Fan Loyalty

[Becks910]

Fan Loyalty should be diminished when a team trades away a player that has been with the team at least 4 years and, should be hurt even worse if the player is good, and should be hurt even worse if they trade a good player who has been with the team at least 6 years.

[Killebrew]

[quote]Originally posted by Becks910:
<strong>Fan Loyalty should be diminished when a team trades away a player that has been with the team at least 4 years and, should be hurt even worse if the player is good, and should be hurt even worse if they trade a good player who has been with the team at least 6 years.</strong><hr></blockquote>

FOF2/FOF2001 has some cool features that uses that concept - it has "fan favorite" players that will effect team income at the gate (trading them will cause a drop in attendance), and it also has team cohesion ratings that encourage you to keep the same team together.

[tarheel-panther]

FOF did a lot of great things with the financial system. If the financial in OOTP could live up to FOF then this would be the best sports game ever created. Free agency, building new stadiums, expansion, getting offers to lead other teams all add a great deal to the feel of that game. If we could get that same feel with OOTP this would make a good game a remarkable game, I would never stop playing.

[hellfrozeover]

Read this through.

[quote]Originally posted by Becks910:
<strong>Fan Loyalty should be diminished when a team trades away a player that has been with the team at least 4 years and </strong><hr></blockquote>
I'm not sure about this, some players are just disliked by a lot of people (i.e. John Rocker) and others just don't get a lot of attention and therefore once they get traded, people don't notice. For instance, I believe that at the beginning of last season, the Cubs traded to get Bill Mueller. I'm pretty sure that the people in San Francisco didn't stop supporting the Giants because Mueller (a 3B with 4 years of experience w/ the Giants) was traded away.

[quote]Originally posted by Becks910:
<strong>, should be hurt even worse if the player is good,</strong><hr></blockquote> Carl Everett is a pretty good player in spite of his temper, but how many people in Boston do you think will miss him?

[quote]Originally posted by Becks910:
<strong> and should be hurt even worse if they trade a good player who has been with the team at least 6 years.</strong><hr></blockquote> Same as above.

Okay, in spite of what I said, I think its a damn good idea. I just think that there needs to be a fan favorite rating. I forget where but we had another string about this I think. Most players should be a normal rating but with a few who are fan favorites e.g. Mark McGwire, Mark Grace (I'm from chicago, got to put in an ex-cub...we still love him). Then there should be some like Carl Everett and John Rocker who are just disliked.
Then if fan favorites are traded it could slowly affect the team revenue and fan loyalty, if normal rated players are traded then they would need to have spent a good amount of time with the team or it would have a smaller effect on it...much smaller. If the hated players (good or bad) are traded away it could have a small increase or no effect at all.

[Loompa17]

Although I like the idea of having players that are fan favorites and disliked by the fans, how would this work practically? I mean, if all the game knows is the player's statistics (from Lahman) then how would you go about determining who would be the favorite and who would be the bum? The things that I can think of are:

1) Assign them randomly. That will leave some cases where Rocker/Everett would be assigned the favorite and Ripken/Gwynn would be the bum.

2) Keep a sort of hard coded piece in the game whereby "if you see player X, make him a fan favorite" etc. This doesn't seem worth while.

3) Possibly base this upon a player's tenure with a single team. This too has it's faults as I'm sure there hated players that stuck with the same team (especially before the free agency era of baseball). I'm sure there were also players that were well-liked that would travel to various teams (nobody coming to mind right off the top of my head that was on more than 2 teams).

Maybe there is something I'm missing. As I said, I like the idea, I just don't know how it could be put into practice.

[Squall]

This has been talked about before, but not quite in this way. Perhaps an alternative to the above ideas is to tie the notion of fan favorite to the game engine, rather than to unrelated things like tenure with team.

For example: Fan favorites can derive from players who are on the career top 25 lists, or maybe from the previous years' top five lists for RBI, HR, ERA, Wins, etc. To prevent these from having a drastic impact on the financial system, maybe there should be some arbitrary ceiling count; no more than 10 per league, or something like that. If a player marked as a favorite comes to town, attendance skyrockets. This could even effect a home team which might have a generally low fan loyalty, but has a favorite on the roster.

In general, though, there seems little logical way to assign a fan favorite (much as in real life... I mean, think about some popular players... and some players who aren't but should be). Their impact on the financial system seems more controllable and predictable, but I think it should be limited. Otherwise, it could overwhelm the baseball model.

[Scott Vibert]

In practice it will have to be determined randomly by the game.. there isn't an objective way to determine who the fans will like and who they won't. If included there would need to be both positive and negative players and it should be pretty rare. Football teams have 53 players on each team and in general it was rare to see more than 2 per team... baseball only has 25 players on each team so there shouldn't be anymore than 1 for each team at anyone time. You can have different factors influence it, but it still would have to be random in the end. Look further down the page and you'll find another thread where this topic was discussed at greater length.

[Erich Ingram]

Well living and working in Boston, I can tell you that the fans around here have 3 or 4 fan favorites with Pedro, Nomar, Trot Nixon and Manny Ramirez. Granted they all hated Carl Everett and were extremely happy when he left, and did not care what they got for him either. Now the only guy left that they hate around here is Duquette.

[Scott Vibert]

Rolen, trust me I know who's favored on the Red Sox, I grew up as a Red Sox fan and I'm still a Sox fan (just in exile away from New England), essentially anyone not named Bob Stanley or Carl Everett have gotten their share of cheers over the years.

However for game purposes, which of those players sells the most tickets... are you more likely to pay to go see Trot Nixon vs. Kansas City or Pedro Martinez? In the Boston case I would make Martinez the fan favorite. (Remember even Manny started to hear some boos towards the end of last season).

If you make too many players "fan favorites" then any positive effects have to be balanced by a much larger group of negative players, and quite frankly in My Opinion a rating like that (or the clutch rating or leadership rating, etc.) must be fairly rare to make it a special bonus to have one of those guys on your squad.

Keep in mind some teams might have more than one of those players, while someone like Montreal (sorry Quebecois) may have no "fan favorite" players, I would just use about 1 per team as the threshold for how many to assign.

[Loompa17]

I guess the question for me is still, would it really be worth trying to do. I agree that if it's done, it really must be limited to a few players. Still the chance remains that one of the (real life) hated players could end up as the (OOTP) fan favorite or vice versa. I think this would rub people the wrong way.

I read in another post about the possibility of increasing the chances of your star prospect not making good (a la Brien Taylor). Somebody (okay I'm too lazy to look at who) made a very good point that simmers would be upset if Ty Cobb or Willie Mays fizzled in their league. This is a very similar argument to what I am saying. If a player that you absolutely despise turns into a fan favorite in the game...

MAYBE, the only way a player could be assigned to be a fan favorite would be through manually editing a player. That probably opens up a whole other can of worms though.

[quote]Originally posted by ScottVib:
<strong>Look further down the page and you'll find another thread where this topic was discussed at greater length.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Wasn't able to find this, so I apologize if I'm repeating the exact same thing that has already been stated.

[Scott Vibert]

Here is the thread with my ideas on the fan favorite rating.. <a href="http://www.ootpbb.com/board/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=000035" target="_blank">http://www.ootpbb.com/board/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=6&t=000035</a>

It was way towards the bottom of the page... and didn't cover much of the same ground, it was specific to this rating and my ideas of a possible implementation and design. (Force of habit, I work designing and coding software for Satellites (I was in design phase at that point).)

I was the person who mentioned that people simming would be upset if Willie Mays or Ty Cobb fizzled.

What it comes down to is how much are people will to over look right, now the game comes up with random splits for vs. lefty or vs. righty for historical players, and no one seems to complain too loudly, I think this is another thing that might not cause too much complaint... of course maybe this rating, the clutch rating, and leadership rating, could all have one toggle that allows you to turn off "player personality modifiers" so that all could be happy.

The chance would remain there, but the people would have the chance to eliminate it. Of course if you played with it on.. you would still have the option to hand edit any ratings you didn't agree with too.

The best part of this game is its customization, you can make it, whatever you think it should be.

[hellfrozeover]

Yeah, I agree with Scott. I also wouldn't be disappointed with randomly assigned fan favorite ratings as long as proper ones were included in lahman database.

[NickBam]

another idea for fan loyalty is bandwagon. if a team is winning the fans will be all over the team (Exp: 2001 Twins in the first half of the season) and if the team starts losing, it goes back to its normal level.

[hellfrozeover]

Hey, us Cubs fans will flock to Wrigley no matter how good or how terrible the team is, so then there should be a level in the fan loyalty labeled "Crazed Cubs Fans." Well, you get my point anyway.

[Becks910]

There are some really interesting ideas here. I was only thinking in terms of negative effect when you trade a player that is loved. What if fan loyalty increased when you trade a player that is hated? I'm having a tough time debating with myself whether or not fan loyalty increases when a hated player departs such as Rocker.

Here's another one to think about: What if a team's play is impacted by team morale. You know, there are random injuries so why not a random: Corey Patterson speaks poorly about his team in SI, team morale goes down. OR, conversely, Keith Reed was at the United Way last weekend with parapeligic kids, team morale goes up.

Should team morale be a factor in a team's performance? What other factors should be considered?

[hellfrozeover]

That's an interesting idea, I would imagine that if the team becomes disheartened then they might not play very well as a team. (e.g. missing a few little details like throwing to the right cutoff man, etc.) Same thing with a player going to the press and complaining like David Wells did with the Sox this year. I think that could hurt team morale. I'm not sure if going to help parapelegic kids would raise it any though, the way I see it, one of hte only things that can improve team morale is winning or maybe that hated division rival losing.