Posted by friarboy on 11/27/2023 10:52:00 AM (view original):
To keep me around it's simple, when leagues merge, bring the history. The great part of the game for me is building a team over a period of years and tracking player statistics and development. I've already dumped one team that was going to merge, now I'm sitting on another in a league sitting on 10 openings for a month now. Frankly I'm not interested in starting over with a new team at this point so given the interesting parts to me are lost in a merger, I'm out.

IMO enhancements to HOF voting and the DH... that's fine but let's look at why people are either leaving or cutting back teams. Enhancements like that pretty clearly aren't coming.

And it would be SO EASY to archive that data.

Something they've all overlooked and shows they really don't understand their customer base.

Posted by keithjs on 11/19/2023 1:50:00 PM (view original):
Don’t worry! An upgrade is being worked on! (so has said the last 5 owners of WIS)

Yup.

x(WhatIfSports)

Sep 19, 2023, 1:19?PM CDT

x,

One of the things we are looking to do with a future HBD update is improving the AI for HBD and allowing worlds to roll with AI controlled teams but putting a cap on the number of AI franchises allowed in a league and potentially allowing them to be picked up by humans during the season. We hope this will help some with leagues struggling to fill.

x

Who wants to bet a team fee we never see this become reality or only hear about it again in typical "We're working on it we promise we really are rinse repeat !" fashion. And yes the post about only 3% of HBD total teams are vacant is misleading. Yes, many good private leagues we never hear about or see in classifieds refill just fine. Good for them; that's not everyone. When leagues start rollover with 5-10 openings and 2 or 3 or 4 or 8 months later it's grown to 10-20 openings and resolved by a merge, that's unacceptable as are the futile attempts at band-aid only after months have gone by of a discounted or free team usually to an overwhelmed newb who bails and then rinse repeat again. Maybe WIS feels that if a lot of plates of spaghetti are thrown at a wall, enough of them will stick while the die-hards continue in our frustration of knowing these broken games and old techno issues aren't going to be fixed or significantly upgraded. Woo-hoo, new stadiums !!

Frankly, I wish they'd put us out of our misery by just going ahead and admitting they're helpless, or even just shut it all down. 30 years at Scoresheet Sports/Baseball and they started with what's now old stuff. Dot-matrix printouts with side ribbon tab still attached mailed draft results. Mailing in lineup changes and $5 check service fee. But they've kept up with the technology times and every single year on the same day roll 600 leagues whether full or not some with orphan autopilot teams and too many vacant teams in a league disbanded. Easy peasy no crying everyone knows the drill. I spose we've been taught pretty well here what the ingrained drill is as well.

Posted by Mwett on 12/25/2023 7:22:00 PM (view original):

Posted by keithjs on 11/19/2023 1:50:00 PM (view original):
Don’t worry! An upgrade is being worked on! (so has said the last 5 owners of WIS)

Yup.

x(WhatIfSports)

Sep 19, 2023, 1:19?PM CDT

x,

One of the things we are looking to do with a future HBD update is improving the AI for HBD and allowing worlds to roll with AI controlled teams but putting a cap on the number of AI franchises allowed in a league and potentially allowing them to be picked up by humans during the season. We hope this will help some with leagues struggling to fill.

x

Who wants to bet a team fee we never see this become reality or only hear about it again in typical "We're working on it we promise we really are rinse repeat !" fashion. And yes the post about only 3% of HBD total teams are vacant is misleading. Yes, many good private leagues we never hear about or see in classifieds refill just fine. Good for them; that's not everyone. When leagues start rollover with 5-10 openings and 2 or 3 or 4 or 8 months later it's grown to 10-20 openings and resolved by a merge, that's unacceptable as are the futile attempts at band-aid only after months have gone by of a discounted or free team usually to an overwhelmed newb who bails and then rinse repeat again. Maybe WIS feels that if a lot of plates of spaghetti are thrown at a wall, enough of them will stick while the die-hards continue in our frustration of knowing these broken games and old techno issues aren't going to be fixed or significantly upgraded. Woo-hoo, new stadiums !!

Frankly, I wish they'd put us out of our misery by just going ahead and admitting they're helpless, or even just shut it all down. 30 years at Scoresheet Sports/Baseball and they started with what's now old stuff. Dot-matrix printouts with side ribbon tab still attached mailed draft results. Mailing in lineup changes and $5 check service fee. But they've kept up with the technology times and every single year on the same day roll 600 leagues whether full or not some with orphan autopilot teams and too many vacant teams in a league disbanded. Easy peasy no crying everyone knows the drill. I spose we've been taught pretty well here what the ingrained drill is as well.

Scoresheet Sports has done a good job of keeping up with technology and keeping the game current because they have a much better staff-to-game ratio than WIS has. Scoresheet had 1-2 staff supporting 3 games for several years and as of summer 2021 is down to only the 1 game of baseball. WIS has 2-3 staff most of the time supporting over a dozen different games of which HBD is one. I am actually surprised that WIS is still able to run over a dozen different games after being understaffed for a long time now.

I am also guessing the staff WIS has had have not been big baseball fans like those of us who play HBD are. When priorities are set based on limited time/resources they likely are going to update/support the games they like better (hockey or football or basketball) more than a game they are not really fans of (baseball).

None of us really know how much revenue WIS has generated for its various owners over the years. Apparently, it has not been enough for ownership to think they could invest in more staff. Without more staff though, nothing is going to change and WIS will likely die a slow death.

I've jumped over to Pennant Wars for all of these reasons. It's run by just one guy, but he actually adds features over time, we have AI-controlled teams so leagues rollover in one day, the seasons are shorter (more games simmed/day), it's cheaper (about $7/season), it uses the 20-80 scouting scale, there is minimal need to manage minor league teams, all drafts are "live" so you can actually pick the player you want...I could go on. Also, there's promotion/demotion just like Premier League soccer. Ping me if you want an invite.

This game isn't bad. There are many little things they could do to make it better, but there is one big thing they could do to make it better.

We can fill up this thread with all the little (and inexpensive) things they could do to make it better, but we already have a separate thread where we have done that.

We can fill up this thread with expensive things they could do to improve the game, but we know they're not going to lower the price of the game for the loyal owners that stick around and they are not going to spend a lot of money on advertising.

There is one big thing that they could do to immediately improve the game. However, they won't do it and the reason they won't do it is NEARLY just as much our fault as it is their fault. We, as a Hardball Dynasty community, cannot agree on what that one big thing is that can be done to improve the game.

Ive been banging the drum for more than 4 years now that injury recovery in this game is the SINGLE MOST BROKEN THING IN THIS GAME! Until it is fixed, I will continue to bang that drum. I'm not going to get into how it's broken because that's been done in many other forum threads.

Our problem is both an Admin problem and a community problem. If we can't agree as a community what the most most broken things are so they can be fixed, then how does Admin know??? They don't play HBD like they play Gridirion. The Gridiron game has a bi-weekly pod cast where sometimes Admin will show up as a guest and they'll discuss recent updates to the game, how fun the game is, how the game used to be played vs. how its played now and how coaches have had to adapt etc.

So, now that I've written all of the above, I can likely predict what will happen next. 1. People will chime in writing that "we should not have to have a community podcast to get them to update the game into 2024; 2. Injury recovery isn't the most pressing thing wrong with HBD, X (insert any random thing that could be implemented to improve the game) is the most pressing thing wrong with hbd.

If the customer service person (Jordan) plays Gridiron and occasionally shows up to Gridiron podcasts, he's naturally going to be more tuned in to the community and improving the game. That's why that game has had more improvements and looks a lot more close to the current iteration of college football in real life. If we, as a community, cannot even agree on what the biggest issues or problems are and we don't have a separate conduit to communicate those grievances (podcast), I don't think it is fair to compare the non-existant updates being made to hbd to the frequent updates that Gridirion is getting.

The curent situation is that Admin has a game that they don't play enough to understand the nuances and culture and we, as an hbd community, cannot come to a consensus. I have tried, on a separate thread, to gather enough momentum to get Admin to fix injury recovery. You know how many people joined in? We got about twenty people that got behind it. That's not even enough people to fill one HBD World. Maybe if we actually got 50+ people to agree that one thing needs to be fixed, we could start some tailwinds, but we won't. We'll just have the same tired 20 or 30 people that come to the forums to complain about still having a DH in the NL or not having individual base running settings or AAAA players asking for $4 million contracts. We'll never get to a point where we choose one thing that is the most important thing that needs to be updated and then present that to Admin. Now, if we did get 50 people to agree that one thing needs to be updated and presented that to Admin and they still didn't make the update after months, then I'd get off my soapbox, but when we, as a community, cannot come to a consensus on the one most important thing, how can Admin prioritize???

Which of these is most true, although sometimes 2 things can be true at the same time :

'Mission Statement' :
Throw spaghetti at the wall. See what sticks. Next.

'Mission Statement' :
No need to throw spaghetti. They'll play anyway. But we will go radio silent on rinse repeat forever ago promises that we'll never deliver. They didn't appreciate the bells and whistles hoopla of the game's biggest problem anyway. Stadium updates single-handed saved this platform.

Which of these is most true?

1. Admin chose from a list of things that people in the hbd community communicated needed updating and went to go study how that item has evolved in real life since the last hbd update that happened years ago. Once they studied it, they adapted it to hbd. Almost immediately people complained and blamed Admin for not reaching out and understanding the culture and nuances of the game. All Admin did was go study stadiums and how they evolved in the past ten years. If, in real life, the stadiums got more closely in design to one another (more neutral), that's not their fault. That's what happened in real life.

2. Admin threw spaghetti against the wall with stadiums to see what stuck and when it didn't stick (people complained), they stopped throwing spaghetti against the wall.

Ill answer the question myself. Item 1 is more true. They actually did pick something to update. They actually took a nuanced approach to making the update, but because the hbd community couldn't come to a consensus on exactly what it wanted, Admin did what they thought made the most sense. When they were making the stadium updates there were very little differing opinions on what should be done. The most common opinion shared on the forum was something like, "they just need to update stadiums, I'm still playing baseball in the Metrodome in Minnesota." But, once they made the stadiums updates, oh boy, now everyone had an opinion -- they should not have did it in the middle of the season; they should have added historical stadims; they should have added more fictional parks; they should not have nerfed my pitchers park/hitters park; etc. There was a lack of communication on both ends. If you say you want an update to stadiums because you're tired of playing in stadiums that have not existed in ten years, then when they give that to you and you immediately whine and moan, you, as a community need to take some responsibility as well. Nobody told them to be sure that the stadiums aren't too neutral. Nobody explained to them that, when you play hbd, sometimes you build a team around park factors and when you change park factors, it messes with my team. There was not a single concern like that posted to the forums before the update. In fact, even after Adam posted the new staduims to the forums, there was very little chatter. But once the update took place, people lost their mind.

The truth is that you can't just throw spaghetti at the wall. You do that and you're asking for trouble. The loyal customers that continue to play this game are very sensitive about it. You go messing with it and people lose their mind. Heck, even when Admin doesn't touch the game, some weird random thing happens (because, you know, when you're dealing with raw probability, random thongs tend to happen) and people think Admin messed with something and they lose their mind.

I get it. Forums exist for people to communicate things to Admin that need to be communicated. But, you have to be reasonable. We're not playing some blockbuster game that cost $80 million to produce. We're playing a game that was created 20 years ago that is now serviced by a company with very little resources. If you want them to update something and you're passionate about it, crowd source it (get enough people to buy in) If not, the complaints are just complaints and they are not going to be addressed so we're all wasting our time.

Here's a funny and legit observation -- you'd think with all these Ads I see on these forums that are annoyingly hindering my ability to read and write on the forum, you'd think they'd have enough money to make more updates.

Oh that's right, the reason that hbd isn't getting updates isn't just about money and resources, it is also about the hbd community, as a whole, not being able to come to a consensus on a best path forward.

I mostly agree with tlowster.

There was a period of time between when the new stadium list was released and when it was implemented into the game. During that time I did voice my opposition to neutralizing most ballparks but apparently I was one of the very few who did so at that time.

I believe both sides share some responsibility in what has happened over the years. We as a HBD community of players have not done a good job rallying around 1 or 2 things to update as tlowster said above. However, WIS staff has done a very poor job communicating with us over the last 10 years or so as well (was much better the first few years of the game).

There is one major aspect to this discussion that most people in the HBD community do not know about or understand. The computer software code for this game was written in 2005 (game released in early 2006) using computer programming software/languages current in 2005. That programming software is terribly out of date today. The current WIS staff likely have very little experience using that old software/language which makes updates difficult to do. In order to do any major updates now it would require a total rewrite of the software code for the entire game using a more modern programing software/language. That rewrite will take a large chunk of time/resources. This is one of the reasons there have been only minor updates the last few years and not any major changes.

I would love to see the injury bug fixed and the game updated to current MLB rules. We as a HBD community need to rally around those things much, much better than we have in the past. However, even if we do rally better there is still no guarantee WIS will invest the time/resources needed to do the updates we propose.

Posted by dyoungquist on 1/14/2024 11:00:00 AM (view original):
I mostly agree with tlowster.

There was a period of time between when the new stadium list was released and when it was implemented into the game. During that time I did voice my opposition to neutralizing most ballparks but apparently I was one of the very few who did so at that time.

I believe both sides share some responsibility in what has happened over the years. We as a HBD community of players have not done a good job rallying around 1 or 2 things to update as tlowster said above. However, WIS staff has done a very poor job communicating with us over the last 10 years or so as well (was much better the first few years of the game).

There is one major aspect to this discussion that most people in the HBD community do not know about or understand. The computer software code for this game was written in 2005 (game released in early 2006) using computer programming software/languages current in 2005. That programming software is terribly out of date today. The current WIS staff likely have very little experience using that old software/language which makes updates difficult to do. In order to do any major updates now it would require a total rewrite of the software code for the entire game using a more modern programing software/language. That rewrite will take a large chunk of time/resources. This is one of the reasons there have been only minor updates the last few years and not any major changes.

I would love to see the injury bug fixed and the game updated to current MLB rules. We as a HBD community need to rally around those things much, much better than we have in the past. However, even if we do rally better there is still no guarantee WIS will invest the time/resources needed to do the updates we propose.

Nicely put.

Posted by tlowster on 1/14/2024 9:25:00 AM (view original):
Here's a funny and legit observation -- you'd think with all these Ads I see on these forums that are annoyingly hindering my ability to read and write on the forum, you'd think they'd have enough money to make more updates.

Oh that's right, the reason that hbd isn't getting updates isn't just about money and resources, it is also about the hbd community, as a whole, not being able to come to a consensus on a best path forward.

I don't think enough HBD users visit the forum often enough to make a real impact on the ad revenue.
Even the use of these types of forums is archaic, Web 1.0.