Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

In yesterday's Athletic: https://theathletic.com/4339875/2023/03 ... seball-24/

There is a paywall for that article, but what I could read was interesting. Here is another take with the owner regarding the newest release:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9umXlF6O4KU

At the risk of using SOM's site for counter-productive pursuits...I will admit I paid for OOTP 24 again this year. I love the idea of SOM and its origin. But...

Markus Heinsohn--the original OOTP owner/developer--is ACTIVE on the forums. Active in playing the game. Actively asking for feedback. Actively making improvements to the engine and the interface every single year.

SOM should learn something from how OOTP puts all their energy into their software product and improve it every year as players of their product, such as this year incorporating pitcher BABIP vs L / R.

OOTP has zero transparency on their game engine--that is not an exaggeration. The entire game is a black box.
So why do they attract more and more players, for decades now?
SOM should try to answer this question, because I think SOM's transparent play system is the OG of simulation and it would be a shame if they went the way of dinosaurs.

The thousands of daily players at OOTP show that chasing the 100% transparency grail is not the answer, no matter the outsized voices of the most vocal on these boards, who are a sliver of the total customer base and represent zero of the new customers SOM should be attracting. That isn't an insult--just saying it needs to get outside of the niche of nerds like me. They need to modernize the software product itself.

I hope they do it. But boredom is honestly one reason I am moving on for at least a while (when I finally bleed my credits!). There is only so many ways you can interact with SOM--and while they have the better engine and better potential for interaction among players IMO, they do not have a better overall software product interface.

I love SOM--I hope they prosper.

Not familiar with OOTP but will take a look. Agree with the notion that this game has not really been updated is real problem, not the transparency issue. There is sooo much out there in VTT technology for all sorts of games--boggles my mind there has been no improvement on SOM.

Lately I have been going somewhat more primtivistic. I found another dice and paper game called Deadball http://wmakers.net/deadball which I have been playing. It is all fantasy--not real teams--but does a damn good job of simulating baseball with made up players. additionally, there are guidelines you can use to recreate historical teams if you want.