My other serious long term imbalance/gamebreaker

[dbacks933]

I posted on this before, and I didn't get much of a response from the board. Now, I ask again as this game is approaching playable, but this part is still vastly broken IMO.

The macro-level financial systems is a total mess. The flux of revenue into the league is just way too ridiculous. merchandising revenue is one of the major contributors to this. It is impossible to control and some teams make well over 70 million in it alone (before gate, media, and playoff revenue) and i consider that figure alone to be an above average player payroll or even an average organization operating total. I don't like the contract system either, players set their own salaries, not the market. this is demonstrated in a sim (which i describe further below) where the Reds have a budget of 2 billion dollars, yet they only have a player payroll of 56 million. Even with revenue sharing on, from what i've seen, there is just way too much money coming into the league, the only difference is that it is peppered around so that all the teams get to hoard money, but at a slower rate.

I did a 40 year sim recently. The financial rules where no revenue sharing, revenue sets budget, no cap, and the rest was default. Boston is a high revenue team in the league ($75 mil merchandising and $40 mil media), however they are currently $800,000,000 in the red. how you ask? because they managed to hoard so much money, that they exceeded the 32-bit variable maximum value of 2.147 billion so it turned over to -2.147 billion. This was done in the timespan of about 30 years i estimate. The Cubs are a supposedly small market team with a merchandising revenue of $1.25 million. Yet they still managed to turn a $16.3 million profit with a $42.4 million player payroll and $12.7 in staff salaries. Sounds like small market ball to me.......

Suggestions:
-Do away with merchandising revenue altogether, or set the value range to between $3-20 million.
-ehhh if the money coming into the leagued is curbed i suppose the rest would work well enough as it is in its current state. but i don't like how a superstar is slated to make $20 million and what not, i think it should be more of a bidding process. which obviously doesn't happen if teams are operating at $60 million payrolls with a $2 billion budget.

[f.montoya]

Now, before I go and agree, and I'm leaning your way, I am still seeing this as tweakable and if there is something wrong with the default settings a better route for now would be to give some feedback with some suggestions on what the default settings should be set at to achieve more realistic economical environment.

In tests that I have run with historical leagues, I often see the financial situations of teams hit conditions that are unaceptable to me. But through my tests, I come up with settings that give me decent balance.

For the time being, this will have to suffice but I will join you in a campaign for the AI improvement which allows players to consider the league-wide economical climate when making demands and negotiating.

I will TT this as a feature request but I wouldn't expect anything in this version unless Markus is feeling bored, which won't be anytime soon, I'd imagine.

[f.montoya]

Feature request TT# 2163

[dougaiton]

Originally Posted by f.montoya

Now, before I go and agree, and I'm leaning your way, I am still seeing this as tweakable and if there is something wrong with the default settings a better route for now would be to give some feedback with some suggestions on what the default settings should be set at to achieve more realistic economical environment.

That's understandable, IMO. The one thing I would say is if the default settings are screwey, Markus should make sure the next patch updates them as well, because it's all very well the odd forum user knowing the game will 'break' if they don't edit them, but game users shouldn't load a default league only for it to become unplayable (my major bugbear about the reserve roster is that the game actively encourages you to run no-minors league in the default setting, even though they run very oddly within the game).

The other thing I'd say is that the old OOTP engine made an effort to spend all its money. Is there some reason why OOTP2006 doesn't do this, even though the financial engine remains decidedly similar? Or is it that there is some code somewhere that doesn't work quite right?

[dbacks933]

merchandising revenue is not under the control of the settings, and tweaking anything in the settings won't change the fact that the settings themselves (i.e. star contract = $12 mil, superstar = $16 mil) fix the amount a player is going to get paid, whereas in ootp6.5 there was a bidding process that factored in demand.

i already made my suggestions in the opening post. to me, the settings can't solve this, it's the mechanics/system that is flawed. the league financials are equivocable to an ideal communist economy with a huge trade surplus. the prices are fixed and everyone has a lot of spending money. but when Commie Carl goes to the electronics store to get a new plasma big screen TV, he finds that all 100 of them in stock for the year have already been sold for $500. with Carl's budget, he would have paid $5000 for one of those TV's, but the economic system didn't allow him to. so Carl ends up with a ton of money, but the money is essential worthless because he can't spend it. so the solution to this is to convert the financials to free market (contract bidding like in ootp 6.5) and also, to keep the number realistic, get rid of that huge trade surplus (the merchandising revenue).

[dbacks933]

any word on this or is it falling on deaf ears again?

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by dbacks933

merchandising revenue is not under the control of the settings, and tweaking anything in the settings won't change the fact that the settings themselves (i.e. star contract = $12 mil, superstar = $16 mil) fix the amount a player is going to get paid, whereas in ootp6.5 there was a bidding process that factored in demand.

That feature isn't so much for setting absolute salary values but instead is for adjusting the salary curve. That it, the distribution of typical salary levels for different skill level of player. The range from highest salary to lowest today is very different from what it was in the 1950s, for example. These settings allow the salary curve from different eras to be emulated.

If you adjust these areas you have to consider the other finanical aspects of your league as well (i.e. average league attendance, ticket prices, and so forth).

[dbacks933]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

That feature isn't so much for setting absolute salary values but instead is for adjusting the salary curve. That it, the distribution of typical salary levels for different skill level of player. The range from highest salary to lowest today is very different from what it was in the 1950s, for example. These settings allow the salary curve from different eras to be emulated.

If you adjust these areas you have to consider the other finanical aspects of your league as well (i.e. average league attendance, ticket prices, and so forth).

i didn't adjust them......and even if that is the purpose of the feature, it's apparently not the sole effect. unless there is something else to explain why teams are sitting on billions of dollars of cash and not using even a fraction extra to sign big free agents (draft pick compensation turned off), then i'd say it is a rather significant part of the problem.

but either way, THERE'S A GIGANTIC PROBLEM WITH SOMETHING that completely ruins the long term playability of the game.