Where Strafe Succeeds

At the beginning of the review I hoped Strafe would work as well as it looked, and I can say with certainty that it does. I haven’t run into any issues with the day-to-day usage of the app, and the way it’s constructed feels solid, well-planned and functional.

Nothing feels half-assed: this is a product of a team that knows both how the modern world designs its apps and the information that eSports fans crave. I would not hesitate to show someone a scoreboard from Strafe in order to share results or give an idea of how similar eSports statistics can be to hockey, basketball, or baseball.

That in itself is a breath of fresh air, especially when it comes to the tournament overview. Being able to see a no-bullshit look at the standings of the competition, as well as things like the prize pool, tournament site and stream page (where available) save us from having to hunt them down ourselves.

I crave more apps and sites that are designed for an older and more mature audience; it’s really easy to notice how dated some designs look, and their functionality seems to suffer along with their ignorance to current design trends.

This isn’t to say that all sites and apps should just clone what they see elsewhere; there’s reasons why they work, though, and those should be taken into consideration.

Where Strafe Lacks

While Strafe deserves praise for delivering on its current feature set, I could not help but wanting more out of its depth of information. Despite wanting to be a one-stop shop for eSports’ fans statistical needs, there is a distinct lack of information that would deliver a more complete experience.

A few curious absences are a lack of separate team or player pages. When looking at a match, I kept tapping on players’ names, expecting to be brought somewhere with, well, more. As I mentioned above, Strafe does a good job of keeping me in the app when it comes to tournament information, but it fails to do so when I’m curious about players’ real names, social media, recent results, playing habits, highlights or other miscellany.

Also, without the ability to progress past “Yesterday”, “Today” and “Tomorrow” in a date range, the ability to plan far in advance or see history is lost. It would be amazing if our Strafe calendar could integrate with iCal or Google Calendar, but that may be a bit tough depending on how they’d be able to be generated.

Finally, some matches remain unfilled, but usually this is fixed within hours of the games being over; you will very rarely find matches in the “yesterday” tab that are blank. Also, while screenshots did indicate a space on a match page to view VODs, I was unable to find it implemented within the app itself.

The type of fan who wants a second-screen solution for their eSports viewing habits will want to explore beyond who is playing and what the scores are. This is what makes them fans, instead of just casual viewers.

This is also true when we are watching the match unfold, as opposed to catching up to something we missed later; right now, there’s little reason for me to use Strafe while watching because I can often find the information I want to know on the stream itself.

I know this criticism may sound harsh, but it’s important to make the distinction between use cases. Right now, Strafe does a great job of telling me when matches are, and I enjoy being able to set alarms for time-shifted start times without having to do the math in my head. It also lets me keep up to date with games that I don’t want to commit to hunting down VODs for.

However, when it comes to a true second screen, it does not replace my second monitor, or having to leave the app for a Google search on my phone while watching from a couch. And from what I’m reading, the app wants to be able to do as good a job (or better!) than both of those.

Closing Thoughts

What’s important to note about those criticisms is that Strafe is doing something smart: it is not becoming over-ambitious in its design too early in its development. It is doing as much as it can with its current development and employee bandwidth, especially for a service that is generating no revenue.

As I said earlier, it is better for Strafe to have a consistent experience than take on too much and have that core functionality suffer. I highly suspect that the reason we don’t have photos, profiles and biographies is because that stuff takes time to collect.

Imagine how hard it is to populate one wiki with accurate and useful information, then multiply that workload by five and divide it among a team who are already manually inputting match data.

In short, I’m willing to cut Strafe a break on the lack of features as long as they get there eventually, and continue to deliver on the foundation of great quality that they’ve provided.

While I may not use Strafe in my day-do-day, the main audience I could see it reaching right now is the eSports fan who wants to broaden their horizons. One of the most intimidating things about getting into a new game is finding out what matches are worth viewing and where they’re being played. Strafe will allow players to connect the dots, see common winners, and keep histories in mind when big tournaments do occur.

That alone makes Strafe one of the best eSports apps you can have on your phone today. Having a pleasing design and a team that seems dedicated to actually making something good with purpose just contributes to something I want to see improve.

Normally, I don’t like saying “wait, and watch it grow” for apps. However, I’m very comfortable saying that about Strafe.