[cprongs2]

Originally Posted by fhomess

All that said, there's still a large potential for getting unbalanced finances if the league settings aren't configured correctly. I'm currently in the process of working on suggested financial settings that will help create a balanced financial universe under a variety of styles of play. I hope to make this available to the OOTP community when the game is released..

Suggested financial settings would be very much appreciated! (if the financial system isn't improved significantly....)

Originally Posted by fhomess

At this point, the game functions relatively well with certain settings, but goes out of balance when those settings are changed. This is something I hope my suggestions can address by the time the game is released. There's also a group of rather dedicated beta testers in addition to myself who continue to scrutinize the current model to see if we can make suggestions that we can get in the game. Markus is still tweaking, after all.

One thing final comment. This type of thing happened in 6.5, too, so it's not new to the OOTP franchise. I think the standards for what is acceptable have gone up, though. In either case, the use of the cash max field in league setup is currently the best method of preventing this problem from happening, just as it's always been. It's not an ideal method, but it works.

The cash maximum option is a great way to handle this, it made 6.5 very playable with regards to the financials. However, in 2006, you couldn't use the cash maximum option if the revenue sharing option was off. So, $$$$ were accumalated over time in 2006, where in 6.5 the surplus money just vanished. If the financial system isn't significantly improved, I hope this makes it back into 2007, it was a great way to control financials.

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

The thing to remember in the OOTP financial model is that, while the revenue side is represented fairly accurately, the expense side isn't. Real-world teams have lots more things to spend their money that do teams in OOTP. That'd be things like taxes, front office overhead, stadium operations, travelling costs, insurance, just to name a few. In OOTP, just about the only expense you have is your player salaries.

From a game play standpoint, this makes sense. The main thing about being a GM in the game is not worrying about how much your money you're spending on road trips or how big a slice you have to give to the tax man, it's about juggling the money available to payroll and signing the best players..

I couldn't agree more. I don't want to set the price of hotdogs and soda pop if you know what I mean. To me, it's not important how many different categories there are to accumalate revenue, or how it is expensed. What is important is a financial system that makes it challenging to put together a good ball club, so that I can't sign the 20 best players in the league because I've obtained hundreds of millions of $$$$ in revenue.

Originally Posted by jarmenia

I can tell you players now adjust their demands based on the amount of cash available in the "universe". That helps to keep the cash from building up.

jarmenia, I'm VERY interested in hearing more about this!!! Can you elaborate on how this effects the cash build up? It seems to me this would take care of most of the money issues.