Strato Baseball Daily

I could be wrong but I don't think that the salaries will change during the course of a strat game "season" - I thought that the salaries would remain constant. Perhaps they'll change the salaries during the real life baseball season but not during the course of a game season. Anyway, I love the daily game!!!

My suggestion would be to ditch salaries for the cards in the Daily game and just have player rankings like the fantasy games do. (Mike Trout =1, Bryce Harper=2, etc.) The rankings could be based upon hidden computed dollar value of the card, like salaries are done in Strat 365. Rankings could change during the season. Teams would not have salary limits nor drop penalties, but managers can use the player rankings as guidelines (again, like in fantasy baseball).

Why? A couple of reasons. It would give more freedom to drop and add players during the season. Second, it would give more challenge to the managers to assess player value. And third, new fantasy customers would be comfortable and like a rank system.

what about the wonderful clutch ratings? Will they vary too?

Bio Man,

One of the complaints during the beta test was exactly what you're talking about. You have a new game, predicated on making lots of moves buying and selling hot hands. However, in a salary cap game, lots of moves diminishes the dollars you can put on the field. One tester perfectly stated: you end up doing nothing but buying hot nickels with cold dimes.

Further, the manager who won our particular league MADE NO MOVES! (Okay, he made one drop during the season). So if that's the ultimate GM/Manager experience, yeah, I guess I was a bit underwhelmed.

Having said that, I repeat this because it was apparently lost in translation, I welcome anybody to play and enjoy the new format.

With regard to RB, I'm not sure if he's talking to me, Niners or somebody else. Nothing short of "spectacular"? Oh. Okay.

I'll stand behind my opinion, however, if that's acceptable to everyone else.

Bio Man,

One of the complaints during the beta test was exactly what you're talking about. You have a new game, predicated on making lots of moves buying and selling hot hands. However, in a salary cap game, lots of moves diminishes the dollars you can put on the field. One tester perfectly stated: you end up doing nothing but buying hot nickels with cold dimes.

Further, the manager who won our particular league MADE NO MOVES! (Okay, he made one drop during the season). So if that's the ultimate GM/Manager experience, yeah, I guess I was a bit underwhelmed.

Having said that, I repeat this because it was apparently lost in translation, I welcome anybody to play and enjoy the new format.

J-Pav,
Thanks for the insight. I am very excited about this new game. That being said, I'm not sure what you are saying exactly. I think you are agreeing that have drop penalties might be counter-productive in trying to create a dynamic, lively game. Is that where we are heading, or are The Powers That Be considering a game with no salary caps or at least with no drop penalties?

With regard to RB, I'm not sure if he's talking to me, Niners or somebody else. Nothing short of "spectacular"? Oh. Okay.

I'll stand behind my opinion, however, if that's acceptable to everyone else.

I'm not sure who he's talking to either but he sure is worked up about it. Not sure why he continues to basically insult those of us who have stated its not our cup of tea, he seems personally aggrieved for some odd reason.

Rest assured RB, that I likely won't play the new game but that doesn't mean I need to stay silent about it and/or hope Strat will continue working on the game I do enjoy.

Bio Man,

The way we tested it, we played $100 mil salary cap. The most actively trading team shed $8 mil in salary. However, we tested it near the end of the actual baseball season, so we only played 80 some odd games with changing prices on the player cards. The entire last half of the season, the salaries were frozen to reflect the actual season-ending stats of the players. I think most of us assumed we wanted to keep as close to $100 mil on the field as we could. So we were discouraged from activity in that regard. The exact opposite of what the nature of the game is suggesting us to do - drop cold players and reload a hot hand! The authentic GM/managerial experience (so I'm told).

Truth be told, because the cards are normalized anyway, it's not like there are bargains screaming from the rooftops. Not to me, anyway, that would justify dropped salary. Heck, gbrookes didn't even recall there were any changed salary cards during the season, it was that hard to notice.

I love Strat as much as anyone here. I want to be upbeat and positive about the direction of things. Until Milty felt compelled to call me out (or whatever it is he's doing), I would have been happy to remain silent in my opinion.

But I have to admit, this "spectacular" addition leaves me only bewildered. It's not Strat, it's not fantasy and it's certainly not DraftKings. I have no idea what it is, or why anyone would be excited by it. Let's hope my one opinion is totally flawed and I completely missed something during the test run. I'll be happy to recant if someone can show me this incredible GM/manager thing I'm missing.

To answer your question, I have no idea what the final product will look like. However, I hope the beta test experience will move things in a dramatically different direction than the format as it was presented to us.

Thanks, J-Pav. Now I understand your experience. Let's hope the beta testing helps Strat figure out how to optimally tweak the new game.

I was a tester too, and thought the game held a lot of promise, but there was a lot of room for improvement (or maybe more accurate to say a lot of areas that needed to be addressed).

On one hand, I did find there were bargains to be found if you "bought low" on an over achiever. It seemed that if a player was having a breakout season, exceeding expectations (i.e., exceeding the baseline projections that their original card was created from), their card price went up, but not to the degree commensurate with their performance. So you could get "bargains" there. Like JPav said though, just cause a player goes 1-1 with an HR, his card won't be filled with HRs, it adjusts from a baseline projection.

I think the game has potential, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves though. My real concern is that it just cannibalizes the consumer base from the other games, rather than attracts new customers.

Well, my first reaction was sort of that it would be a neat concept but I kind of doubt after thinking about it that I will get into the game that much. Traditional Strat involves a static pool of data on players where we can find ways to maximize a team's competitive level by finding ways to maximize player value. What makes it fun is that are just many ways to make those kind of analyses (especially when they work). But the new game from what I can tell focuses on two things: (1) finding players whose card is undervalued compared to their expected value in the coming year, and (2) finding the inevitable surprise players who have big years. So it pays to know a lot about current baseball so before the season you can assess whether a player's card is undervalued and then you have to pay a lot of attention to baseball to figure out which players are having break- out years. Well, that's making fantasy baseball more important than traditional Strat strategies.

I play Fantasy Baseball and I like it but if you like traditional Strat I'm not sure superimposing Fantasy Baseball on it really improves it because now you are forced to spend so much time trying to extract value by paying attention to what is happening currently in baseball rather than just analyzing static data. Maybe it will increase the strategic possibilities but it seems more likely that managers will become more focused on the Fantasy aspects of it.

I think what they're trying to do is admirable. Playing last year's set this year, in today's instantaneous Information Age, comes across as archaic. I'm watching Kris Bryant live, but I can't play him on my Strato team until next year - while fantasy baseball managers are playing Kris Bryant in real time.

I get that. But the execution part of the strategy is complicated. You can't have free drops, because changing a roster every single day is not the authentic GM/Managerial experience. You can't have drop penalties, because a diminished roster generally does not compete well with a fully plenished roster.

I think the attempt to cross-breed Strato (game engine, salaries, drop system, etc) with fantasy (real time, auction, pay for drops, etc) is misguided. You end up not with the best features from each format, but rather the worst. Just one manager's opinion.

FWIW, I agree with Grandpa qksilver and Negative Niners: there's so much to be done to improve Strat-O-Matic, that worrying about how to compete with Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball should be the last thing on their mind. Grilled chicken McWrap, anyone?