Projected Balance and Budgets

[AaD88]

Does anyone know the purpose of this statement...

With a negative projected balance, the (development) budget must be less than half the league baseline!

If it is not enforced in game? Or is it enforced and I don't realize it?

I am trying to manually enforce this statement in an online league and getting a lot of flack for it. Perhaps auto-enforcement will happen in OOTP20?

[Matt Arnold]

It is enforced if you actually go in to change it, however for a human team if you don't touch the budget in the off-season, however if you don't touch it, I don't believe that we will auto-adjust it down (however we probably should, just not sure when exactly makes sense to run that auto-adjust).

[NoOne]

the moment the new budget is enforce? day one of FA or maybe january 1st.

the budgets flip on day one of FA, so that would jive with how the UI presents the data, i guess.

either FA is considred this year's budget or next year's ... i'd assume it's "next's" relative to a completed reg season and playoffs. plus the way everythign else works relative to what we see...

in real life when the fiscal year ends really doesn't care about a baseball schedule, lol, but that just makes it uneccessarily complicated for a video game. it's already deviating from RL anyway, make it jive with how ootp finances work already as opposed to mimiccing a complicated system of splitting it up between 2 years and each year the date between shifts.

i.e. in effect for FA and on based on when the accounting and salary info moves forward in the GUI.

[AaD88]

Hi Matt,

Thank you for your response. It is good to know it is on the developer's radar.

I would like to continue to seek some clarification regarding enforcement. Some of my leadership committee and I have run some tests today and it seems that it is manually possible to voluntarily raise budgets even if teams are projected to have a negative balance. (GMs are currently limited to remain within their budgets). There seems to be some confusion among myself and others regarding the difference between balance and budget, and whether both are enforced properly. This is my understanding:
- Budget is the allocated money available to you. Currently, the dev/scouting budgets do not allow teams to raise d/s budgets if they don't have the available money. This makes complete sense.
- Balance is the projected profit (or lack thereof) for an organization, demonstrated on the accounting page. It is possible for teams to max out their budget and have a huge projected balance (due to high revenue stream) or a huge negative projected balance (due to low revenue stream).

With a negative projected balance, the (development) budget must be less than half the league baseline!

This statement does not appear related to being overbudget. Rather, it appears when there is a projected negative balance. Teams can have ~40M in budget room, but see the statement because they have a negative projected balance. The statement goes away when the s/d budget is reduced to the point where a negative balance no longer exists. However, it is still possible for teams to manually raise their s/d budgets into a negative balance, provided it is within their allocated owner budget. Simply put, it seems that the above statement is not being enforced, or else I am misunderstanding the statement.

Perhaps this belongs in bug reports? Or there is a reason behind it? Which is the main purpose of my post.

Thanks in advance for your help! Sorry for the long post.

[AaD88]

Still hoping for a response to this.

I have done more testing and can confirm that the statement in question (quoted multiple times above) is NOT currently enforced by the game as described. Would love to either see the statement removed or enforcement enabled in OOTP20.

[Matt Arnold]

Yeah, it's all about budgets, not necessarily projected balance. Virtually everything in the financial engine is keyed on the budget, this is no exception. The text should be talking about being over budget, not about projected balances.

[AaD88]

Perfect, that puts my mind at ease. Thank you!