near impossible will happen, because we know that it that is does happen and must happen at least sometimes. From a purely statistical perspective strat is the same - we play because in general, taking into consideration every team that every player ever plays, the average of those would look very close to what we would expect. But on a day to day, team by team, season by season, basis - anything can happen. I love that about this game, and about statistics in general. There are certainly flaws in the game, but, having played literally tens of thousands of simulated seasons over the course of forty years playing this game, I have seen every situation you brought up dozens or hundreds of times. But the percentage of times that it happens is actually very small, we just remember them more clearly.
You've seen some tragic failures, and I'd bet some spectacular successes, but I'd also bet that most of your teams fell somewhere in between. We can influence the numbers with our choices. Once those choices are made and the simulation is run, though, we have to remember that, in the world of probability, everything that can happen, will happen.