Originally Posted by Syd Thrift
I don't think the way the financials are done is... terrible. It can break down after a decade or two but, like, I can think of some games with far, far more detailed financials that fall apart much more spectacularly than that. My favorite example in fact is Victoria II, the Paradox Interactive game about the Victorian era (1830ish - 1920). It has an absolutely insane world trade model that tracks individual "pops" (not quite each person but groups of people per province per worker type, like "day laborers in London" and "soldiers in Milan", but there are I think 8 different kinds of pops over a few hundred different provinces), assigns them desired items, some of which are produced locally and some of which you need to trade for, the ability to expand what you make locally by building factories or, if you are running a capitalist economy, encouraging your capitalist class (literally one of the pops) to build them for you. The flow of trade is affected by wars, country-specific events, revolution, famine - all kinds of things, like just about everything that might effect trade in the real world. It's actually kind of a fascinating economic model, definitely the most in-depth model I've seen in any game, ever, maybe actually the most in-depth in the history of gaming.
So... what happens in this game is that everybody also starts out with a bit of "seed money" as well, both so that you have something to do in 1830 but also because IRL countries had money in their coffers. At around 1880 or so, that initial chunk of cash dries up... and the world economy collapses. Factories that just six months ago were at capacity are now sitting idle. In order to balance your budget you have to scale back, and everybody else has to do the same, creating a knock-on effect as lower trade begets more lower trade. Eventually things kind of rectify themselves in terms of there being a new "normal" for the economy but it never ever quite gets back to what it was before. The game hasn't really been touched in several years but I don't know that this is even a thing that the devs could fix even if they wanted to. It's, like, the long-term consequence of a hundred little design decisions all rolled up into one.
The point being here that the more complex you get, the more of these knock-on effects you're going to see, and the less a dev team composed of people with PhDs in economics, much less a regular old group of coders with CS degrees, will be able to "fix" that. Also, I'm reminded of a programming principle that all large systems look messy over time. This is more about not complaining when code in a system is hard to track when 20 different people have worked on it for 5 years, but it also applies here: the more complicated things get, the messier it gets as well.
Okay, back to the original point: I actually don't think OOTP is all that complicated in terms of the financial model. You *do* get that budget from the owner, it's just... just as in real life, you can go over the budget and the owner won't cry too much if you're successful. The game also has a dynamic where a 90 win team will make more money, even in smaller markets, than a 70 win team - I'm reminded of my own Seattle Mariners, who, when they win 110 games are a top 3 baseball market, but when they lose 95 they are considered "small". There are also some generalized standard contract levels to keep the AI from signing a 4.5 star 1B to the major league minimum while paying $15M a year for a 3 star middle reliever (which could completely happen if there was a glut of 1B on the market; you just wouldn't see that IRL, at least not in the short term, because GMs and agents aren't robots), and other ways beyond ticket prices that a team can make money, including the "national media" deal that amounts to a baseline of money that everybody gets. And, for games that have free agency, there's a relatively easy way for teams that are overspending to jettison too-large contracts.
That's still less than what competitors have tried - I remember people giving Baseball Mogul crap for setting hot dog prices - and it's still a relatively simple financial system. It doesn't surprise me that it breaks down over time, especially if you're not using it the way modern baseball uses their financials. I've pointed out that the true "issue" of pre-free agency baseball is that every team really should be making money hand over fist and the only clubs who should be penny-pinching are the ones stuck in truly awful markets (like the Browns, the 2nd team in the 18th largest market in the US in 1950) or whose owners are fantastically skinflint / intent on pulling massive wads of cash out of their team (the Griffith family Senators come to mind, although after the early 50s they also began to have the issue of sharing a market with the Orioles, granted that Baltimore/Washington was #4 in the country circa 1950). I *suspect* that even with the game treating these teams like their 2021 versions - baseball now is, I'm sure, a game where some teams do struggle to balance the budget, and sports in general has become a "prestige" buy for the wealthy rather than a means of generating revenue in and of itself - if you turned the reserve clause off and allowed free agency, things would shake themselves out for the most part. But even so, even in its not-as-complicated-as-it-could-be state, it's going to get messy, especially after the universe has been allowed to do its own thing for a while.
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