financial issues addressed?

[dbacks933]

i didn't read anything in the patch notes about the problems with the financial system being addressed.

here was the comprehensive post i made before

I posted on this before, and I didn't get much of a response from the board. Now, I ask again as this game is approaching playable, but this part is still vastly broken IMO.

The macro-level financial systems is a total mess. The flux of revenue into the league is just way too ridiculous. merchandising revenue is one of the major contributors to this. It is impossible to control and some teams make well over 70 million in it alone (before gate, media, and playoff revenue) and i consider that figure alone to be an above average player payroll or even an average organization operating total. I don't like the contract system either, players set their own salaries, not the market. this is demonstrated in a sim (which i describe further below) where the Reds have a budget of 2 billion dollars, yet they only have a player payroll of 56 million. Even with revenue sharing on, from what i've seen, there is just way too much money coming into the league, the only difference is that it is peppered around so that all the teams get to hoard money, but at a slower rate.

I did a 40 year sim recently. The financial rules where no revenue sharing, revenue sets budget, no cap, and the rest was default. Boston is a high revenue team in the league ($75 mil merchandising and $40 mil media), however they are currently $800,000,000 in the red. how you ask? because they managed to hoard so much money, that they exceeded the 32-bit variable maximum value of 2.147 billion so it turned over to -2.147 billion. This was done in the timespan of about 30 years i estimate. The Cubs are a supposedly small market team with a merchandising revenue of $1.25 million. Yet they still managed to turn a $16.3 million profit with a $42.4 million player payroll and $12.7 in staff salaries. Sounds like small market ball to me.......

Suggestions:
-Do away with merchandising revenue altogether, or set the value range to between $3-20 million.
-ehhh if the money coming into the leagued is curbed i suppose the rest would work well enough as it is in its current state. but i don't like how a superstar is slated to make $20 million and what not, i think it should be more of a bidding process. which obviously doesn't happen if teams are operating at $60 million payrolls with a $2 billion budget.

and later on in the thread ....

merchandising revenue is not under the control of the settings, and tweaking anything in the settings won't change the fact that the settings themselves (i.e. star contract = $12 mil, superstar = $16 mil) fix the amount a player is going to get paid, whereas in ootp6.5 there was a bidding process that factored in demand.

i already made my suggestions in the opening post. to me, the settings can't solve this, it's the mechanics/system that is flawed. the league financials are equivocable to an ideal communist economy with a huge trade surplus. the prices are fixed and everyone has a lot of spending money. but when Commie Carl goes to the electronics store to get a new plasma big screen TV, he finds that all 100 of them in stock for the year have already been sold for $500. with Carl's budget, he would have paid $5000 for one of those TV's, but the economic system didn't allow him to. so Carl ends up with a ton of money, but the money is essential worthless because he can't spend it. so the solution to this is to convert the financials to free market (contract bidding like in ootp 6.5) and also, to keep the number realistic, get rid of that huge trade surplus (the merchandising revenue).

[Nutlaw]

This tidbit helps, from the list of tweaks:

Free agents are aware of the current market and adjust their demands properly (i.e. when there is loads of $$ available from the teams, they demand more and vice-versa)

[Le Grande Orange]

The issue really isn't too much revenue; the issue is too few expenses.

Real major league clubs have lots of expenses beyond player salaries. Things like taxes, stadium upkeep and operations, front office administration, and travel, just to name a few.

The game models the real-world revenue streams for clubs fairly well, but the expense side of the ledger only sees players and coaches. This creates an immediate mismatch. These days, clubs spend roughly 50% of their revenue on salaries; the rest goes to all the other costs. In earlier years salaries made up an even smaller percentage of expenses.

To compensate for the lack of additional expenses, using ticket prices or media contracts well below their real-world values is probably required, assuming you want your salaries and attendance to look close to current-day numbers.

[Curtis]

My response to excess dollars in the system has been to reduce (in some leagues eliminate) merchandising revenue.

Media contracts reflect market size, so they provide a nice large market/small market dichotomy. Ticket sales reflect number of people showing up for a game (market size, loyalty, interest). Merchandising is simply a fudge factor inserted during league creation. It's based on payroll size, so if you're trying to hold down payroll, it's a bad thing. Some posters have claimed that it either doesn't fluctuate, or does so based on undefinable modifiers. Who needs it?

I'm hoping that over time I can completely wring it out of all of my leagues. I hate salary inflation, and guys getting paid 2 1/2 times Superstar rate make me nauseous.

[Kivlehan]

I experienced the same thing as dbacks933 but never bothered to look into it.

What bothered me is that there seemed to be almost no correlation between city market size and the team's revenues over time. It could be a side effect of what dbacks933 is describing.