What could be done to............

For starters I'd say giving the customers what they expect. Better customer service and full transparency of the rules. All of the rules. Everything. Until these two things happen this game will never reach the heights it's capable of. The last major issue I will point out is the advertising is terrible. Not once have I ever received an ad for the game. That just shouldn't be the case.

There are other issues too. Clumping all the players together leads to new players having rough experiences (hard to get rings when there are six deadly managers in the league). Generally in online competitive games the best do not play against the worst. It does not make good business or game sense IMO.

As for the game itself I have to disagree with the injury complaints. If you don't want injuries you can play perfectly viable low injury risk cards or indestructible cards. You're not forced to play injury prone lineups. Risk vs reward. I will say too that the base stealing doesn't seem as effective as it should be. Not even close. You can look at team after team in league after league and see very poor steal success percentages. Only so much blame can be placed on the managers. Even the elite managers tend to suffer in this category and with few exceptions based on what I've observed in my leagues.

Another issue is HAL doing whatever he wants and essentially robbing players of credits. We all have to live with it but some players absolutely will not tolerate it. The game replayer is also severely bugged at times and spits out a lot of faulty information in the game feed and player name displays. It's just sloppy considering how long it's been out. There is also a LOT of completely horrendous cards in the game. Nothing more than traps for beginners and maybe at best serve some nostalgic purpose. That new 500k Mountain Goat Spencer card comes to mind. Keep in mind people actually spend time clicking on those cards.

All in all though it's a fantastic game. I'm having a blast per usual. None of the issues will stop me from playing but the game definitely needs some work. As most games do! I almost forgot: The game is way too expensive. Constant mentions on the forums alone of "This is my last team" or "Once my credits run out I'm done." If you're not having fun one would think it would be pointless to use remaining credits. So this is IMO an indicator of the price being too high. Not in all cases of course. But let's face it: You can play thousands of games for free these days. Tons of people will not spend hundreds of dollars on this. IMO lower the price and advertise more. Increase the size of the player pool so there are more new players to balance out the field.

Thanks for reading and btw my comma key died in a water spill

‘Clumping all the players together leads to new players having rough experiences (hard to get rings when there are six deadly managers in the league). Generally in online competitive games the best do not play against the worst. It does not make good business or game sense IMO.”

Agree with this. Should be a newbies, average and expert option. I miss the rookie mystery leagues where the bots weren’t too smart.

Kids generally aren't growing up playing strat the way many of us did. Baseball is now a distant 3rd is sports popularity. The "baseball stats nerd" has always been a niche demographic but now's it's a critically endangered species. I am 47 years old and one of the youngest players here. My position is and always has been "let's enjoy this while it lasts!"

The kids today.
LOL
Upvote this one

And BC15NY's comment--the new cards, besides creating new interest the same as any new baseball season, they help to further even the playing field.
In ATG, there are no must-have players except at the highest caps. If you have a strategy, you can try it and don't have to rely on a favoravble draft (ie, luck) to ensure you get the right players. In the single seasons, you may only have a couple viable players at a position or for a strategy, and if you don't get lucky in the draft, season is at risk no matter what you do.
Zero chance of that in ATG--just look at Cristano in the finals--drafted all .50 types and is currently near the top of the league.

On Backfire's comment re: who plays who, maybe, but revisit tmfw30's comment--you would almost never fill leagues because of the low interest that you are trying to fix. It is like a death spiral.

I think it is clear there are no (or very little) digital marketing analytics used to promote the game.
But, again back to matt's comment--the pool of potential customers is not as large as it used to be.

Heck, today's younger culture generally is not about doing critical or quantitative analysis, or anything that requires more than a passing glance. And no, Matt (and myself for that matter) are younger but not young. "Enjoy it while it lasts"

For starters I'd say giving the customers what they expect. Better customer service and full transparency of the rules. All of the rules. Everything. Until these two things happen this game will never reach the heights it's capable of. The last major issue I will point out is the advertising is terrible. Not once have I ever received an ad for the game. That just shouldn't be the case.

Maybe, though data doesn't support this at all. Look at OOTP. Immensely popular--compared to SOM, its SOM365 analogue product is at least an order of magnitude more popular.

And it has ZERO transparency--ZERO. you have no idea how a game is played. It's a little weird, especially to watch the same player compete against themself since there is no roster uniqueness requirement.
They do not release anything, only the boxscore. The stats get pretty close to expected but you don't know how. There is no board game as basis--it is digital from the ground up and is the ultimate black box. And no one seems to care.
And they don't exactly advertise aggressively either.

SOM365 is massively transparent, with a few threads of things on the margins that are annoyances when we don't know how something occurred. The transparency part is moot--they recreated 99% of the board game digitally and the people who care about seeing the remaining 1% are not a burgeoning untapped demographic.

Have the replay have a real stadium overlay, lots of crowd noise, select a legendary broadcaster to listen to for the new audio output. Fireworks. Morganna.

I know none of that will work here, but it makes as much sense as everything MLB is doing to shorten games for casual fans.

Bringing the digital version of the game into the 21st century couldn't hurt. If it were me, this is the first place I would start.

For starters I'd say giving the customers what they expect. Better customer service and full transparency of the rules. All of the rules. Everything. Until these two things happen this game will never reach the heights it's capable of. The last major issue I will point out is the advertising is terrible. Not once have I ever received an ad for the game. That just shouldn't be the case.

Maybe, though data doesn't support this at all. Look at OOTP. Immensely popular--compared to SOM, its SOM365 analogue product is at least an order of magnitude more popular.

And it has ZERO transparency--ZERO. you have no idea how a game is played. It's a little weird, especially to watch the same player compete against themself since there is no roster uniqueness requirement.
They do not release anything, only the boxscore. The stats get pretty close to expected but you don't know how. There is no board game as basis--it is digital from the ground up and is the ultimate black box. And no one seems to care.
And they don't exactly advertise aggressively either.

SOM365 is massively transparent, with a few threads of things on the margins that are annoyances when we don't know how something occurred. The transparency part is moot--they recreated 99% of the board game digitally and the people who care about seeing the remaining 1% are not a burgeoning untapped demographic.

The data I would consider honestly is the multiple testimonials on the forums and in person of people quitting the game due to lack of complete transparency. This is not like the other game you mentioned. Two very different products. Strat is at its roots a board game of full transparency and the online version is what aggravates players. Especially those that actually roll out entire games with dice in person. The other game may not get complaints in this aspect but this game absolutely does.

Any time I take a break and return to the game I see more complaints from new people. It's such a terrible feeling to watch my IRL friends quit the game due to this. I returned to play against them and now they're gone. I'm just one such person in a very familiar situation that sadly many of us have had to experience.

Those people will never be satisfied, same as the people MLB is chasing with all the ridiculous rule changes will never be satisfied. If someone doesn't like the pace of baseball they're not going to be converted by shaving 30 mins off the average game. It's a leisurely game like golf, the people looking for nonstop action cannot be reached no matter how many dumb rule changes Manfred comes up with. Similarly the people obsessed with the 1% sliver of non-transparent gameplay in 365 are convinced that Strat is engaged in some nefarious conspiracy to favor new players at the expense of veterans. Accordingly Strat could decide to fully reveal the mechanics of every max rule and those people would still assume it was all a big lie.

Agree with Max 100%.

For myself...as a middle aged dude...
I tried quitting almost a year ago but I kept winning credits. I haven't purchased one since late 2020, gave away about 5, and still have 4 right now. They certainly aren't making money from me. And I didn't want to leaved out of transparency concerns--basically just the game has become stale. The interface and the ways to interact are not 21st century. SOM's engine is brilliant, and reminds me of my youth. But it is us who are the dying breed no matter how transparent they are with their proprietary code (which businesses almost never share--SOM is quite generous here).

Backfire--you are equating a forum handle with a unique person and that this is the way to grow the game. It is known there are people who use multiple alts, but that aside, your assertion is not data-driven--it is an assumption that there is some great swath of people not playing and that the root cause is transparency?!

The FACT is as I said--OOTP is indeed a simulation, has at least an order of magnitude more active daily players, has zero transparency, and also has lots of people that complain on their boards. Burt their software interface is engineered like it belongs in 2023.

I realize you have a belief of what you think they need to do to satisfy existing players. Fine--assuming they are ever satisfied with anything except the W-L results that they want, you are still talking about a sprinkle of people. You can do the math by the number of leagues and what that revenue stream is. But there are a lot of people playing on credits, as I said above.

Hint: it is small... and appeasing the people who are already playing apparently against their better judgement is not going to improve the game's outreach to people who aren't playing.

Ie you aren't the target and neither is anyone else here for growth. Sure you want to sustain current customers but again--look at the data--the number of leagues.
They need growth, but instead they have net attrition. And it isn't because of a lack of transparency--OOTP is a direct counter example. There are always players leaving--you need to attract more than leave.

Sure you want to sustain current customers but again--look at the data--the number of leagues.
They need growth, but instead they have net attrition.

I agree with most of what you said, but I'm not sure about this statement. What I could estimate from pulling league data is that, pre-pandemic, Strat365 (baseball) was averaging between 4 and 5 new leagues per day. There was a spike starting around March 2020, and now it has settled to between 6 and 7 new leagues per day. My methods are imperfect, but aside from dropping from the 2020 spike, I do not see a downward trend.

Other random observations: In a period roughly covering July through October 2022, there were close to 1000 new leagues, with close to 2000 unique member names participating. 50 of those member names account for about 20% of the teams played.