My two cents

[Giants44]

I will not be joining the pay league and I would like to tell you why. Not that you will miss my five bucks, but because I think this is a fantastic idea and I would like to see it succeed, but I feel as it is there are some serious issues that would need to be addresses first.

*** Price Structure – The price structure is based on time, rather than on participation and that leads to abuse problems. For example – there is nothing to prevent a player from joining a league and abusing his team (I ran across a great deal of these teams in the beta process) and then skip town and try with another league. There is virtually nothing to combat this and in my opinion this is the number one problem with the league.

Now if you had a price structure based upon participation, I believe you would eliminate the majority of this. (The numbers I put here are just speculative; you know the numbers you need to attain to make this successful so you would need to find the magic numbers)

Play a team for one year – 1.00
Play a team for two years – 1.75
Play a team for five years - 3.00
Play a team for ten years – 5.00

Start your own league – 5.00

This structure does a number of things. It places a financial restriction to the hit and run method. Those who have paid for a season, will be much less likely to abandon that team because they have already paid for it and to join a separate team would cost them more money.

*** Limits

I have seen teams go into massive debt and then simply quit as owners, the above price structure does prevent players from hitting and running, but it does not prevent a “Florida Marlins” strategy. Take a team for one year and go for it and then simply leave that team to die as it is so far in debt it can not be competitive for years following. A simple limit as to how far teams can go into debt would solve this.

*** Preview team

I think this might have been addressed, but I do feel it is very important. A prospective owner needs to be able to see his team and the state of the league before joining. If I am a die hard Giants fan, and my favorite player is Rich Aurilla and I go to my team and find he has been let go, or the team is in such financial peril that I won’t be able to retain him, my interest in the league will instantly go down.


*** League settings

This is minor and I would be interested to see who agrees with me on this, but I personally do not like to see a mix of real and fictional teams. In other words I want to see the Giants play the Dodgers and the Titans plays the Mud Hens, but not the Giants – Mud Hens. You could simply make some leagues “MLB” and others “open”

Again, not a deal breaker for me, but a personal preference.

More ideas that would be nice as bells and whistles would be adjustable league settings such as salary caps, leagues with contraction (and the subsequent free agents) and any other of the various scenarios that get bandied about. After all these are “what if” scenarios and that is what games like this are all about.

[Bad_Ash]

Pretty much all your problems with the game are solved if you join a league with a commissioner. A commissioner can name any team, edit any teams cash, readjust rosters that have been messed up, and kick out GM's for any reason. The only problem you would have is I don't know if you can edit the number of teams in a league, other than that all those issues are solved by joining a league with a commissioner.

Hope this info helps.

[Giants44]

so the beta leagues I have been trying did not have commissioners?

I joined five leagues and enocuntered the same problems in all of them.

[Giants44]

Also how would I even know if a league has a commissioner, since that is not an option in the search league function.

[takaplan]

All private leagues have commishs. Right now...the only leagues with commishs are Mogul Enthusist, All-Star, North American Baseball League, and another one that i forgot

tom

[Giants44]

so only private leagues solve the problems. doesn't sound like a very efficent business model.

In order to make money and thus continue to exist and improve the game needs to work for everyone. If a player wanted to play in a private league why not play in one of the various private leagues (Sierra, HH,OOTP) for free.

[takaplan]

once the game goes live, i believe you can create a public league with a human commish.

[James Grove]

Giants44 -

Thank you for your thoughtful letter. I appreciate all the constructive criticism you have provided.

Let me try and address your points:


Price Structure:
You have proposed an interesting alternative price structure, and one that we may explore in the future.

The main reason for our current pricing is that we wanted something simple. There are not many subscription services on the Internet now, so we did not want to create a complex pricing model that might confuse or scare away potential customers.

We were also concerned that it might become too expensive to play in a fast-sim league, which many people enjoy.

But we will definitely be reassessing our pricing model over the coming weeks, and I will keep your suggestion in mind.



Spending Limits:
We did impose the Budget Limit on teams to solve part of the bankrupt teams problem. We are continuing to strengthen the limit through new features like limits on Free Agent bidding.


Preview Team:
That is high on Ian's pre-launch checklist, and it may be ready by Monday.


League Settings:
Since Sports Mogul does not have a license from Major League Baseball, we are not allowed to use the real team names. Some of our players choose to rename their teams, and they happen to use the real team names. But we are not allowed to assign those names to any teams.


More Ideas:
All good ideas. We will look at each of those as possible future enhancements. Basically it's time for us to launch the game, so at a certain point we drew a line in the sand and said "no more new features". We will of course add more in the future, but we had to lock the game down and focus on the launch.

A CD-ROM game is subject to clear lifecycles -- the game is created, it is released, a revised version is created, and it is released. Baseball Mogul Online will go through a process of evolution and continuous improvement, which should allow the game to improve rapidly.


Private Leagues:
As Bad_Ash points out, the private password-protected leagues run by Commissioners solve many of the problems you describe. We only had four in the past because we were testing them out, and expanding the Commissioner's special powers to deal with the problems that came up.

Before launch we could not let everyone manage a league because each new league puts additional strain on our servers. But with the launch, we will be allowing customers to create leagues for the first time. Because our revenues will grow along with the new leagues we create, we will be able to manage the load better. (Side note--we were also worried about hackers creating thousands of new leagues and crashing our systems. Since people will now have to give us their name and financial information, that is much less of a threat.)

We will also have public leagues, and they may fall prey to some of the difficulties you describe. But we will be bringing additional customer support staff and community moderators on board as needed to help stamp out abuse of the system.


Other Improvements to Come:
You can already see the "Leagues Quit" functionality. Over time, this will begin to act like a user rating. If a user quits too many leagues--presumably because he ruins a team and moves on--he may be disqualified from joining some private leagues, or some "power-user" leagues. We also plan to add in a user feedback function that would help achieve those ends.


In summary, we are trying hard to address many of the problems you describe. I would urge you to remain part of the community to see how it grows. After all -- it's less than $5 to see what the game is like in its first month as a service, and I think you will find it much more enjoyable with the many cheaters out of the system.

But even if you don't stay, thank you for trying out Baseball Mogul
and helping us get through the Beta Testing period. And thank you for your comments.

Regards,
James Grove

[Giants44]

Thank you

Your concern for your users has convinced me to at least give the first month a try.

One other question about the “quit leagues” rating. Will the slate be wiped clean from the beta process? I have 5 quit leagues, all because everyone I joined I saw quickly I had a team that had been laid to waste and then abandoned. I would hate to be lumped in with the “quitters” simply because there was no preview option

[James Grove]

Yes, we will be resetting everyone's quit leagues counter at or short after launch. (After we have the View League functionality working.)

I'm glad to hear you'll be giving the game a try! Welcome aboard!

-James

[John]

Does a private (human created) league have to have a password?
:confused:

[James Grove]

No, a human-created league does not have to have a password.

But I think most owners will want one, just so they have some control over who joins.

-James