Financials and Budget Adjustments
Jun 27, 2015 2:13:23 GMT -5
Jeremiah:OriolesGM, Jean - NYY, and 1 more like this
Post by thomas on Jun 27, 2015 2:13:23 GMT -5
Hello SBL!
We reached a solution to the budgets that we believe we are happy with. It may very well take some adjustments in the future to get this right but for now we've worked the past few days for many hours to get us to a place where we feel comfortable making the changes and uploading them to you all. That said, you can download the latest league file to see your 'new' budgets for 2021.
Let me talk about how we got to this number as well as a couple other changes that we made that you won't notice until 2022 if you happen to stay with SBL that long. I'll preface this next segment and attempt to give credibility to my reasoning by stating that my day job is as a video game designer. I get paid to balance game systems and make sure that a game is fair and fun to play.
So you have your new budget, which in a lot of cases is very different from the one you were presented with a few days ago. Here is how we went about getting you that budget. Because we had clearly established that the 2021 budgets were horribly unexpected and wrong for each team (in one case a team dropped 40m in budget from the year before with a fairly okay record in baseball), we needed to come up with a fair and appropriate way to reward teams who won and punish those who lost- but not too much. So I worked in a spreadsheet tonight for about 4 hours plugging in numbers and here's what I came up with that we are happy with and I hope you'll be happy with too.
The best way to determine if a budget should go up or down is winning percentage. Let's be honest though, there are way more factors in OOTP like owner fiscal personalities, current rebuild or win now goals, and others but that would take a solid week or more of investigation and recording and in the end, I can't parse out the exact formulas that the OOTP developers use to determine budgets. I had to do the best with what I had. So I took your team's previous year budget and your winning percentage then I compared your winning percentage to plus or minus .500. .500 would indicate that your budget remained unchanged for the next season. I believe only one team went exactly .500 in 2020. I took the difference, halved it (cause the full value was too large), and multiplied it by your previous budget and then added that value to your previous budget to get your new budget (with some adjustments to playoffs).
Let's use my team as an example: Miami's budget was 98m in 2020. I had a winning % of .537 which compared to a .500 winning % is .037. This number is kind of large when we're talking hundreds of millions so I halved it to get .0185 (but wait, why halve it? when you're talking Dodgers budget numbers, trust me, you want to halve it). I multiplied this number by my 98m budget of the previous year to get 1.813m. I then added that to my 98m and rounded the number to get an even 100m. But, Miami made it to the playoffs this year! I made it simple and added 1m to budgets for teams that made it to the WC, 2m for Division series, 3m for league series, 4m for WS, and then a 5m bonus for the winner. So Miami's new adjusted 2021 budget is 103m. I know those couple million figures seem arbitrary but a lot of game design balance is. You test numbers until they make sense then you go with them.
So, after calculating this for every team we were left with a fairly decent spread of budget increases/losses that were pretty much in-line with some year-to-year budget increases/decreases seen prior to OOTP16 (don't worry, I checked all this out as well). So, that's how your new budget got calculated for this year. Hopefully most of you have enough money to cover your existing contracts and make a few moves this offseason.
But wait there's more!
This was just a band-aid solution to the current year. What about 2022, wouldn't the bad budgets just happen again? Anthony created a brand-new MLB file in OOTP16 and looked at the financials and discovered that a lot of the revenue sources we have in SBL are way lower than what they should be in new OOTP financial system. So we've raised revenues across the board. In 2022 we'll be seeing roughly 150m total influx of new revenue into the league. This seems like a lot, but spread over 30 teams, it's not as much as you think. This SHOULD get us back on track with the new financials while not helping or hurting too many teams.
We ran multiple test sims with the new financials and they looked pretty solid. If we need to make further adjustments to jettison cash from the league or to add more we will definiely do so but we're pretty happy with the results we ended up with and we hope you are as well.
Please, as always, do not hesitate to ask us any questions or voice any concerns you might have about the changes. Thanks everyone for being so patient while we try and solve our issues!
We reached a solution to the budgets that we believe we are happy with. It may very well take some adjustments in the future to get this right but for now we've worked the past few days for many hours to get us to a place where we feel comfortable making the changes and uploading them to you all. That said, you can download the latest league file to see your 'new' budgets for 2021.
Let me talk about how we got to this number as well as a couple other changes that we made that you won't notice until 2022 if you happen to stay with SBL that long. I'll preface this next segment and attempt to give credibility to my reasoning by stating that my day job is as a video game designer. I get paid to balance game systems and make sure that a game is fair and fun to play.
So you have your new budget, which in a lot of cases is very different from the one you were presented with a few days ago. Here is how we went about getting you that budget. Because we had clearly established that the 2021 budgets were horribly unexpected and wrong for each team (in one case a team dropped 40m in budget from the year before with a fairly okay record in baseball), we needed to come up with a fair and appropriate way to reward teams who won and punish those who lost- but not too much. So I worked in a spreadsheet tonight for about 4 hours plugging in numbers and here's what I came up with that we are happy with and I hope you'll be happy with too.
The best way to determine if a budget should go up or down is winning percentage. Let's be honest though, there are way more factors in OOTP like owner fiscal personalities, current rebuild or win now goals, and others but that would take a solid week or more of investigation and recording and in the end, I can't parse out the exact formulas that the OOTP developers use to determine budgets. I had to do the best with what I had. So I took your team's previous year budget and your winning percentage then I compared your winning percentage to plus or minus .500. .500 would indicate that your budget remained unchanged for the next season. I believe only one team went exactly .500 in 2020. I took the difference, halved it (cause the full value was too large), and multiplied it by your previous budget and then added that value to your previous budget to get your new budget (with some adjustments to playoffs).
Let's use my team as an example: Miami's budget was 98m in 2020. I had a winning % of .537 which compared to a .500 winning % is .037. This number is kind of large when we're talking hundreds of millions so I halved it to get .0185 (but wait, why halve it? when you're talking Dodgers budget numbers, trust me, you want to halve it). I multiplied this number by my 98m budget of the previous year to get 1.813m. I then added that to my 98m and rounded the number to get an even 100m. But, Miami made it to the playoffs this year! I made it simple and added 1m to budgets for teams that made it to the WC, 2m for Division series, 3m for league series, 4m for WS, and then a 5m bonus for the winner. So Miami's new adjusted 2021 budget is 103m. I know those couple million figures seem arbitrary but a lot of game design balance is. You test numbers until they make sense then you go with them.
So, after calculating this for every team we were left with a fairly decent spread of budget increases/losses that were pretty much in-line with some year-to-year budget increases/decreases seen prior to OOTP16 (don't worry, I checked all this out as well). So, that's how your new budget got calculated for this year. Hopefully most of you have enough money to cover your existing contracts and make a few moves this offseason.
But wait there's more!
This was just a band-aid solution to the current year. What about 2022, wouldn't the bad budgets just happen again? Anthony created a brand-new MLB file in OOTP16 and looked at the financials and discovered that a lot of the revenue sources we have in SBL are way lower than what they should be in new OOTP financial system. So we've raised revenues across the board. In 2022 we'll be seeing roughly 150m total influx of new revenue into the league. This seems like a lot, but spread over 30 teams, it's not as much as you think. This SHOULD get us back on track with the new financials while not helping or hurting too many teams.
We ran multiple test sims with the new financials and they looked pretty solid. If we need to make further adjustments to jettison cash from the league or to add more we will definiely do so but we're pretty happy with the results we ended up with and we hope you are as well.
Please, as always, do not hesitate to ask us any questions or voice any concerns you might have about the changes. Thanks everyone for being so patient while we try and solve our issues!