LIVE DRAFT ABSOLUTE DISASTER

And they would enjoy it even more if everyone screwed by SOM also filed. Point is publicity and accountability.

Totally serious question. This is an online computer generated game so how can a human draft be reasonably expected to be carried out?

Well sometime after 11 p.m. I did get my account credited for the one credit after agreeing to relinquish my "team."

Earlier in the day I received the following e-mail:

Strat-O-Matic Baseball Online Support
To Me
Today at 4:03 PM
Hi Bruce,

Thank you for signing up for a Live Draft that took place last night. We apologize for the problems that occurred during your draft and the frustration it caused. Unfortunately the end result left you missing a high draft pick. If you wish, we are offering to remove your team from that league and replace it with a new team.

As for the draft problems themselves, we now have added some more code to help browsers stay connected even if the internet connection blips. For your specific problem, you say you were kicked out of the draft. What exactly happened where you were not able to draft? When did the draft knock you out? Did you refresh the page and were you able to resume from there or did it lock you out of the page? Any information you can send us would be helpful as we try to both recreate and solve the problem.

Sincerely,
Strat-O-Matic Baseball Online

So in the interests of transparency and of improving the live draft "functionality," here is my response:

Hi Strat-o-Matic Baseball Online,

I didn't just lose a high draft pick. Originally my first four picks were Williams, Brett, Morgan, Walsh. After I reset the draft (operating via consensus from league messages during the draft) because the manager drafting 10th couldn't get his first two picks to register and had Speaker and Mays picked for him by the draft engine, which then subsequently failed to acknowledge that he had Mays on his team! Now during the redraft, starting with the 15th pick overall, managers chose to not pick the same players as before so Morgan and Walsh were not available any longer when it came time for me to draft my 3rd and 4th rd. picks (I was drafting in the 11 spot) so they were replaced with Walker and Brown (I had selected Mathewson with 2 sec left on the 15 second clock (I hadn't realized that I was listed as "away" and thought I had 45 seconds per pick) but another problem with the draft is it evidently takes slightly more than 2 seconds to register a pick, so I was denied Mathewson. The next two rounds it selected Lynn and Keefe for me. With the Lynn pick he was in my queue as I routinely place lower salaried players there that I want to prioritize for later rounds so I don't forget about them when the time comes for them to be drafted. The Keefe pick remains a mystery to me, I don't usually include pitchers in the queue for various reasons.

Sometime after my 2nd round pick I was apparently booted from the draft. A message appeared stating something like "loading player status" which is usually followed by loading "draft status"(or vice versa) or something akin to that. I am absolutely certain that my ISP did not disconnect me. I play chess on line far more than I play strat and with chess on ICC if you even get disconnected for a nanosecond by your ISP, you lose the game. I haven't had a single disconnection in over 6 months playing chess so that was not the problem. No idea why I was booted, that had never happened to me with the current live draft iteration. I don't recall if I attempted to refresh the page or not, I suspect that I didn't.

Normally when the messages re status appear, the blue line quickly fills the little rectangular box, but this time it didn't. So, not wanting to lose my next pick, I manually disconnected from the draft and immediately logged back on to SOM and eventually the draft. When I got back on it was seconds before the expiration of my third round pick. Had no idea that I was listed as "away" until someone brought it to my attention, well after the 4th round. My Brown "pick" in the 4th happened because the area over my queue was blocked by listing the 4th round pick of manager 12 and it took about five seconds before I could even access my queue, which left me with 2 sec. to draft Mathewson. It takes longer to search for a player which doesn't work anyway, you pretty much need to search by position as when you search by player that name comes up but then disappears.

So anyway that is what happened from the perspective of my team during the draft. After that I informed the league of my disgust and that I was done with this draft. I then logged out and left the team on the 15 sec. away status.

Hope that helps troubleshoot some of the ongoing problems with the live draft as well as the ones the were unique to the specific draft in question.

I appreciate the email and the restored credit but you folks really need to work on your customer service. These problems all appear to stem from Mr. Richman's policies, hopefully he gets the picture and finds some way for SOM to better communicate to the community. I don't think that Mr. Garcia's weekly locked blog is sufficient.

Sincerely,

Bruce Steffek

First; good email.

Second; simply replacing a team people spend a few hours trying to make with the same credit you already paid for is INSANE and shows no consideration or understanding.
Really its incredible to realize that giving a free credit costs the company pennies- and actually makes them money since the person receiving it is much more likely to buy more knowing that should something go wrong they are actually going to be covered.

Third; For the love of communication!

First; good email.

Second; simply replacing a team people spend a few hours trying to make with the same credit you already paid for is INSANE and shows no consideration or understanding.
Really its incredible to realize that giving a free credit costs the company pennies- and actually makes them money since the person receiving it is much more likely to buy more knowing that should something go wrong they are actually going to be covered.

Third; For the love of communication!

amen

SOM should have credited Petrosian with at least two credits, since he did lose some time. I had some problems in the first live draft. I e-mailed Customer Support and they answered me the early the next day, wanting to know the identity of the problems.

It sounds like they are trying to solve the problems and improve their customer service. I once observed a baseball sim go out of operation in a matter of weeks, because of poor customer service. The whole community left and all joined a different site. I hope this does not happen to SOM.

The live draft will be of great benefit to the community once it is tweaked. We need to be patient, but SOM needs to also pay for their mistakes with credits that cost us time.

"The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing."

- John Russell, President, Harley Davidson -

Engaging customers is not simply a weekly blog update...

Now during the redraft, starting with the 15th pick overall, managers chose to not pick the same players as before so Morgan and Walsh were not available any longer when it came time for me to draft my 3rd and 4th rd. picks

Yeah, I was the 1st one dinged by that. During the original draft, I picked Pete with pick #27 or 3rd player in 3rd round.
In the restart, Pete was picked at #16, immediately when the draft resumed.