An email to Strat

I sent this today as a suggestion to Strat. Who knows? We can only try.

Gentlemen,

I am a long time strat 365 baseball player, an ex TSN strat football player and am in a 20 team face to face strat baseball league .  I am a BIG  strat-o-matic fan and love what your company provides.

I understand with the rollout of your Football365 that you have your hands full currently.  I would like to make a suggestion that would improve your standing with your customers.  Currently your customers ask questions and discuss their frustrations on the forum.  I know that it would be difficult to answer or respond to every post but .....

If you can set something up whereby you can respond to issues on the forums or at least keep your customers informed as to the current status of issues then your customers would 1.  have hope that things are being addressed  and 2. feel valued and listened to.

I realize that someone would have to be thick skinned while doing this job of intermediary because there will be a few obnoxious insulting customers but the majority of us will be patient and grateful.

I sent this today as a suggestion to Strat. Who knows? We can only try.

Gentlemen,

I am a long time strat 365 baseball player, an ex TSN strat football player and am in a 20 team face to face strat baseball league .  I am a BIG  strat-o-matic fan and love what your company provides.

I understand with the rollout of your Football365 that you have your hands full currently.  I would like to make a suggestion that would improve your standing with your customers.  Currently your customers ask questions and discuss their frustrations on the forum.  I know that it would be difficult to answer or respond to every post but .....

If you can set something up whereby you can respond to issues on the forums or at least keep your customers informed as to the current status of issues then your customers would 1.  have hope that things are being addressed  and 2. feel valued and listened to.

I realize that someone would have to be thick skinned while doing this job of intermediary because there will be a few obnoxious insulting customers but the majority of us will be patient and grateful.

Please post SOM’s response when you hear back from them. I am curious about their reply... Thanks

Here's the reply:

Seriously, this is a good suggestion. I hope there really is a [positive] response.

I'd go a step further. When you're taking $ from a customer to provide a product and the product doesn't work as advertised, said company has an obligation to communicate with customers on how the situation will be handled. Poor customer service in baseball and all of our love for Strato seems to have blinded us to this and does anyone else find it crazy that we have to beg to find out what the hell is going on?
The rules themselves don't even discuss multiple aspects of the game and unfortunately I think this is going to just be scrapped as can't see them being able to fix this unless we get lucky and somebody's nephew actually knows how to program. Keeping my fingers crossed and not demanding a refund (and hope people don't) as to give them time but I'd like to do a little more than beg for some communication since I paid a company for x and got x-
Looking forward to the response - probably something like, we'll have a forum this Friday night from 6-9 in order to go over issues we are facing, explain how/why the engine is messing so many things up, and our plans moving forward. I'm gonna hold my breath.

I will give them time.... In fact I don't want to use the credits I bought until they make much needed improvements...

The way the game stands now, it should be free, it is pitiful. No replay, no stats, crazy injuries and usage, bugs galore, too fast of a season, not enough control, no player control, and on and on...


Don't tell me you can't do it because the SOM Football CD-ROM is really nice and SOM online baseball is awesome. This however, is pitiful...

Take your time SOM, do this over, do this right. Please. Or give me my money back for my two unused credits!

I did the same thing. I bought the two credits with the intention of rereading the rules and getting reacquainted with the game dynamics. After reading about all the problems, I decided to sit on my credits until things got worked out.

No response yet, but I will be patient.

Yeah, I have some faith they can get it turned around to some degree, after some amount of time... hopefully... Here's to hoping!

No response as of yet... Still holding out hope.

Doesn't seem like they are being very responsive to our issues with the current version and our suggestions to make it a better product.

Seems like the few who have received responses to direct messages have gotten the same line essentially...

We (strat-o-matic) wanted to make this version of football a simpler game than the last one.

I'm really not sure who this product is supposed to be designed for. It doesn't seem like they have their current fan base in mind.

my sense is, that the people now designing and programming , are not long time strat players themselves, they are more techno engineers than sports fans, and their decisions, as to what they do make complicated, show an engineering focus, and not a "this is why we play strat" focus..
Of course, I could be wrong...

but I see them, when they were designing the game sitting around saying...."yeah we could do this really cool injury feature, with all kinds of different levels of injury...."---- that had to be someone who never really played strat football.

If they were long term strat players, rather than engineers, then they would have put the best features into the actual strategy and settings of the game, using the key components from the original board game. any long time strat player would fully get that....

the whole fun of the strat games, is attempting to win with yourself as manager, making the key decisions about what players to have, how to use them, what plays to use when etc etc. The reality of what the football is now, is at least for me, I have no idea as to how the performance adjustments work and what they actually do. The settings certainly, at least so far, are not reflected in the result---it seems in many ways arbitrary......