Quote:
Originally Posted by Questdog
Market sizes in OOTP are initially set based on the team payroll when you start a league. The game wants to set the market size high enough so the team can afford to pay its players. The size of the actual market does not matter a bit. If you want it to, then you have to have an initial draft with set budgets and base those budgets on population or manually set them yourself.
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Thanks! That makes a lot of sense as well. I'd *love* to see the game incorporate historical census data to factor into this somehow as well but there's a good argument to be made, especially in the 16 teams / 10 cities era, that mere population doesn't begin to tell the whole story. Consider how the Yankees were *massive* but the Giants and Dodgers both played like mid-market teams, to the extent that the Dodgers even had attendance issues during their dynasty run in the 50s, or how the Red Sox and Braves played in the same market but while the Red Sox were certainly a large market team, the Braves really were not until they moved out to Milwaukee, or for that matter how St. Louis often played like a medium to large sized market for the Cardinals whereas the Browns couldn't buy fans (Bill Veeck I know insists that he could have forced the Cards out of town had they not been purchased by Gussie Busch, but I'm skeptical, and even Veeck was employing all kinds of small-market craziness to attract fans while he owned the Browns).
Adjusting it to payroll is probably the best that can be done to salvage the situation, frankly. I will say that IRL midmarket cities that have teams winning 100 games often act as large market cities while that's happening and ideally the game should figure out how to reflect that when importing seasons. The Reds in the mid-70s are a fantastic example of that, as are the Mariners in the early 2000s, the Atlanta Braves at least in the beginning and middle portions of their long, long dynasty from the early 90s to mid 2000s, and even the Marlins drew fans when they won their World Series.