I Can't Decide on a Financial System (Choose one)

trendon · 02-15-2010, 07:27 PM

As I have stated before, I am relatively new to OOTP and after telling two people in a NCAA 10 league about the game, the next thing you know we had a 16-team league, in like three days. Excepting a little snafu here and there, it's been fantastic. However, my nuts are in a knot over financials. So, help me as I talk aloud on the plan. We are merely 30 games into the inaugural season, so i want to nip this in the bud before wholesale changes need to be made.

Goal

I want to occasionally have teams going broke and needing to dump salary. Parity is not too much of a concern since we are all sports nuts and understand that **** doesn't always work your way! In fact, we have one owner who purposely picked his birthplace (instead of his home in Miami) as his franchise's location because he wanted a small market.

Idea #1: Survival of the Fittest

Scouting Enabled
Coaching Enabled
Market Size/Media Contract Varies (Average: $41 million)
Fan Interest/Loyalty indirectly related to market size
No Cap
Luxury Tax (120/20)
$75,000,000 Max
Entire revenue available
Salaries range go 21/16/9/5/3/2/1

This is one I cooked up with assistance from someone's GMExcelSuite spreadsheet on these forums. Using the Nielsen Market Data, it spits out a market size. Beautiful. I end up with 17, 7, two 0's, and the rest were all twos and threes. The 17 (located in Westchester County, NY) was awarded $90,000,000 from his television contract while Pueblo, CO got about nine. OK, cool, what we want.

Of course, this quickly spiraled out of control in sims. Because of the large amount of cash floating around (albeit, with two teams) you had one of two problems: 1) Stacked teams and/or 2) free agents asking for ludicrous (one guy signed for $45 million a year) contracts.

I decided to correct this by altering the FAN INTEREST and FAN LOYALTY. What are some of the disadvantages of being in a large market? Well, how excited do you think the New York metro area is going to be about getting a third baseball team and 10th major sports franchise? Ho-hum, right? They could put a major league team right across the street from me and I'd still be a Mets fan. Now, what about Sioux City? Think they'll be excited about things if a major league franchise established a home there? I just inverted the numbers. Sioux City had a market size of zero, a starting fan interest of 100, and a fan loyalty of 10. New York was 17/15/1.

I am unsure if what happened was bad or good. The New York team drew terribly and didn't sell much merchandise while the small market teams were PACKED. New York would be severely in the red at the end of every single season while Sioux City would be very healthy. However, once the season ended, New York was filthy rich again while the smaller market teams all hovered around average. Also, we still had some absurd contracts being handed out.

Questions: I really like this idea; is there a tweak I can make? Would lowering the cash maximum solve things or just defeat the purpose of having the market size in the first place? Should I jack up the luxury tax through the roof?

Idea #2: All Places Created Equal

Scouting Enabled
Coaching Enabled
Market Size/Media Contract Set ($35,000,000)
Fan Interest/Loyalty indirectly related to market size*
No Cap
Luxury Tax (120/20)
$35,000,000 Max
Entire revenue available
Salaries range go 21/16/9/5/3/2/1

* - Despite there being no market sizes, I kept this to simulate my theory on how new teams in big/small markets would respond. So, if I refer to market size, I am indicating what their fan support is.

With this setup, two teams have won the first six titles; Austin and Columbus, teams with a wonderfully large market size of THREE! New York $41,000,000 in the whole and had to cut payroll down to $59 million. Pueblo (zero market size) has a $97 million payroll with $13m to spare on new signings and $39 on extensions. This is AFTER they spent nearly $80 million in the offseason.

On the face of it, this looks fantastic.

New York started off with a ton of money and little interest. Attendance sucked (1.6 million) and their $101m payroll promptly found them ending the first season with a balance of negative $4m. For six seasons, it was cut payroll, get back to even, raise payroll, lose, cut payroll. Fan interest is up from 15 to 58 but they are still just as disloyal as they were six years ago. The champions were a random bunch, but New York and Toronto (17 & 7 respectively) are .500 teams. Toronto also had a $232m payroll three seasons ago (up from $132) and finished 6th ... and $131m in debt! They cut almost all of that next season and are now in the black and coming off a trip to the playoffs.

Questions: Once again, is there anything I can do with the max cash or luxury tax to fix this?

I am working on other ideas as we speak and I will edit as I come across them.

Once again, basic goals are:

1) Force teams to have to pay for loading up on payroll. We think it will be entertaining to rape and pillage a team because they are broke.

2) Try and preserve as much realism as possible (i.e. the market size vs initial fan interest)

3) Keep player salaries from going insane because they think everyone has $100,000,000 to spend.

4) Let the ultimate factor on your money be winning. Losing will cost you.

5) No salary cap whatsoever.

Thanks in advance!

kq76 · 02-15-2010, 08:41 PM

Regarding the whole unbalanced vs balanced thing, I've gone back and forth on this myself in solo leagues, but I think in online leagues where your main goal should probably first and foremost be about making it fun for everyone, I think more balanced than unbalanced is the way to go. That doesn't mean you have to go with completely equal market sizes, fan interest / loyalty, media, merchandise, etc, just that it's probably best not to go crazy unbalanced like having your 17,7 and all the rest 3-. It's your league, play it how you want, but just keep in mind that you want your members to have a good time and having it crazy unbalanced is probably going to lead to less than desirable long-term results.

Now to the specifics.

I don't understand what you mean by, "Fan Interest/Loyalty indirectly related to market size". Is there some setting in the game about that? Are you merely saying it has no relation to market size? If so, I think you may be mistaken as to what the 3 mean. I take market size to simply mean the # of fans of your team be they local or half way across the world (think Seattle due to their following in Japan). Of course, the more fans locally will still influence your attendance #s, but it's not just the fans who come to your games. Fan interest is more to do with fans actually coming to your games. And fan loyalty is about fans still coming despite you starting not to play so well. The point is, I don't see why you bother to kill New York's fan interest and loyalty. You really want no one to come to New York's games? If you're going to have things uneven then fine, let there be great differences in market sizes, media and merchandise, but killing fan interest and loyalty makes no sense as it's not at all realistic.

We use a cap and if you want to limit rich teams from having too much of an advantage, I'd recommend giving it a try at least in tests.

I haven't played with a luxury tax so I can't really speak to it, but if you just don't like the idea of a cap then I'd suggest trying a harsher luxury tax.

Regarding "entire revenue available" vs "owner controls budget", last I looked at it it doesn't work. Yes, the two give different numbers, but the former probably doesn't produce the numbers you'd expect.

You want to help prevent ridiculous asking prices? Slash your cash max to nothing. 70M and even 35M is way too much. For the longest time we went with 10M and we've recently gone with 20M, but your better financial teams will have an advantage with this that I don't think you want. It also tells players that there's rooms of gold out there.

EDIT: In addition, the lower your media revenue and the more equal it is, the better it should be for what you want.

One last thing, opinions on this vary of course, but I think you'd find that most online leaguers prefer not to play with scouts. Not that it will have any effect on your finances, but you might want to consider scrapping that. Things are already pretty foggy and scouting is just something a lot of people don't care to play with.

trendon · 02-16-2010, 01:14 PM

You are probably right with scaling it down a bit. What I meant by making the fan interest and loyalty inverted compared to the market size was just a quick little formula I created. My line of thinking was that an expansion team in Sioux City would be met with extreme interest and immediate loyalty as opposed to the New York Launch showing up in an area with two baseball teams and nine other professional teams.

In my sims, it actually worked out fairly well. The one problem was, after about twenty years, the New York team started winning consistently. Thus, the interest went up quite a bit and they were basically filthy rich as attendance and merchendising skyrocketed. I assume once fan loyalty came around, it would have been completely ridiculous.

All in all, all of us in this league like some disparity. Our roots are in a 120-man NCAA 10 (for PS3) league. Obviously, there are guys who, like me, are stuck with the University of Buffalo or similar teams and we basically spend our whole season getting our teeth kicked in. The good players win what games they can (or vastly exceed expectations) and maybe get that job at Ohio State or Nebraska. Guys who aren't that good or who don't practice/try get stuck at Buffalo for ever and ever and ever.

So, we are not only used to playing games where we are behind the 8-ball, we kinda welcome it.

In any case, my next test sim will be tonight and I am going to test it with: no cap, equal market sizes ($25m media arevenue), random fan interest, no fan loyalty at all, no max cash, and a 100/25 soft cap. We'll see how that goes.

Also, as for scouting, the whole reason these guys all bought the game was almost solely because of the scouting. I IM'ed one of the commissioners of the football league and said, "Dude, you have to check this game out." After some quick back-and-forth, he asked a question that led to scouting and he was sold. We all get a kick out of it. Every so often, I get an IM, "Yo, tell me what your scout says about so-and-so." "Oh, he thinks he sucks." "What?! My guys says he is a 310/35 guy!" The waiver wire has been a blast, too, seeing some of the guys that have shown up on there. Personally, I am getting hit hard by it, having signed a 2B for 3/23 that, well, doesn't seem to be very good. No wonder he was untouched for two full sims.

And, by the way, kq, I appreciate your input very, very much. I hope I am least asking some interesting questions! I always try and do a search first, but having been a veteran on other forums, I know how much of a pain in the ass some of these questions can be. Thanks again!

kq76 · 02-16-2010, 02:08 PM

Ah, inversely, not indirectly. And you're make believing that your league runs alongside MLB, not without. That makes more sense then. Maybe just keep in mind that OOTP will, as it sounds you've already found out, probably over time ramp up that fan interest and loyalty as teams start winning. I doubt the game is programmed to take into consideration other teams in the same market in the same league not alone in different leagues.

If your guys are used to and even like having the disparity then more power to them. Maybe just keep in mind that if you start looking to these boards to replenish your ranks that you might want to state this about your league since many here probably expect that they have a good shot at competing for a championship as long as they manage their teams well. I'm sure there are guys like your guys here too, but you just might want to let them know up front so they know what to expect. The less often you have to replace managers, the longer you'll likely last yourself.

Instead of testing with your sims, why don't you test outside of you league? You keep changing the settings on your guys the less they can plan for the future. Most of us probably only change things in the off-seasons for this very reason. Or are you running whole seasons at a time as it is?

If you guys like scouting then, again, more power to you. It's good that this community has such variety. It allows people to figure out what they really like. I only suggested it because your group sounds fairly new and just might not have known otherwise, but if you guys like it then great.

No problem. If I don't feel like answering a question, I just won't. I usually don't feel like I have to so no worries there.

Besides, finance has always been an interest of mine (don't ask me how many years I spent studying it) so these what if finance questions are often right up my alley.

Going back to the testing talk, if I were you I really would create a few leagues similar to yours (use the quickstart or templates, whatever they're called to clone leagues easily) and then test them out with different cash maxes, media/merch revs, market sizes, etc. Testing it in your sims is probably going to grate on your guys after awhile. EDIT: Not that I know anything about building houses, but I'd liken it to trying to build a house while the permit office keeps telling you that they've changed the rules on you for the nth time. After awhile you'd probably get pretty fed up with them.

rutri01 · 02-23-2010, 01:01 PM

"Regarding "entire revenue available" vs "owner controls budget", last I looked at it it doesn't work. Yes, the two give different numbers, but the former probably doesn't produce the numbers you'd expect."

Do you know how the team budget is figured out using entire revenue available? Does it take last year revenue and use it for next years budget?

02-16-2010, 02:08 PM	#4
kq76 Global Moderator Join Date: Nov 2002 Posts: 12,016	Ah, inversely, not indirectly. And you're make believing that your league runs alongside MLB, not without. That makes more sense then. Maybe just keep in mind that OOTP will, as it sounds you've already found out, probably over time ramp up that fan interest and loyalty as teams start winning. I doubt the game is programmed to take into consideration other teams in the same market in the same league not alone in different leagues. If your guys are used to and even like having the disparity then more power to them. Maybe just keep in mind that if you start looking to these boards to replenish your ranks that you might want to state this about your league since many here probably expect that they have a good shot at competing for a championship as long as they manage their teams well. I'm sure there are guys like your guys here too, but you just might want to let them know up front so they know what to expect. The less often you have to replace managers, the longer you'll likely last yourself. Instead of testing with your sims, why don't you test outside of you league? You keep changing the settings on your guys the less they can plan for the future. Most of us probably only change things in the off-seasons for this very reason. Or are you running whole seasons at a time as it is? If you guys like scouting then, again, more power to you. It's good that this community has such variety. It allows people to figure out what they really like. I only suggested it because your group sounds fairly new and just might not have known otherwise, but if you guys like it then great. No problem. If I don't feel like answering a question, I just won't. I usually don't feel like I have to so no worries there. Besides, finance has always been an interest of mine (don't ask me how many years I spent studying it) so these what if finance questions are often right up my alley. Going back to the testing talk, if I were you I really would create a few leagues similar to yours (use the quickstart or templates, whatever they're called to clone leagues easily) and then test them out with different cash maxes, media/merch revs, market sizes, etc. Testing it in your sims is probably going to grate on your guys after awhile. EDIT: Not that I know anything about building houses, but I'd liken it to trying to build a house while the permit office keeps telling you that they've changed the rules on you for the nth time. After awhile you'd probably get pretty fed up with them. __________________ My OOTP Wishlist \| My FAQ List OOTP Wiki \| Your Recommended Team Nicknames, By City (A Crowdsourced Project) For Beta/Devs: Full screen (1920x1080) Last edited by kq76; 02-16-2010 at 02:18 PM.

02-15-2010, 07:27 PM	#1
trendon Minors (Double A) Join Date: Jul 2009 Posts: 103	I Can't Decide on a Financial System (Choose one) As I have stated before, I am relatively new to OOTP and after telling two people in a NCAA 10 league about the game, the next thing you know we had a 16-team league, in like three days. Excepting a little snafu here and there, it's been fantastic. However, my nuts are in a knot over financials. So, help me as I talk aloud on the plan. We are merely 30 games into the inaugural season, so i want to nip this in the bud before wholesale changes need to be made. Goal I want to occasionally have teams going broke and needing to dump salary. Parity is not too much of a concern since we are all sports nuts and understand that ** doesn't always work your way! In fact, we have one owner who purposely picked his birthplace (instead of his home in Miami) as his franchise's location because he wanted a small market. Idea #1: Survival of the Fittest Scouting Enabled Coaching Enabled Market Size/Media Contract Varies (Average: $41 million) Fan Interest/Loyalty indirectly related to market size No Cap Luxury Tax (120/20) $75,000,000 Max Entire revenue available Salaries range go 21/16/9/5/3/2/1 This is one I cooked up with assistance from someone's GMExcelSuite spreadsheet on these forums. Using the Nielsen Market Data, it spits out a market size. Beautiful. I end up with 17, 7, two 0's, and the rest were all twos and threes. The 17 (located in Westchester County, NY) was awarded $90,000,000 from his television contract while Pueblo, CO got about nine. OK, cool, what we want. Of course, this quickly spiraled out of control in sims. Because of the large amount of cash floating around (albeit, with two teams) you had one of two problems: 1) Stacked teams and/or 2) free agents asking for ludicrous (one guy signed for $45 million a year) contracts. I decided to correct this by altering the FAN INTEREST and FAN LOYALTY. What are some of the disadvantages of being in a large market? Well, how excited do you think the New York metro area is going to be about getting a third baseball team and 10th major sports franchise? Ho-hum, right? They could put a major league team right across the street from me and I'd still be a Mets fan. Now, what about Sioux City? Think they'll be excited about things if a major league franchise established a home there? I just inverted the numbers. Sioux City had a market size of zero, a starting fan interest of 100, and a fan loyalty of 10. New York was 17/15/1. I am unsure if what happened was bad or good. The New York team drew terribly and didn't sell much merchandise while the small market teams were PACKED. New York would be severely in the red at the end of every single season while Sioux City would be very healthy. However, once the season ended, New York was filthy rich again while the smaller market teams all hovered around average. Also, we still had some absurd contracts being handed out. Questions: I really like this idea; is there a tweak I can make? Would lowering the cash maximum solve things or just defeat the purpose of having the market size in the first place? Should I jack up the luxury tax through the roof? Idea #2*: All Places Created Equal Scouting Enabled Coaching Enabled Market Size/Media Contract Set ($35,000,000) Fan Interest/Loyalty indirectly related to market size No Cap Luxury Tax (120/20) $35,000,000 Max Entire revenue available Salaries range go 21/16/9/5/3/2/1 * - Despite there being no market sizes, I kept this to simulate my theory on how new teams in big/small markets would respond. So, if I refer to market size, I am indicating what their fan support is. With this setup, two teams have won the first six titles; Austin and Columbus, teams with a wonderfully large market size of THREE! New York $41,000,000 in the whole and had to cut payroll down to $59 million. Pueblo (zero market size) has a $97 million payroll with $13m to spare on new signings and $39 on extensions. This is AFTER they spent nearly $80 million in the offseason. On the face of it, this looks fantastic. New York started off with a ton of money and little interest. Attendance sucked (1.6 million) and their $101m payroll promptly found them ending the first season with a balance of negative $4m. For six seasons, it was cut payroll, get back to even, raise payroll, lose, cut payroll. Fan interest is up from 15 to 58 but they are still just as disloyal as they were six years ago. The champions were a random bunch, but New York and Toronto (17 & 7 respectively) are .500 teams. Toronto also had a $232m payroll three seasons ago (up from $132) and finished 6th ... and $131m in debt! They cut almost all of that next season and are now in the black and coming off a trip to the playoffs. Questions: Once again, is there anything I can do with the max cash or luxury tax to fix this? I am working on other ideas as we speak and I will edit as I come across them. Once again, basic goals are: 1) Force teams to have to pay for loading up on payroll. We think it will be entertaining to rape and pillage a team because they are broke. 2) Try and preserve as much realism as possible (i.e. the market size vs initial fan interest) 3) Keep player salaries from going insane because they think everyone has $100,000,000 to spend. 4) Let the ultimate factor on your money be winning. Losing will cost you. 5) No salary cap whatsoever. Thanks in advance!

02-15-2010, 08:41 PM	#2
kq76 Global Moderator Join Date: Nov 2002 Posts: 12,016	Regarding the whole unbalanced vs balanced thing, I've gone back and forth on this myself in solo leagues, but I think in online leagues where your main goal should probably first and foremost be about making it fun for everyone, I think more balanced than unbalanced is the way to go. That doesn't mean you have to go with completely equal market sizes, fan interest / loyalty, media, merchandise, etc, just that it's probably best not to go crazy unbalanced like having your 17,7 and all the rest 3-. It's your league, play it how you want, but just keep in mind that you want your members to have a good time and having it crazy unbalanced is probably going to lead to less than desirable long-term results. Now to the specifics. I don't understand what you mean by, "Fan Interest/Loyalty indirectly related to market size". Is there some setting in the game about that? Are you merely saying it has no relation to market size? If so, I think you may be mistaken as to what the 3 mean. I take market size to simply mean the # of fans of your team be they local or half way across the world (think Seattle due to their following in Japan). Of course, the more fans locally will still influence your attendance #s, but it's not just the fans who come to your games. Fan interest is more to do with fans actually coming to your games. And fan loyalty is about fans still coming despite you starting not to play so well. The point is, I don't see why you bother to kill New York's fan interest and loyalty. You really want no one to come to New York's games? If you're going to have things uneven then fine, let there be great differences in market sizes, media and merchandise, but killing fan interest and loyalty makes no sense as it's not at all realistic. We use a cap and if you want to limit rich teams from having too much of an advantage, I'd recommend giving it a try at least in tests. I haven't played with a luxury tax so I can't really speak to it, but if you just don't like the idea of a cap then I'd suggest trying a harsher luxury tax. Regarding "entire revenue available" vs "owner controls budget", last I looked at it it doesn't work. Yes, the two give different numbers, but the former probably doesn't produce the numbers you'd expect. You want to help prevent ridiculous asking prices? Slash your cash max to nothing. 70M and even 35M is way too much. For the longest time we went with 10M and we've recently gone with 20M, but your better financial teams will have an advantage with this that I don't think you want. It also tells players that there's rooms of gold out there. EDIT: In addition, the lower your media revenue and the more equal it is, the better it should be for what you want. One last thing, opinions on this vary of course, but I think you'd find that most online leaguers prefer not to play with scouts. Not that it will have any effect on your finances, but you might want to consider scrapping that. Things are already pretty foggy and scouting is just something a lot of people don't care to play with. __________________ My OOTP Wishlist \| My FAQ List OOTP Wiki \| Your Recommended Team Nicknames, By City (A Crowdsourced Project) For Beta/Devs: Full screen (1920x1080) Last edited by kq76; 02-15-2010 at 08:48 PM.

02-16-2010, 01:14 PM	#3
trendon Minors (Double A) Join Date: Jul 2009 Posts: 103	You are probably right with scaling it down a bit. What I meant by making the fan interest and loyalty inverted compared to the market size was just a quick little formula I created. My line of thinking was that an expansion team in Sioux City would be met with extreme interest and immediate loyalty as opposed to the New York Launch showing up in an area with two baseball teams and nine other professional teams. In my sims, it actually worked out fairly well. The one problem was, after about twenty years, the New York team started winning consistently. Thus, the interest went up quite a bit and they were basically filthy rich as attendance and merchendising skyrocketed. I assume once fan loyalty came around, it would have been completely ridiculous. All in all, all of us in this league like some disparity. Our roots are in a 120-man NCAA 10 (for PS3) league. Obviously, there are guys who, like me, are stuck with the University of Buffalo or similar teams and we basically spend our whole season getting our teeth kicked in. The good players win what games they can (or vastly exceed expectations) and maybe get that job at Ohio State or Nebraska. Guys who aren't that good or who don't practice/try get stuck at Buffalo for ever and ever and ever. So, we are not only used to playing games where we are behind the 8-ball, we kinda welcome it. In any case, my next test sim will be tonight and I am going to test it with: no cap, equal market sizes ($25m media arevenue), random fan interest, no fan loyalty at all, no max cash, and a 100/25 soft cap. We'll see how that goes. Also, as for scouting, the whole reason these guys all bought the game was almost solely because of the scouting. I IM'ed one of the commissioners of the football league and said, "Dude, you have to check this game out." After some quick back-and-forth, he asked a question that led to scouting and he was sold. We all get a kick out of it. Every so often, I get an IM, "Yo, tell me what your scout says about so-and-so." "Oh, he thinks he sucks." "What?! My guys says he is a 310/35 guy!" The waiver wire has been a blast, too, seeing some of the guys that have shown up on there. Personally, I am getting hit hard by it, having signed a 2B for 3/23 that, well, doesn't seem to be very good. No wonder he was untouched for two full sims. And, by the way, kq, I appreciate your input very, very much. I hope I am least asking some interesting questions! I always try and do a search first, but having been a veteran on other forums, I know how much of a pain in the ass some of these questions can be. Thanks again!

02-23-2010, 01:01 PM	#5
rutri01 All Star Reserve Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 515	"Regarding "entire revenue available" vs "owner controls budget", last I looked at it it doesn't work. Yes, the two give different numbers, but the former probably doesn't produce the numbers you'd expect." Do you know how the team budget is figured out using entire revenue available? Does it take last year revenue and use it for next years budget?