Why I asked for a refund

[Chiefsfan]

I hope those at Wolverine Studios will take this in the spirit which it is given. A critique meant to help.

I am an avid football fan. Will not play Madden because I want strategy. Love Dave Koch's Actions Sports games, but wish they had fictional and career play. Like Out of the Park, OOTP, and think it is the Gold standard, but am mediorce towards baseball.

I bought both your games in 2019. Played them a little. Realized that I had lots of problems. Put them to the side.

Four years later saw your new games on YouTube. Bought the DDSCF 23, First Access to DDSPF, and the DDSCB 22. I will deal with only football.

1) Most of my criticism might go away but for the price of your game. I paid $39.99 USD for each of the games I bought. Do a quick comparison of game prices and you will see that you are at the high end. Not AAA, but AA at least. For that I should not deal with some of the things below.

1) Documentation.
9.99 per month will get you a monthly subscription to Microsoft Office 365 and access to MS Word.
Around $20.00 a month will get you an Adobe account.
You will only need these 1 month since you will only spend a couple of hours writing an MS Word file that you then use to create a PDF.
Keep the files as you can update them for later versions of the game.

2) You have recruiting down, but I am not going to buy Office Recruiter or Tech Startup recruiter. Recruiting is important. But when your came is Draft Day College Football you need to get the Football right. You don't.

3) Football

Pure text is better than really bad animation, which is what I got. The scoreboard does not update. It has toggles for offense and defense, but no information on what they do and no warning that if you do toggle them the game will fast forward out of your control.

I gave up on calling my own plays because, since you include no documention, I cannot really tell what a play is doing. Yes, I can read the description and look at the play diagram, but I had to give up on defense because no only could I not tell WHO was blitzing I couldn't even tell IF I was blitzing.

Offense is no better. Why, in 2022 in a highly ranked college, is my offensive coordinator wanting to run the Wishbone?

I can tell my team to pick up the pace in gameplan, but no idea what that does and in a game I have no way of switching to a Hurry Up offense. I also cannot switch to a slow down the game offense when I am in the lead.

Go to any website that tracks games and find out which ones put the game information, down, distance, clock at the bottom of their screens. None.

One of the problems is you use playbooks. The base average NFL Playbook has 400+ plays that allow for in game modification. I want to simulate being a football coach, if I have to do it, I might as well do it.

When my game ran into a problem the solution was to send you a file. No problem. But I have to go get a service so that you can do download the file since neither your support ticket system nor your forum can handle the size of the file. This is only after playing to the end of my first season.

Remember you charge the same as the polished OOTP.


I asked Steam for a refund and, at least for football, I will check you out in a couple of years.

[Chiefsfan]

Cannot get refund cause I played 8.3 hours.

Paid 39.99 for a Football game that wants to run 5-2 defense and the wishbone in 20222. No documentation. Cannot advance season.

Done.

[hansmellman]

I don't know if I'd call OOTP that polished, sure it's a much later iteration of a franchise that's been going for decades but every year there are save breaking bugs that last for the first couple of months of it's life cycle and then after that it always has wonky trade AI and waiver logic. Let's not forget that game is funded by a card collecting mode and owned by a larger company now too, there's a difference in levels of funding and the size of development teams.

[brooks_piggott]

I'm not sure how Steam works or if we have control over refunds... If we have control over it we'll do what we can.

What I would recommend is that folks download our free demo that gives you a week to tinker around with the game ahead of purchasing. We also offer several discounts whether it's during first access or other Wolverine sales throughout the year.

Overall I do appreciate your viewpoints and feedback on the game. Obviously we have a lot of work to do to clean up some of these areas.

Some comments in case other folks have these questions:

We are constantly working on documentation, but we're just not there yet. To bolster we use YouTube videos, articles on our support site, the forum, slack, discord, etc. all to help build a community of help.

The play game display is set up the way it is to somewhat match the design for DDS Basketball and bring consistency across the games. It's also set up to be more like a TV presentation, which is why we put items at the bottom. The scores, stats, timeouts, etc. all update as you play the game, and the full boxscore and play by play are always available. Obviously everyone's tastes are different and some folks will prefer a different layout.

The offense/defense toggles are to turn off control of calling plays for offense or defense, which was a requested feature from the community where some folks only wanted to deal with one side of the ball.

Wishbone and 5-2 were highly requested formations from the community.

Tempo is set in your strategy screen and the team will obey that setting. Towards the end of the game the team will auto adjust and speed up or slow down based on scenario.

Yes, the support site limits our file sizes, as does our forum. For regular out of the box leagues the files are much smaller. But a modded league uses custom assets that are much larger. That's why we ask folks to upload to *free* services such as box, onedrive or google docs or any other file share service they want to share the file with us. Worst case I can provide a onedrive link for folks to use in a pinch. We provide a support system so we can directly diagnose issues that people are having with their leagues and fix them if we can. Sometimes we have to patch the game, other times we just fix the files... we're pretty proud of our support and of things like backwards compatibility with very early leagues that people started years ago.

[Gary Gorski]

I hope those at Wolverine Studios will take this in the spirit which it is given. A critique meant to help.

I am an avid football fan. Will not play Madden because I want strategy. Love Dave Koch's Actions Sports games, but wish they had fictional and career play. Like Out of the Park, OOTP, and think it is the Gold standard, but am mediorce towards baseball.

I bought both your games in 2019. Played them a little. Realized that I had lots of problems. Put them to the side.

Four years later saw your new games on YouTube.

1) Most of my criticism might go away but for the price of your game. I paid $39.99 USD for each of the games I bought. Do a quick comparison of game prices and you will see that you are at the high end. Not AAA, but AA at least. For that I should not deal with some of the things below.

We are always open to fair and honest critiques of our game and we will give consideration to those items however I think it is only fair for those reading this thread to see that some of your points are not quite accurate.

Oddly enough that football game you mentioned above that only has single season play sells for 49.00 and the AAA games retail from $70-100+ so I would strongly disagree that we are at the high end of anything.

1) Documentation.
9.99 per month will get you a monthly subscription to Microsoft Office 365 and access to MS Word.
Around $20.00 a month will get you an Adobe account.
You will only need these 1 month since you will only spend a couple of hours writing an MS Word file that you then use to create a PDF.
Keep the files as you can update them for later versions of the game.

We would love to be able to provide full documentation to all our games. If you think doing so would only take a couple of hours writing a MS Word Doc I would gladly pay you or anyone else for a couple of hours work to do that. For example we did a full documentation for Pro Basketball 2020 and that one is 134 pages long. Even the "quick guide" we provide in our College Basketball series is 18 pages long and is a very brief overview of the game. There is also a DDSCF User Guide that is included in the install and should be in your game directory which again is a 46 page document from a prior version which at least provides a starting point for most items in the game. In all cases those documents have been written by a community member who just wanted to help. We do not have the resources to provide a full written manual for our games on a year in and year out basis. Instead we offer tooltips in the game, have a help page in the game with some FAQs, we try to get videos up on our YouTube channel, we have an active community here, on slack and on discord where you can interact and ask questions and get answers to those questions from community members or the developers themselves and we have our support ticket system where you will get one on one answers from our developers. We feel it is best to put our time into actually developing the product and providing new features and features the community requests. I wish we had the time to add documentation writing to that list but we do the best we can with the documents we provide and make sure we are always available to answer questions.

2) You have recruiting down, but I am not going to buy Office Recruiter or Tech Startup recruiter. Recruiting is important. But when your came is Draft Day College Football you need to get the Football right. You don't.

3) Football

Pure text is better than really bad animation, which is what I got

You started this post saying "I hope those at Wolverine Studios will take this in the spirit which it is given. A critique meant to help" - I fail to see how making comments somehow comparing recruiting in college football to running a tech start up, claiming we don't do football and saying we have really bad animation are in any way helpful critiques.

Go to any website that tracks games and find out which ones put the game information, down, distance, clock at the bottom of their screens. None.

As Brooks pointed out our presentation is a TV style one and I happened to watch a number of different games this weekend and I did not see one where the game information was anywhere but the bottom of the screen. I am sorry if you do not prefer it there but it was there in the prior version you said you had in 2019 and I don't know what you saw on YouTube whether it was our community manager doing his Draft Day Dynasty series or our trailer but all of them would have shown that we did not change anything about that.

Paid 39.99 for a Football game that wants to run 5-2 defense and the wishbone in 20222

I also think its unfair that you are acting like a 5-2 defense and wishbone offense are a) being forced on every team in the game, b) the only options in the game and c) are fictional things that do not exist in the world of football. There are plenty of offenses and defenses to choose from and as Brooks said those particular formations were highly requested from members in our community so I guess other people like those formations. What is great about our game is that you are free to run whatever offense and defense you want so if you hate the wishbone you never ever have to run a single play with it.

Brooks responded very kindly to a number of your other points already so there is no need to rehash those. I am sorry you are disappointed with the game. I am also sorry you seem more interested in bashing our product and efforts, trying to make it sound like an office recruitment simulation with really bad football as opposed to bringing up legitimate things that could be done better, discussing them with the intent of making them better and more than likely getting improvements made in the areas you are hoping for because that is exactly what happens over and over again in our community. We have hundreds of community members who have found something they weren't super fond of in our games over the years and when they approach us in a manner of truly wanting to see improvements they find that our developers are extremely receptive and willing to work with them and that many times that even though initially they were frustrated with something about the game that after getting the chance to be listened to and interact with the developers they find improvements being made to those places.

With that said I will be closing this thread. We have no control over Steam refunds or any way to even see who has purchased what on Steam which is why we always encourage people to buy our games directly from us. I do not know if Steam will grant you a refund beyond their normal window but you certainly can try. I am sorry we are not able to produce a game you like and I wish you the best in finding one. Perhaps Dave Koch Action Sports will be willing to add in career and fictional play if you ask them to do so.