What SOM should do to improve the online game

1. Do salary pricing in-house rather than farming it out to a Bbrool, a community member. As it stands, SOM is dependent on Bbrool's availability and willingness to price additions in a timely fashion. This may contribute to the paltry player additions to ATG 7 that became ATG 8 as well as to Garcia & Company's long delays in adding cards to ATG 8, not to mention limiting additions to 20 players at a time. SOM should also incorporate some sort of periodic re-pricing, perhaps based on a combination of usage and performance. Once a model to do this is created, its implementation would be automatic. Another possibility would be for the community to vote on the pricing of player additions. That could be scored the way Olympic judging was scored back in the days of the cold war (it may still be that way but I no longer watch commercial sports). Just throw out the top and bottom 10% of the votes to eliminate motivated outliers and average the remaining 80%. Periodic repricing would keep ATG continually fresh as the endless hunt for bargains would be given fresh impetus and community voting on initial prices is a great way to engage the community. Unfortunately, consumer collaboration in product improvement is not something in which SOM has ever demonstrated the slightest interest.

I tried bolding key points in my last post, judge for yourself if that is even perceptible.

2. Now that all the stats have been imported (only took about three years) and manager ratings resurrected, it would be great if SOM could bring back the team stat page added by Bernie toward the end of ATG's tenure with TSN. That page featured our team results as a function of our home ballparks and salary cap. That was a great way to quickly see which of our team design strategies were working and which weren't.

3. Introduce ATG 9. Each new ATG iteration should have a minimum of a 10% increase in the player pool.

4. Provide the same stats per player per ballpark that Diamond Dope provided as "actuals" until Adrian lost interest in ATG. They could even charge a nominal annual fee for each customer to access this data. I'd pay it if it was limited say to the cost of buying a team, i.e $15 per year. Again, once this feature is up an running it provides a small but reliable revenue stream and would only enhance the community's experience with the product.

5. Introduce hit sequencing with pitcher's cards -with the computer game this is feasible - couldn't be done with the board game. This would allow ERA's to be much more replicable. As it stands, pitchers cards reproduce whip, not ERA. This would be the equivalent of clutch pitching and also appears to be a hot, up and coming sabermetric as well.

6. Change the injury formula to not be biased against guys who don't lead off. Ask the community to identify cards that played in every game their team played yet still have injury chances on their cards, and then fix that.

7. On player hitting preferences, create a box for NEVER hit vs a lefty or righty and then use it if the bench situation permits.

8. Allow per game lineups rather than per series lineups.

These are just my priority suggestions to improve the online game. I know there are many others, such as bullpen improvements etc., these are just the ones that I feel strongly about.