As Fate Would have it...

Of my past 28 teams, 16 have gone to the playoffs.
4 made it to the finals.
1 won a championship.

this is not a good scenario, not a good ratio, not a good investment, on any level.

my girlfriend tells me its a message to leave STRAT behind and move on to something more rewarding....
my math professor buddy tells me---when it comes to probability, remember that the improbable will and does happen.

of course one could harp on conspiracy theories, and how some people believe that STRAT targets owners who they believe will buy more teams if they lose often in the playoffs.
i do not subscribe to those theories, but I do think this--- whatever and wherever the message is coming from, it is time to move on once again.
I started playing board game strat in 1966, and joined on-line strat early on, my first moniker was MtheB. I had signficant success, and then burned out, took a very long break, came back with a new moniker, blineimages, and started out quite well, and then encountered the "made it to the playoffs and then died" scenario, over and over again. So I took another long break from the game. Came back this year, and the same scenario just keeps recurring.

enjoyed it all, its time to move on. when my current remaining 4 teams are done, so am I.
time to go back to the board game, and play against live souls......

Feel your pain brother, having taken multiple 3-6 month hiatuses from this game myself. Sorry to see you go, but hope you come back. This game needs quality managers like you.

Call me a tin foil hat guy, but I believe there is a ton of crap going on inside the game that we do not know about. Yes, anything can and will happen, but that anything happens too often to fall within the norm IMHO.

Perfect example: Players getting injured again after coming back from an injury. Happens all the time. In fact, I think there's something fishy about their entire injury system (maybe shared rolls across the game rather than individual rolls for every at bat?).

Do they target certain owners, I doubt it, that would take more effort than they are willing to put forth.

But I do believe there are things built in to the game to increase player interest, such as random success variables. If they simply allowed the best built team to win every time, I believe they'd lose players in droves. If that were the case the top managers would win rings 50% of the time. But even the very best win a ring 20%-25% of the time.

How many times have you looked at a team and asked yourself, "How is that crappy looking team playing .600 ball?" or "How did that 82 win wildcard team just sweep that 108 win monster team?"

Ask your math professor buddy what are the odds of you winning 1 ring in 16 playoff appearances?

Step away from the ledge!

Steph Curry, one of the greatest shooters ever to lace it up, has gone 0-11, 1-10, 1-9, etc. from 3 in a game. His 40+% career 3pt shooting gives him much better odds to hit a 3 than a strat playoff team has to win a title. Playoffs in particular are susceptible to temporary small sample size disasters. Be like Steph: keep shooting, play the long game, it will work out!

And your girlfriend, bless her, suggests more meaningful pursuits? What pursuit could possibly be more meaningful than playing stratomatic baseball online? I've spent hours racking my brain for something, anything, that could bring more benefit to an individual or to the community as a whole. Nope, nothing.

If you're sick of spending money on credits, for the sake of argument I'll say that's understandable (even though stratomatic credits, if valued correctly, should rank higher than both food and shelter on the hierarchy of needs). Your girlfriend clearly cares deeply about you and wants to support you, so I'll share a relationship tip that has played no small role in keeping my marriage running pretty smoothly for the past 10 years: Ladies, trying to find that perfect gift for Valentine's Day, his birthday, or just a special surprise to keep those fires a-burnin'? Look no further:

https://www.strat-o-matic.com/product/d ... -card-100/

Step away from the ledge!

Steph Curry, one of the greatest shooters ever to lace it up, has gone 0-11, 1-10, 1-9, etc. from 3 in a game. His 40+% career 3pt shooting gives him much better odds to hit a 3 than a strat playoff team has to win a title. Playoffs in particular are susceptible to temporary small sample size disasters. Be like Steph: keep shooting, play the long game, it will work out!

And your girlfriend, bless her, suggests more meaningful pursuits? What pursuit could possibly be more meaningful than playing stratomatic baseball online? I've spent hours racking my brain for something, anything, that could bring more benefit to an individual or to the community as a whole. Nope, nothing.

If you're sick of spending money on credits, for the sake of argument I'll say that's understandable (even though stratomatic credits, if valued correctly, should rank higher than both food and shelter on the hierarchy of needs). Your girlfriend clearly cares deeply about you and wants to support you, so I'll share a relationship tip that has played no small role in keeping my marriage running pretty smoothly for the past 10 years: Ladies, trying to find that perfect gift for Valentine's Day, his birthday, or just a special surprise to keep those fires a-burnin'? Look no further:

https://www.strat-o-matic.com/product/d ... -card-100/

Love all that! Playing this game, or any other cards & dice sports simulation, falls loosely into Benjamin Graham’s description of the stock market when he said, “in the short run, it’s a voting machine, in the long run its a weighing machine.” In the short run, this game is all about luck. Even entire sim seasons can vary meaningfully. As for conspiracy theories, I think it would take a pretty complicated algorithm to glean the average or individual psychological pain points of this group and program the optimal deviations from random results to keep us all interested. That’s a lot to expect from a company that for what, a decade, hasn’t been able to remove the word “Beta” from its incredibly shitty play-by-play screen. If you want to get scientific, let’s get the entire community to list the regular season W/L percentage of all their playoff teams and how far each team got, and see if there’s any correlation between regular season wins and trips to the finals and championships. I would bet that, with a large enough sample, we’d discover one, and a positive one at that. We all suffer from certain biases, and that would include reacting stronger to our 100+ win teams’ playoff failures than their successes.

Every now and again, on this board I have seen someone make a value judgment around the cost of a team and winning/or not winning a championship. I don’t feel like I’m trying to buy championships, per se, although I do look at my cumulative W/L %. For me, getting back into this game, and another like it, after 25 years away, gives me the opportunity to feed a relatively healthy obsession. I get to exercise my imagination, I enjoy the challenge of drafting teams, the feeling of optimism/or not before the season starts etc, and not least, making some new friendships.

Gyuppie and Evgrich--
i don't think playoff results have anything to do with winning percentage, at least thats what my math wiz tells me. he says its a combination of luck, teams effectively tailored to their home ball park (and getting home team advantage in the playoffs), and the pitching staff settings in particular.
my buddy loves to play with numbers (he is an math professor), and he is fascinated by the on-line game, and has done quite a bit of research based on the teams that I have had, and the teams I have played against.
he believes there have been 2 programming shifts since the beginning of the on-line game.

the first one, is that he believes that STRAT changed the programming in the third of fourth year, to somewhat reduce the effectiveness and impact of unbalanced players and un-balanced parks--as owners who knew how to take advantage of those imbalances where winning big time, and other owners were complaining.

2nd one, is that he believes that there is an injury programming effect, and it is based on when teams are started (when the league begins, not when the team is purchased).
Example---he first got interested in this, when I had like 12 teams going, and 3 of these teams had Eddie Mathews (one of my favorite players) and went into the playoffs, and in all 3 instances, Eddie Mathews was injured in the first game of the playoffs in each instance. My buddy got interested because of the probability of that happening was to say the least, remote. So I got on the boards and asked other players if they had experienced anything similar.
At first, it looked like there was nothing to it, as other people shared that they had Eddie Mathews and did not have that experience. But then several people chimed in and said that they had the same thing happen, that Mathews had gotten injured in the first game. And lo and behold, the common factor was that all the teams that had Mathews be injured, all started the season in the same month. Teams that had Mathews in the month before, or the month after, did not have that happen. So my buddy believes that STRAT has some variable injury programming quotient, that selects (possibly randomly), specific players that are going to be injured in the playoffs and that programmed selection is changed every month or so.
Now of course my friend will also say that even given how remote that probability is (that without a programmed function)--that 3 teams going to the playoffs, owned by the same owner, would all have Mathews get injured in the first game---is highly improbable, but....of course it is possible.

Well, of COURSE your girlfriend is going to say that.

Steve F

Grin

We all suffer from certain biases, and that would include reacting stronger to our 100+ win teams’ playoff failures than their successes.

I can confirm that I suffer from this bias. After yet another 110 WIN TEAM flamed out in the playoffs I began composing a 100-win curse rant supported by data. Then I collected the data to discover that my 100+ win teams had a better championship conversation rate than my sub-100-win teams. I was completely shocked, because that is not AT ALL how I remembered it!

I am certainly not a mathematician, nor a statistician, but it has always seemed odd to me that even the very best players of this online game only win championships about 30% of the time. That's a rough figure from scanning manager records, but it seems to me that the best should be able to do better than that.

Wah Wah Wah

Be thankful it's not 2050 where Strat's AI Interface isn't waking you up in the middle of the night with a dulcet tone 'It seems Eddie Matthews has gotten injured again in Game 1, would you like to scream at the Heavens or have me email Strat your April Injury Conspiracy Theory?'

Somebody's having fun and winning championships on here. Maybe ask them how many times they used Eddie Matthews? Maybe it's the ghost of Eddie Matthew's Mistress in the machine? Eddie Matthews is a Libra maybe you need to play him only in his Astrological month?

Oh wait...blineimages you live in Seal Beach, CA. Dude, all teams from Seal Beach are programmed to get axed. You need to move to Long Beach or Huntington Beach, you'll do much better there. Eddie Matthews used to date a girl from there. I was staying in the Belmont shore for a month in Joe Maddon's house (true story) and had a .700 win pct. When I moved back to the valley it plummeted to .490.

Strat HATES the Valley.