Quote:
Originally Posted by ipodiipodi
I have done some testing myself using two teams: Chicago White Sox (a notoriously small market with terrible fan loyalty and low fan interest) and Detroit Tigers (mid-market team with average fan interest), and here are what I found:
1. There appears to be no connection between winning and market size. Market size seems to change at random.
2. A sustained success will increase fan loyalty for teams with terrible fan loyalty ratings; teams that already have above average or higher fan loyalty ratings would rarely see increase in fan loyalty.
3. Fan interest will gradually increase after a string of winning seasons. Signing popular players will provide a brief bump in fan interest due to interest modifier, but the bump will eventually disappear and your fan interest will go back to its earlier level.
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I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of your findings, but I'm thinking that this may not be a design flaw or a glitch. Instead, this could be how it's supposed to work. The notion that teams that win consistently draw bigger and bigger crowds to the ballpark isn't consistently true in real life. There are plenty of examples where the opposite is the case.
And market size really is random - or, at least it's random from the perspective of OOTP, since it is often influenced by factors that aren't part of the game. For instance, the Atlanta Braves made the playoffs every year from 1991 to 2005 (excluding 1994), but the Braves' market size probably increased the most in the 1970s and '80s, during the WTBS/Dale Murphy years. That had pretty much everything to do with the Braves games being televised on basic cable and almost nothing to do with the team's performance on the field. That's not something that can be controlled in OOTP. Likewise, the White Sox, which you mention as a small-market team with terrible fan loyalty, were actually extremely popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but they were saddled with a terrible TV deal in the '60s that saw them banished to UHF purgatory while the Cubs were safely ensconced on WGN, a powerful VHF station that would eventually join WTBS on free cable. And the Cubs, by the way, are a good example of a team that has historically performed poorly but still has maintained a large market.
Now, that's not to say that I particularly like the way OOTP handles market size - I'd prefer it if there was more of a link to the actual size of the market - but rather to point out that market size is likely influenced as much or more by the team's marketing than by the team's on-field performance. And marketing is something you have no control over in OOTP.