People playing using historical settings with finances on: read this!

[Eckstein 4 Prez]

I'm posting this here to increase visibility because if I'd seen something earlier I would've stopped simming before going through an offseason of season ticket sales. (There are a couple thread on it in the bug reports forum.)

The formulas used for attendance in the new patch will have screwed with your league's attendance numbers. There's something in the way the low historical ticket prices interact with the formula that is causing an attendance spike in your entire league since the new patch - this will be more noticeable, I suspect, the further back in history you go. (I play in the 1870s and attendance has gone up roughly by a factor of 7.)

I'm stopping progress with my league entirely until it gets fixed - I'm going to have to edit the new season's season ticket numbers at some point, I'm sure, but at least I can avoid going through more games with the finances absolutely wrecked. Obviously whether you want to do so depends on how much you care about having roughly accurate ticket numbers/finances.

But it is definitely a problem with the game and the new patch. Also, as of the time that I'm writing this, the devs still seem to be treating it as something we're doing wrong so you might want to check your attendance numbers and chime in if you're also having issues with them. Deadball simmers, I'm sure you've got this problem if you're playing with finances on!

[Matt Arnold]

FYI this looks like it's more related to leagues where park capacities are greatly larger than average attendance, rather than strictly being about historical leagues. I think a workaround for the moment is your league average attendance is, say, 1500, make sure your parks capacity doesn't stretch too far. If you limit your parks capacity to maybe 4-5k or less, that will bring attendance back in check.

[Eckstein 4 Prez]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

FYI this looks like it's more related to leagues where park capacities are greatly larger than average attendance, rather than strictly being about historical leagues. I think a workaround for the moment is your league average attendance is, say, 1500, make sure your parks capacity doesn't stretch too far. If you limit your parks capacity to maybe 4-5k or less, that will bring attendance back in check.

Thanks, you're right - to an extent. I lowered all my park capacities to 2,500, edited down all the terrible season ticket numbers the new patch gave, and played a few games. Attendance is still way too high, but in the 30-50% too high range, which I'll tolerate for a bit rather than not playing my league at all until the new patch.

Please - PLEASE - ask the beta team to go over this pretty carefully to make sure things are fixed (or else revert them back!) for the next patch. Having served on the team before, I know how haphazard these things can be sometimes. I hate having my league blown up by things I'd have no reason to anticipate.

[uruguru]

Originally Posted by Eckstein 4 Prez

Please - PLEASE - ask the beta team to go over this pretty carefully to make sure things are fixed (or else revert them back!) for the next patch. Having served on the team before, I know how haphazard these things can be sometimes. I hate having my league blown up by things I'd have no reason to anticipate.

Report the problem in the bug forum and whenever a new beta patch is released, do a quick test to see if the problem is fixed. If it is not, create a screenshot of the problem and post that in addition to the precise steps needed to create it in the beta patch release thread.

OOTP is an extremely complicated game. There are lots of bugs. When there is one that really impacts you, your best bet is to make sure that your bug report remains visible to the devs.

[David Watts]

Once again, if it's not broken don't fix it. Wonder why this was even messed with?

[LansdowneSt]

Originally Posted by David Watts

Once again, if it's not broken don't fix it. Wonder why this was even messed with?

This is the video I remember showing it's a bit easy to mess with ticket pricing and abuse it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLDS9s8SKTw

There are ticket pricing threads too. Here's one:

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...d.php?t=339523

I'm kinda on team "Don't let the user set them." but I reckon some of the changes were to make attendance more elastic to pricing.

[Brad K]

Originally Posted by Eckstein 4 Prez

I hate having my league blown up by things I'd have no reason to anticipate.

That's a good reason not to move leagues to newer versions.

[uruguru]

Originally Posted by David Watts

Once again, if it's not broken don't fix it. Wonder why this was even messed with?

It was broken! There was an exploit involving ticket prices and attendance that was addressed. Clearly the fix for this exploit had unintended consequences that the dev did not catch.

[Brad K]

Originally Posted by uruguru

It was broken! There was an exploit involving ticket prices and attendance that was addressed. Clearly the fix for this exploit had unintended consequences that the dev did not catch.

The unintended consequences are worse than the original problem. They can't be avoided but the original problem could be ignored and have no effect.

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by Brad K

The unintended consequences are worse than the original problem. They can't be avoided but the original problem could be ignored and have no effect.

Exactly.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by uruguru

It was broken! There was an exploit involving ticket prices and attendance that was addressed. Clearly the fix for this exploit had unintended consequences that the dev did not catch.

Originally Posted by Brad K

The unintended consequences are worse than the original problem. They can't be avoided but the original problem could be ignored and have no effect.

Originally Posted by David Watts

Exactly.

Yes, yes, yes. The original problem was because the human player can't control themselves when it came to changing ticket prices. The human could change prices during season and get an advantage. You know, "If the game allows it, I should be able to do it." The answer? Another "please stop me from cheesing the game" solution that, while nice to look into for the future, wasn't needed in a patch. Save it for v24 and a proper beta time table to test it out.

If users are allowed to do this in an online league? IE no league rule against it. Well, that's a league I wouldn't want to be a part of, if I played online. Which I don't because of how many will game the system, IE play "OOTP the spreadsheet" instead simulating baseball. Hell, the video linked has a thanks from someone that, I think, likes the idea and sees it as a way to WIN!! But when I think of how his chest must swell with pride as the W's just keep coming I begin to understand just how "right" he is. "We are the champions!!"

Seemed simple enough to do what I do in my game. Set your prices preseason, same as the AI, and let it take you where it takes you. I honestly didn't know you could even change the price in an on going season until the post about needing it "fixed".

Hint: there are always going to be ways for the human to exploit the system.
Closing all loopholes is never going to happen. Maybe, we as the human, could take some responsibility and learn to control our behavior? It's really not that hard, is it?

[Eckstein 4 Prez]

Originally Posted by uruguru

Report the problem in the bug forum and whenever a new beta patch is released, do a quick test to see if the problem is fixed. If it is not, create a screenshot of the problem and post that in addition to the precise steps needed to create it in the beta patch release thread.

OOTP is an extremely complicated game. There are lots of bugs. When there is one that really impacts you, your best bet is to make sure that your bug report remains visible to the devs.

I've served on the beta team and have friends who are still on the team. Years ago, I posted here quite a lot and some folks still know me as a historical simmer.

Those two facts are the only reason this drew a response of any kind from the devs. The threads I found and bumped in the bug report forum were from people who didn't have these advantages and they weren't being believed or listened to - they were going to get the old "give me more information, did you change your settings, etc." treatment.

In addition to other things, I'm a very squeaky wheel. So this isn't something they'll be able to easily ignore.

[LansdowneSt]

Originally Posted by Eckstein 4 Prez

I've served on the beta team and have friends who are still on the team. Years ago, I posted here quite a lot and some folks still know me as a historical simmer.

Those two facts are the only reason this drew a response of any kind from the devs. The threads I found and bumped in the bug report forum were from people who didn't have these advantages and they weren't being believed or listened to - they were going to get the old "give me more information, did you change your settings, etc." treatment.

In addition to other things, I'm a very squeaky wheel. So this isn't something they'll be able to easily ignore.

Or... or... consider that someone active on the beta team saw the issue, commented, and also posted it on the actual Bug tracker for the developers at 08-15-2022 09:19 PM EST (a week before you commented on the issue) and it's been worked for the next patch already. Sometimes when they ask for more information... they are genuinely asking for more information.

[Eckstein 4 Prez]

Originally Posted by LansdowneSt

Or... or... consider that someone active on the beta team saw the issue, commented, and also posted it on the actual Bug tracker for the developers at 08-15-2022 09:19 PM EST (a week before you commented on the issue) and it's been worked for the next patch already. Sometimes when they ask for more information... they are genuinely asking for more information.

Sure. I'm not trying to disparage anyone on the beta team - a thankless job for sure - and I'm glad it's being worked on. I jumped to a conclusion and I'm assuming based on the specificity of your post it was the wrong one - sorry about that.

It felt troubling that the dev post in the other thread implied that the user was doing something wrong to cause the problem. Obviously at that point everyone was working with incomplete information, so maybe I shouldn't have reacted the way I did.

I agree with Sweed on the issue of tinkering and unintended consequences, but that's a separate issue.

[LansdowneSt]

Originally Posted by Eckstein 4 Prez

Sure. I'm not trying to disparage anyone on the beta team - a thankless job for sure - and I'm glad it's being worked on. I jumped to a conclusion and I'm assuming based on the specificity of your post it was the wrong one - sorry about that.

It felt troubling that the dev post in the other thread implied that the user was doing something wrong to cause the problem. Obviously at that point everyone was working with incomplete information, so maybe I shouldn't have reacted the way I did.

I agree with Sweed on the issue of tinkering and unintended consequences, but that's a separate issue.

And I didn't mean to sound as snappy as I did. Sorry about that. Anyway, on this one they weren't blowing the OP off, it just takes time to try to isolate the hows and whys of unintended consequences (this or any other), but it was being tracked within hours of the initial post. That was more my point.

[Brad K]

Originally Posted by Eckstein 4 Prez

It felt troubling that the dev post in the other thread implied that the user was doing something wrong to cause the problem.

The dev post in THIS thread stated you were doing something wrong. So I was confused about your claims that you were getting better results than others.

[Matt Arnold]

Originally Posted by LansdowneSt

And I didn't mean to sound as snappy as I did. Sorry about that. Anyway, on this one they weren't blowing the OP off, it just takes time to try to isolate the hows and whys of unintended consequences (this or any other), but it was being tracked within hours of the initial post. That was more my point.

Yeah, we can't drop everything to dig in to every issue reported. When this was first brought up, there were some plausible explanations related to the changes, so those were initially suggested. But when others report the issue, or the original poster clarifies a little more (even sometimes just clarifying whether it was just them, or all teams involved), that's when we dig deeper.

Originally Posted by Brad K

The dev post in THIS thread stated you were doing something wrong. So I was confused about your claims that you were getting better results than others.

I never said Eckstein was doing something wrong. We had isolated the cause when this thread was created, so I offered a temporary workaround until the next patch comes out which will fix it.

The unexpected side effect was due to stadiums being larger, but the initial symptoms only really showed up causing people to think "historical leagues" or "early historical leagues". Mostly because those 2 factors are seemingly correlated. You don't see it in the modern game, because with an average attendance figure of 30k, stadiums would need to be probably > 60k before you would start to notice issues relating to that. But when your average attendance is in the hundreds or low thousands, easily some parks listed in those days could have capacities even in the 5k-10k range which is enough to cause issues.

Obviously, had we known there was going to be a side effect, we wouldn't have made the change. But as with everything, it's a small isolated piece, what can go wrong?

[Eckstein 4 Prez]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

The unexpected side effect was due to stadiums being larger, but the initial symptoms only really showed up causing people to think "historical leagues" or "early historical leagues". Mostly because those 2 factors are seemingly correlated. You don't see it in the modern game, because with an average attendance figure of 30k, stadiums would need to be probably > 60k before you would start to notice issues relating to that. But when your average attendance is in the hundreds or low thousands, easily some parks listed in those days could have capacities even in the 5k-10k range which is enough to cause issues.

Haha, I sort of suspected this when you posted the workaround. In this day and age it's easy to forget the difference between stadium capacity and attendance that existed even one generation ago. I remember as a kid going to see games in those giant ovals that seated 60,000 or so people - Busch Stadium, Veterans Stadium, old Anaheim Stadium - and it was completely normal to have attendance be around 15,000. Not even something that would have been remarked upon as a small crowd if the team wasn't in a pennant race.

Obviously it was even more of a disconnect during my grandparents' generation - in the 1930s the St. Louis Browns had seasons where they averaged around 1,000 fans per game in a stadium that seated 34,000.