![]() In other words, in my mind, there is a reasonable chance that we are basically fighting for a communal revenue pile-or, in other words, since overall revenue is controlled, revenue I make removes revenue from other teams. Īt the end of the day, what I think this means is that the financial engine has a series of relationships and constraints that make our cash flow-specifically that related to attendance and revenue-into a big, intertwined, and multi-dependent mess. I suggest (but again, do not know), that the game has at its most important design goal that there always be enough money floating around each team to keep it solvent enough to keep the engine from crashing. ![]() In the case of the financial engine, it is my opinion that the game takes a similar approach. Once you think hard about that for a few days, you can see exactly what’s happening, and then you see how OOTP then does a bunch of back-tracking to make the rest of the baseball world feel like it’s sabermetically solid. I know pretty much how it works because it works in a completely logical fashion as soon as you realize that the game’s design is made specifically to create ratings out of historical stats. I like to get a flavor for how things work on my own-for example, the results engine. I mean, there are probably better ways to spend your time than digging into OOTP algorithms. For myself, I’ll say that a lot of times I hear people say “I can’t figure this out” about a lot of OOTP things, and when I hear that I think “no, what you can’t do is break your own mindset for long enough to figure out the right way to look at the problem.” I only know what I see, and I can only suggest what I think. I need to take a moment and do one of my normal disclaimers. (See Des Moines 2039-2040 coming soon here!) Things don't always work like you'd think they would. But once you start asking questions, you see there is -something else- going on. In real life, for example, a major league team would not survive in Yellow Springs because…well…population is horrible.Īnd the OOTP model works just enough like this that if we wave our hands a little and just pretend the Yellow Springs has lots of people, and maybe draws from Dayton and Columbus, and Cincinnati, and even Cleveland and Akron, that, well, we can convince ourselves that this model is “true.” I mean, as long as we don't think too hard it almost seems to work this way. It’s that way in real life, right? Outside a few very unique examples, a MLB’s team’s attendance is purely determined by how many people in the area. In this model we see people in our city as folks we have to sway, and that’s that. In our mind, I think a BBA GM thinks about their city and its surrounding areas as being filled with people, and that our goal is to find the sweet spot with ticket prices that will optimize revenue-that if we simply tweak prices up or down, then do the basic math we’ll be good (20,000 fans at $20 per ticket are better than 10,000 fans at $30, right?). HOW A “NORMAL” PERSON PROBABLY THINKS THINGS WORK I’ll comment and join in the discussion in some detail in that thread, but I wanted to start with a few very high-level thoughts that might be things you haven’t considered before. The problem, however, is that I don’t think every case is apples to apples, so sometimes you mimic another team and it works out well, and other times you get a shit sandwich. All of those are outstanding things to take into account as you go about deciding the best way to optimize your team’s revenue stream. In it, he’s discussed several specific examples of revenue creation by teams in the BBA. Justin dropped a great little thread here to propose changes to how we interact with the game’s financial engine.
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