Future Budgets getting massive drops after switch in online league, as well as other issues

[mattsamuelw]

Hi, so we made the switch in our online league and we noticed future budgets got massive drops out of no where. First we tried the switch right after the World Series before simming to the offseason and budgets dropped massively for the next season (2036) compared to what it was showing in OOTP 23 and it was across the board. For example the team that won the World Series was showing 270M in OOTP 23 but ended up showing 256 in OOTP 24. The team that lost in World Series went from 304 to 288. Both teams were profitable in previous season. And similar things happened to small markets too. So ultimately we decided to go with simming to the offseason in OOTP 23 to keep the budgets it was showing there and then making the switch. But that ultimately only kept the budgets for the upcoming season (2036) and all future budgets showed in team's accounting page that they were dropping good amount. So I went and searched for reasons why and noticed on the "financial setting page" that the "financial summary & projections" were way different between the two versions, especially when it came to "Approx. Revenue Range." The weird part is that all the numbers that we have the ability to change in settings are all the same, so it doesn't make sense that the projections would change, especially that drastically. I mean the "Approx. Revenue Range" in 23 was $126.7M - $314.2M while 24 is $136.4M - $282.6M. I will attach links to screenshots comparing the two financial pages below (Left will be OOTP 24 (black) and Right will be OOTP 23 (Blue)):


https://ibb.co/0G4gM1Y

https://ibb.co/ykXfsPV


After trying to figure out what was going on I decided to just run a test year on AI and see what the drops would be and the budget drops were even greater with each team than was showing right after the switch, more than it was initially showing after the switch on accounting page for 2037. Obviously success and AI not being a human played a role (lower ticket prices, etc.) can affect them, but it seemed like something else was going on. There wouldn't be enough available money in the league to be able to help with all the negative finances out there.

I will attach links to our current League File in 24 and 23 after simming to offseason after 2035 WS. If you need the two pre-simming to offseason files I can upload them as well. Just DM me and I'll get you them.

Also I wanted to mention that some GM aren't able to offer 1 year pre arb settlement contracts to arb players. It seems it might be because they are over budget, but settling would actually help them save money in the end. And most are only over budget because the budgets are their 2036 budget's, but the expenses are their 2035 expenses since we haven't got to free agency yet.

Also IFA pool money has switch to $4,750,000 with the switch, with us being at $5,000,000 before the switch. When you go to change it back to $5,000,000, you can change it in settings but it doesn't change the actual pool money you have in IFA page and because of that it is showing a good amount of teams at -$250,000 in spent pool money. I'll attach links to screenshots of this below:


https://ibb.co/LvHwk8V

https://ibb.co/LvHwk8V


Obviously we can change the date of IFA in the game so this isn't an actual problem, but I wanted to mention that the IFA date in game automatically switches to 1/15 in the switch, which I know is the real life date. Our date in our file has always been in July since we started the league in OOTP 21 (2020). I don't know if you meant for it to automatically switch or not, but figured I'd mention it just in case you didn't. We are still deciding when you want IFA now, but it does let us switch it so we are good there.

I've also had a good amount of random crashes. Good amount of them are when you try and get to the league IFA page. I'm sure you are working on good amount of them, but figured since I'm posting this I'd mention that too.


OOTP 24 file (just .dat files as asked):*https://drive.google.com/file/d/17hx...ew?usp=sharing

OOTP 23 file (just .dat files as asked):*https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eFZ...ew?usp=sharing


I put it on google drive since saw other doing that, if you want it another way I can do that too. If you need passwords just DM me.

Also if there are fixes for any of these coming, do you have an ETA on them so we can let our league members know as we make decisions on how to proceed. Thank you for all you do and I look forward to your response.

[Lukas Berger]

Fixes for the too low budgets will be in the public beta patch we're planning to release tomorrow.

[mattsamuelw]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

Fixes for the too low budgets will be in the public beta patch we're planning to release tomorrow.

Thanks Lukas. Will the being able to settle (1 year extension) with arbitration players even if you are over budget be in it too? Also will we have to retransfer from OOTP 23 to fix the too low budgets or will it automatically fix in our current file.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by mattsamuelw

Thanks Lukas. Will the being able to settle (1 year extension) with arbitration players even if you are over budget be in it too? Also will we have to retransfer from OOTP 23 to fix the too low budgets or will it automatically fix in our current file.

You shouldn't have to reimport, the fix should come in your next offseason. For the current season, you might just need to add on a bit of extra media funds till you get to the next offseason.

On the arb players, I'm not sure. Please test this out on the public beta and let us know if it works or not.

[mattsamuelw]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

You shouldn't have to reimport, the fix should come in your next offseason. For the current season, you might just need to add on a bit of extra media funds till you get to the next offseason.

On the arb players, I'm not sure. Please test this out on the public beta and let us know if it works or not.

Hey Lukas, so I downloaded the beta and it did change some of the future budgets (so 2037 and beyond, since out upcoming years is 2036 which was transferred over from 2036 since we used the transfer after simming to offseason), but was both up and down and most minimal and larger ones were actually decreases and most were different than OOTP 23.

Also the "financial summary & projections" section on financial settings page is still off between two versions (this is the screenshot from before showing that: https://ibb.co/0G4gM1Y), especially "Approx. Revenue Range" (23 was $126.7M - $314.2M while 24 is $136.4M - $282.6M). To me that seems like the main problem that is going on. The future budgets are lower because the total leagues revenue or revenue range is being calculated wrong or at least differently, especially since the numbers we have the power to change are all the same.

To make sure on all of this I ran a test sim for 1 full season as well as did two new transfers. First being from transferring from 23 right after WS (before simming to offseason) and then transferring from 23 after simming to offseason. Results were pretty much the same. In fact the budgets were still low on the transferring right after WS before simming to offseason and then simming to offseason in 24. The WS winning team in that one was 252M compared to 270M budget in OOTP 23.

On the arbitration situation with not being able to settle (1 year extensions for less) if it's showing team is over budget, you still can't do it. Here are screenshots showing that:

https://ibb.co/1Q8B87x

https://ibb.co/X2QydrL

https://ibb.co/vPGqZPs


Thanks Lukas and let me know if you need anything from me.

[mattsamuelw]

Continuing from my previous post so you can see what the arbitration stuff was looking in OOTP 23:

https://ibb.co/dQr4JWG

https://ibb.co/DRTXdDT

https://ibb.co/WzQgCRd


Since KC is showing over budget in OOTP 24 and under budget in OOTP 23 I am include screen shots of ARI too in OOTP 23 since they are showing over budget there too:

https://ibb.co/Lh3rLcq

https://ibb.co/tbtGCqY

https://ibb.co/H4NQgBF


As you can see you can offer up to the arb estimate in OOTP 23 even if you are over budget, but in OOTP 24 you can't offer anything.


Also here is OOTP 24 screenshot of KC's financial page showing extension information section since OOTP 24 only shows 4 sections on my computer instead of 6 like OOTP 23:

https://ibb.co/59LFjtL

[Lukas Berger]

Thanks for all the above info. We'll take a look at it and see where we can improve things even more if needed.

[mattsamuelw]

Thanks Lukas. I made this excel for my league with all the differences in budgets between files/patches and figured just add it here as well: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...f=true&sd=true

[Matt Arnold]

The Google Drive links above seem truncated - can you post them in full so we can see again?

Do note that the financial engine is updated every year, so the changes you see on the recap in the settings page are not unreasonable. It looks like the gap between the top and bottom teams in revenues have shrunk, so especially if your league skewed towards the higher end of the range as a whole, it's possible more revenue/budget was lost by the teams at that end than was gained by teams at the lower end.

If you can correct the links, we can investigate to see if there's further issues. If there's an issue with Google Drive, you can try to send them to our FTP (https://support.ootpdevelopments.com...p-developments), but if they're still on the drive you likely just need to make sure the links are pasted in full, and we can dig in a little deeper.

[mattsamuelw]

Strange. Sorry about that. Here is the links again:


OOTP 23: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17hx...usp=share_link

OOTP 24: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eFZ...usp=share_link

I tried them both and they worked for me, so hopefully they work for you now. If you have any problems let me know.

As for the revenue range setting, wouldn't it be the same between versions if both were on the same day? That's what's confusing and then why would all the future budgets be different than.

[Matt Arnold]

The revenue range settings are based heavily on projections, I believe. So when we make changes to how much ticket prices impact attendance, or just change up some other calculations for revenue figures, they can shift. I know one bigger change this year was tweaking the impact of ticket prices - I'm noticing a very wide spread in your league, it would not surprise me if the teams running 50-70$, as well as those under 20$, ticket prices are getting penalized more this year than they were last year, which can influence some projection values.

We did find one issue with projected budgets that was depressing some teams. So that should help. We'll get that in the next update to the patch.

[mattsamuelw]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

The revenue range settings are based heavily on projections, I believe. So when we make changes to how much ticket prices impact attendance, or just change up some other calculations for revenue figures, they can shift. I know one bigger change this year was tweaking the impact of ticket prices - I'm noticing a very wide spread in your league, it would not surprise me if the teams running 50-70$, as well as those under 20$, ticket prices are getting penalized more this year than they were last year, which can influence some projection values.

We did find one issue with projected budgets that was depressing some teams. So that should help. We'll get that in the next update to the patch.

Thanks Matt! The ticket price part makes some sense to some teams (at least portion of the drops) since decent amount of teams are on playoff ticket prices so I guess when you switch it is recalculating budgets based on those prices. Hopefully the rest are fixed by the upcoming patch and other changes you fixed there. If we did show the changes you made to "impact of attendance" lowered our budgets over the future, would increasing average ticket price in settings be a good way to help the future budgets then or would there be a better way (media contracts, etc.)? Especially since when I ran a test on AI, tickets prices seemed super low compared to what we have been able to have over our life of our league and thus dropped the future budgets even more than the projections they were showing now that I showed in my google spreadsheet in previous post. I mean WS winning team was around $37 compared to being in $45-$46 and selling out most games in OOTP 23. Obviously AI over human is part of the affect, even though that seems like a big drop for just that (obviously I didn't pay close attention to the daily changes so day to day they could have been different) but just wanted to find out what would be a good way about going about it if the "impact of attendance" changes affected our league budgets over time negatively.

Also thanks for working on a new beta patch for today. We really do appreciate it since we decided to wait starting our first season in OOTP 24 until the full patch comes out after these Beta's. I did want to find out if the arbitration situation with teams not being able to settle (1 year extensions) if over budget be in today's beta release too? Also what about the IFA pool money still being $4,750,000 when I changed it in setting back to $5,000,000, which we previously had in OOTP 23. And since it is $4,750,000 it is showing good amount of teams in negative pool money. I showed this in some of my first screenshot on this thread.

Also I noticed a cosmetic issue on the lineup page. It cuts off the pinch hitter and pinch runner sections in half. Here is a screenshot showing that: https://ibb.co/NYbmRYL It could obviously be my computer, but it's weird how that is cut off but nothing else on the page is. Plus it is difficult to add people to that section so doubt it's only my computer. I have to try multiple times to add people to pinch runner/pinch hitter to get them to stick. Just so you know I have a mac. Thanks Matt!

[Matt Arnold]

if teams set their ticket prices closer to the average overall, that's probably going to help their overall finances. But from what I can tell, with the fix coming in today's update, budgets should be fairly close to revenues. If you want to inject more cash into the league, you can always increase the average ticket price, or update the media contracts, but that's up to you guys to decide. You can always see what things look like with the updated patch.

The arbitration issue should be fixed now in this update too. We'll look into the IAFA issue some more to see what might be happening there. I don't believe we have corrected that here, but we can look into it some more.

For the screenshot, I would think that's related to your screen size, perhaps? What screen resolution and settings are you using?

[mattsamuelw]

Sweet the beta today sounds like it should do what we were wanting with future budgets then. And I will also have a ton of happy people in my leagues about the arbitration issue. I got asked so many times about that by our members, so I really appreciate it! And thanks for looking into the IFA pool money part. I mean it's not the end of the world since I don't think it was affecting future ability to offer money in the next IFA period. Like no penalties/restrictions in the next period, but would be nice to find out why.

As for my resolution here is my settings page in OOTP. Is that what you are looking for? https://ibb.co/3yFDTrJ

I have tried making OOTP super big, like way bigger than my screen and it still cuts off pinch hitters/pinch runners. And I have pretty much tried every different window resolution size in OOTP settings there and still the same.

I'm also not seeing the full buttons in Online League FTP Settings: https://ibb.co/sq6dkHX

[mattsamuelw]

Also is there a reason in Complete Transaction page in League Transaction News section that only my team's transactions are showing up? It's happening in another online league that I am in that is already simming in OOTP 24 and been wondering why that is happening. It's happening to others in that league too, not just my team and in OOTP 23 it was showing every team's transaction there like it was suppose to. Here is the screenshot: https://ibb.co/WGvzNfP

[Matt Arnold]

Originally Posted by mattsamuelw

Sweet the beta today sounds like it should do what we were wanting with future budgets then. And I will also have a ton of happy people in my leagues about the arbitration issue. I got asked so many times about that by our members, so I really appreciate it! And thanks for looking into the IFA pool money part. I mean it's not the end of the world since I don't think it was affecting future ability to offer money in the next IFA period. Like no penalties/restrictions in the next period, but would be nice to find out why.

As for my resolution here is my settings page in OOTP. Is that what you are looking for? https://ibb.co/3yFDTrJ

I have tried making OOTP super big, like way bigger than my screen and it still cuts off pinch hitters/pinch runners. And I have pretty much tried every different window resolution size in OOTP settings there and still the same.

I'm also not seeing the full buttons in Online League FTP Settings: https://ibb.co/sq6dkHX

I think these might be related to the font size, Instead of choosing "Automatic" on the settings window, you could try setting that to small or standard, and see if that helps correct these issues.

[mattsamuelw]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

I think these might be related to the font size, Instead of choosing "Automatic" on the settings window, you could try setting that to small or standard, and see if that helps correct these issues.

So the small font size helped the pinch hitter/runner one, but still seems like that sections is sized too small compared to 23 and why it isn't working on automatic size. It's between 3/4 - 2/3 the size of 23 section. As for the FTP setting buttons still no luck. I mean that one doesn't matter much, but figured I'd mention it here since I was asking about all the other stuff. I looked in OOTP 23 and the same problem was happening there too with FTP Setting buttons. The weird part is the last button on that pop up, "Open League Setting Folder," shows fully but the other two don't. It's almost like there is an extra line before or after what they are saying in those two buttons making it cut in half.

As for the new Beta that came out this morning. I tried it out and it seems to be better with the future budgets in the transfer from OOTP 23 after simming to offseason in 23, which is the file we are going to use. Feel it could be even better, but it's definitely better than before, so thank you! But there are definitely in game things that are affecting it as you have pointed out like ticket prices. When you retransfer from 23 to 24 before simming to offseason and then sim to offseason in 24 the first season's number is off still, but that won't affect us since we are going to use the other file and the ticket prices might be affecting that first season too. In the file we are going to use, there is still difference in 14 teams negatively though for 2037/2038, but the ticket prices are probably accounting for at least some of them. Like the one team with most lost in those years is at $70 ticket price which they had for the playoffs. They were off $16M in 2037 future budget and $22M in 2038 future budget. I don't know if all that money will come back (really doubt all though) when ticket price is lowered to regular season ticket price, but I'm sure decent amount will. I updated the spreadsheet here with everything just in case you guys were curious: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...f=true&sd=true

And here is screenshot of what matters for 2nd beta today from that spreadsheet with the things that don't matter to 2nd beta hidden from it: https://ibb.co/HpXRCXX


As for the Arbitration issue with teams over budget not being able to offer 1 year settlement deals, the game is still not working there. Here are two screenshots showing that: https://ibb.co/xY7S3Qn & https://ibb.co/cDKsvfp

It's kind of weird since it's showing on the left hand side in the "Team Financial Info" section that you are allowed to offer the arbitration estimate for 2036 but when you offer it the owner doesn't allow it. I have tried tons of players and have even tried simming a day, as well as retransferring and no luck on either too.


As for the IFA page still showing $4,750,000 even though it was changed to $5,000,000 in settings, that is still happening too. And same with the Complete Transaction page in League Transaction News section only showing my teams transactions in a league I'm in. My guess is you haven't had a change to really look at either with all the other stuff, especially with both being minimal things that really don't affect the actual game playing.

And btw, thanks for all your work on this, we greatly appreciate it.

[mattsamuelw]

Just noticed you guys fixed the FTP Setting buttons and the pinch hitters/runners section too in 3rd Beta! Thanks for doing that too. I have two more weird cosmetic things I found today:

1.On the Minor League page the list of minor league systems in the left hand side are all over the place. Tried small fonts size too and no luck either. Here is the screenshot: https://ibb.co/rm3rGnj

2. On the Staff Role page for coaches the Teaching Roles drop down buttons are cut in half at the top like the FTP buttons were. Probably the same issue in the codes as was the case with FTP buttons. I tried all font sizes and all were the same. Here is the screenshot: https://ibb.co/B4jJmRC

Both were good in OOTP 23. Thanks again Matt/Lukas!

[Will Beh]

Ok so I think I have an update for yall about the IAFA money. From what I can tell what happened was you imported the 23 game to 24 after the international signing for the year had begun. So the list of players had already been released and teams already started signing guys. But the old IAFA system used 5mil pools, so when you updated to the newer version, it switched to a maximum of 4.75mil. But many teams had already spent their full pool of 5mil, so when we displayed the amount each team has remaining, it calculated it to be negative because it now thinks teams spent more than the 4.75mil cap.
Manually changing the league settings will change it for the next signing period but won't change it for the current one (which is why you still see negatives even after changing it back to 5mil).
I don't think this should affect anything significant in the long run for the save, cause everything will just be recalculated when the next signing period starts, but you may just need to get through it for this year like this. If there are any issues come next IAFA period please let me know

[Will Beh]

Ok I actually made a change to the iafa pool setting which'll get picked up in the next patch. If you go type 5mil into the settings again it should resolve any issues (once the patch is out)