Scouting messed up finances

[saturn2187]

Hi everyone
I wanted to play as the expansion 1993 Marlins. I started the game in 1992 and ran through the entire season. I got up to the offseason, and I decided I'd be OK with some fake players, so I turned on Scouting. Now every team is in the red. Is the decision to use scouting something I should have enabled at the very beginning? I am thinking that now each team is using a portion of their budget for scouting that they didn't need to before.

Please help me figure out what to do.

[RchW]

I'm puzzled about the connection made between fake players and scouting. Did you allow ghost players in the minors?

[The Wolf]

I've been playing this game since 6.5 and that post made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

[saturn2187]

LOL

Sorry I was not clear. Let me try to rephrase. It does sound a little nonsensical.

I wanted to play as the 93 Marlins, do their whole draft, etc. I wanted to use only real players. So I created the 92 season, let it sim through 1992.

November 92 comes around, Marlins are created. Well I was messing around in the settings, and decided that even though my original plan was to use real players only, I also wanted to try out some of the other features, such as international free agency, scouting, etc.

I activated scouting.

Each team now appears to be running huge deficits financially. Lets take the Marlins I just created as an example. When first created they had a 29.5 million dollar budget. Most of that was free for free agents. Once I activated scouting, it was down to like 13 million for free agents, because the game set up a 9 million dollar scouting budget for the Marlins.

My question is if by turning on scouting (and making teams suddenly have to consider this large expense they didn't have before) , that would explain why looking at the league financial report shows them all in the red.



In more simple turns, does turning on scouting (which costs money) screw up teams finances if scouting wasn't on when I created the league (and their budgets were first generated).

Hopefully thats a bit more clear.

[Mister_G]

I've heard nothing like this before, but would also like to know, because I'm 25 years into my one league, but plan on turning on scouting in a few years.

[sprague]

you could go an manually drop the scouting numbers in the financial page

but 9 mil for scouting in 1993 seems way off.
you might want to try that all over again, and keep a screen shot or two alonng the way to show

[saturn2187]

yeah, it wont allow me to adjust the scouting budget until February or so. I'm still in November. So , i do plan to drop it. I'll take some screen shots tonight.

[Bluenoser]

Originally Posted by saturn2187

LOL

Sorry I was not clear. Let me try to rephrase. It does sound a little nonsensical.

I wanted to play as the 93 Marlins, do their whole draft, etc. I wanted to use only real players. So I created the 92 season, let it sim through 1992.

November 92 comes around, Marlins are created. Well I was messing around in the settings, and decided that even though my original plan was to use real players only, I also wanted to try out some of the other features, such as international free agency, scouting, etc.

I activated scouting.

Each team now appears to be running huge deficits financially. Lets take the Marlins I just created as an example. When first created they had a 29.5 million dollar budget. Most of that was free for free agents. Once I activated scouting, it was down to like 13 million for free agents, because the game set up a 9 million dollar scouting budget for the Marlins.

My question is if by turning on scouting (and making teams suddenly have to consider this large expense they didn't have before) , that would explain why looking at the league financial report shows them all in the red.



In more simple turns, does turning on scouting (which costs money) screw up teams finances if scouting wasn't on when I created the league (and their budgets were first generated).

Hopefully thats a bit more clear.

Well, since you suddenly added $9M in expenses to the budget, yes that would explain the sudden change.

During the pre-season you can lower scouting budgets, increase avg ticket price/attendance etc to get the budgets back in line.

[saturn2187]

Ok, yes i understand the sudden 9m in scouting expenses is what put the teams in the Red, but I suppose i'm not wording the question correctly.


Lets say I initially created my league with Scouting on. Maybe all teams would start with slightly higher budgets in order to compensate for their scouting expenses?

Lets look at it the other way around.

You start a league, scoutings on. Teams go about doing their thing, bla bla bla . One day I just turn off scouting . Now these teams are suddenly going to have millions of extra dollars to spend on free agents, which would throw things out of whack the opposite way.

It seems to me like having budget on vs off should adjust the OVERALL budget number, allowing teams to perform in a relatively normal manner either way. If you are running a league with scouting off and then turn it on, it shouldn't bankrupt all teams immediately, because if you had played with scouting on from the beginning, their finances would have been auto-generated in such a way that they'd have some wiggle room taking the scouting into account already.

I know what i want to say but i guess its hard explaining it.

In other words, having the Marlins have a budget of 29.5 million regardless of whether Scouting/Development is on or off doesnt seem right.

[Bluenoser]

It doesn't really matter how you look at it - if you suddenly add or remove $9M from a budget, it's going to have a large fallout effect.

Think of it on a realistic level.

If MLB didn't have scouting, and then decided they were going to start using it, they wouldn't just "Turn it on" suddenly. They'd announce it, allows teams time to prepare for it, and then implement it during the off-season period.

They wouldn't just flip a switch and tell teams they suddenly need to allow for another $9M in expenses.

What I would suggest you do - turn scouting on during the off-season and edit every teams budget to alleviate the sudden added expense. This would certainly mirror real life much more than just "throwing the switch" on scouting.

[saturn2187]

OK Bluenose. I think your response makes sense. I can adjust their numbers, now that I've turned on scouting. I am just not sure how much to adjust them by, or exactly what field to adjust.

Lets assume I didn't touch them at all. Would things eventually even out, as teams adjusted? or would they be forever running deficits?

[Bluenoser]

Originally Posted by saturn2187

OK Bluenose. I think your response makes sense. I can adjust their numbers, now that I've turned on scouting. I am just not sure how much to adjust them by, or exactly what field to adjust.

Lets assume I didn't touch them at all. Would things eventually even out, as teams adjusted? or would they be forever running deficits?

They would probably balance out eventually, but you're likely to see a lot of teams suffer for a while. Not sure how that will effect your league - teams with money will sign the good players while the poor teams won't be able to sign anyone. You may wind up with some serious imbalance as far as competitiveness goes.

Hard to say for sure though - maybe make a copy of your league file, rename it and sim ahead 10 or 15 years to see what your finances might look like.

[Bluenoser]

Also, if all teams are in the red and don't have $$$ to spend, you'll see a lot of good players sitting in FA because nobody can afford them.

[saturn2187]

Thanks Bluenoser.

I'm still not sure what I will change to restore these teams to economic normalcy.

What I may do is go through and figure out what the average scouting/ Development budget is, and add that same amount of cash to each teams finances.

Would that work?

[Bluenoser]

Upping their budgets will surely help.

Try increasing them a few $m at a time and look at the financial report after each bump. Keep going until you start seeing numbers you like.

Again, I would do this with a copy of the league file, or at the very least keep a copy of the original somewhere safe so you can go back to this point if something else messes up.

[saturn2187]

i solved it, i think.

I went into the league financials settings, and it showed "Average Profit" based on current financial settings, about (negative) 3.5 million per year.

I reimported the financial settings again for that year (1992), now that scouting was given a line , and it recalculated the average revenue from 32 million to 36 million. The average profit increased from a negative number up to positive 500,000 dollars.


I hope this did the trick.

[Bristolduke]

My apologies, I usually look for financial questions, but I'm focused on the US Open at the moment.

The step you just took is the correct one because you have had OOTP recalculate its financial model.

When the league is established and you define all your financial conditions, the financial engine is established with all its parameters. If you change that (e.g. scouting on/off, coaching on/off, player development on/off, etc) then you will create a different financial situation than the engine modeled.

You must either adjust the model yourself or in your case, re-import and have the engine re-calculate.

For others who might read this I should point out budget is irrelevant. Changing that will not really affect anything financially (it would free space for free agents but this will only put the teams deeper in debt). The adjustment was to get more revenue into the game (to offset the added scouting expenses). If you removed something then you must remove revenue. I suspect if you look your media revenue is different now than before. You might also differences in merchandise revenue and attendance as those are things the financial engine adjusts. After those are complete budgets are addressed.

Changing the finances mid-stream can be a challenge.

[Bluenoser]

Originally Posted by Bristolduke

My apologies, I usually look for financial questions, but I'm focused on the US Open at the moment.

The step you just took is the correct one because you have had OOTP recalculate its financial model.

When the league is established and you define all your financial conditions, the financial engine is established with all its parameters. If you change that (e.g. scouting on/off, coaching on/off, player development on/off, etc) then you will create a different financial situation than the engine modeled.

You must either adjust the model yourself or in your case, re-import and have the engine re-calculate.

For others who might read this I should point out budget is irrelevant. Changing that will not really affect anything financially (it would free space for free agents but this will only put the teams deeper in debt). The adjustment was to get more revenue into the game (to offset the added scouting expenses). If you removed something then you must remove revenue. I suspect if you look your media revenue is different now than before. You might also differences in merchandise revenue and attendance as those are things the financial engine adjusts. After those are complete budgets are addressed.

Changing the finances mid-stream can be a challenge.

This is true, but by upping ticket prices, you're changing the budget imo, and also bringing more revenue into the league.

There are many ways to tinker with the finances if you're willing to spend the time doing it. Takes some fine tuning sometimes but is definitely doable.

It works for me anyway.