Can't create a balanced promotion-relegation league structure?

[marcellorvalle]

Hi everyone! This is my first post here, and I hope I'm not breaking any rules.

I recently started playing OOTP 25. I'm on my second save and still learning a lot of the basics. I decided to experiment with league creation and build a 20-team, 4-league structure with promotion and relegation.

I've saw a nice tutorial on Youtube and also read the manual about the topic.

I successfully created the leagues, set up their promotion/relegation relationships, and adjusted their reputations and finances to 10/8/6/4 and 100%|75%|50%|25% respectively. All players are fictional, and the other settings were left at their default values.

I decided to start unemployed and let the game run for 10 years to gather some historical data. While navigating through the leagues and their history, I noticed a few odd things:

1. The vast majority of the teams had huge negative balances. Teams keep expanding their payroll expenditures even when they get relegated (see the attached screenshot at the end).
2. On the player profile page, if I change the "Ratings relative to:" setting to any league, there are minimal or no changes.
3. It's not uncommon to see top players (sometimes even the actual MVP) from the top league being contracted by lower league teams. While this may not be impossible, I feel it should be much harder to happen due to financial limitations.

I repeated this simulation three times with the same results. I feel I am missing some configuration, as the leagues seem very comparable when they should not be.

I am also afraid to start a game only to discover later that the save is unplayable due to the deteriorating financial situation.

Am I missing something?

[jksander]

I have never tried a promotion / relegation league, but everything I've heard from people suggests it doesn't work particularly well in OOTP.

[Rain King]

Originally Posted by jksander

I have never tried a promotion / relegation league, but everything I've heard from people suggests it doesn't work particularly well in OOTP.

It can work well, but it takes a lot of manual work.

Here are a few things IMO that need to be done.

You need to make sure that the financials and reputations of the leagues as you drop down the levels get significantly smaller. This prevents lower level teams from being able to sign top-tier players.

You need to adjust a team's Market Size when they switch leagues. If a team goes up a level, their Market Size should go down. Market Size is built within the game to be relative to that specific league's average. This change needs to happen before you move to the off-season and the teams actually get moved between the leagues. Once you hit the off-season all of the new budgets/financials get assigned and it will be much more difficult to adjust.

If a really big market team (for their current league) gets relegated or a small market (relative to their league) gets promototed you may even need to adjust the Market Size of all teams and/or the Overall League Financials of the affected leagues to balance things out. I had to keep track of all of this in a spreadsheet to get it right.

[Baconi]

I've tinkered constantly and can never fix the issue of lower leagues signing players way above the caliber of the league for cheap, even with their financials lowered. The balance of inter-league free agency in OOTP is pretty much broken - needs a revamp to work similar to FHM.

[Rain King]

Originally Posted by Baconi

I've tinkered constantly and can never fix the issue of lower leagues signing players way above the caliber of the league for cheap, even with their financials lowered.

Strange. This isn't an issue I've really run across. Do you adjust the league reputation?