Making Money Count in MLB The Show - MLB Bob's Blog

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Making Money Count in MLB The Show

Posted on February 2, 2014 at 10:23 PM.

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I just loaded up my MLB The Show 13 roster I was working on where I set the contracts to "close to real life" amounts and length. What I was seeing to make me try this was that every team�s budget adjusted at the start of a new franchise to be about $10 million or so more than player and staff salaries. IE with ARod out, the Yankees budget was around $100 million, but other versions of rosters the Yankees were as much as $120-$130 plus with the same amount, 10 million, left in the budget for future player acquisition.

I took the Toronto Blue Jays and then in the roster control screen adjusted the contracts with a little work around that�s been in the forums for a few years. I started a new franchise hoping that my budget would be upped with the $10 million or so buffer I have seen that all teams get. What I found instead was the contract amounts re-adjusted for all my players� salaries to mess everything up again and keep me at my predetermined SCEA amount. This game will not let you make a realistic payroll for teams the game deems lower budget. Last year the Jays were at or around $135 million for player payroll, in game they are at or around 90-95 million. This year the Jays are said to be closer to having $150 million, but I�m guessing we won�t see in game payroll much over $100 million, if that much.

I understand budgets, payroll and contracts in MLBTS are not set to real amounts, but they are not to scale either. Mark Buehrle makes less than $2 million in-game. In real life he's on an $18-$20 million a year payday, making him a big contract and harder to move player. In game he would be no problem.

Something I�d like to see in future games is some sort of payroll, budget and money system adjustment. Games like FIFA you can set how strict your owners are with giving your team money for player acquisition.

Now that�s not terribly relevant to MLBTS, but I�ve mention a few times in The Show forums that it would be fun to be able to set what type of monetary world you play in. My example would be: let�s say you make an historic roster and don�t want to see big contracts, set it to small budgets. Play The Show as-is with default scaled budgets or play a fantasy or even more realistic franchise and have closer to modern day salaries. The dream would be to set how much the elite, average and league minimum players would get manually and have the league scale itself from your manually set input value.

This isn�t a knock on SCEA as I�m sure they have restrictions and guidelines from MLB themselves, but there must be a way to have it a little more user input friendly, have the option or get closer to reality. My reason for some of this is an idea I have had to reintroduce the GM/Owner mode options that were taken out in Last Gen, besides just having realistic contracts for optics sakes.

Here�s my idea:

Put all the features with Owners Mode back in and add some new ones so money means something again. These features will make this part of the game more fun and add depth in the process.

The point isn�t to only make money important, but also make it necessary. To do this, it has to affect your franchise in different ways and you don�t want to make it so easy to accumulate mass amounts of money that it becomes a moot point in your franchise, as it has in the past.

The key areas to have money and your profit directly affect your franchise is to have it adjust how much you can spend on things such as player budgets, international players and draft spending, trades that include money, facilities, staff and relocation. (Things like international spending and the draft has pots in real life, but many teams don�t use the max.) As an owner you sell tickets, do giveaways, set vendor prices and run your team to try and make a profit. (Also a nice little feature to �steal� from FIFA would be the Financial Takeover. Have a team get a new owner with big money and completely change the way a franchise is headed.)

The first big feature that I would like to mention is trades that involve cash. Id like to be able to add cash to deals to move high priced contracts or just straight up trade a player for cash. This process would be pointless unless money meant something.

Being able to upgrade minor league stadiums, add grass patterns, and all the previous facility upgrades that were offered before would be a great reintroduction.

I�d like to see the International Free agent market available in game, and I want to have more control over how big or small my budget for player personnel actually is, but money has to mean something.

I want to be an owner and say "I�m increasing payroll, get me a championship"

I dont want to have to win so many games to gain 8%. I don't want to have it dictated by some preconceived idea of the market. And that's where my slider idea came in and the ideas to adjust it at the beginning of every off season.

The set up would be to take your overall allotted budget you have as an owner and shift sliders to allocate money to the areas you want to spend it on at the beginning of every off season. A nice enhancement would be to choose to start your franchise at the beginning of current year�s spring training, which is the traditional method, or start in the off-season of previous year, allowing you to build your team going into spring training before you even play a game.

These sliders would be broken down into categories. As Owner you would set them and play out your franchise for that season with your chosen allotted amounts. Every off-season you evaluate your team and reset them according to your bank. You can only allot what you have available by earning it through your traditional channels of team revenue that year.

These are a few ideas I had for money and what I want to do with it, it�s a long read and thanks for making it to the end.

Discuss, tell me it�s unrealistic. Im sure some will tell me SCEA can�t actually do this stuff because there are "rules", but also discuss and tell me what you do like. Share what you would do, what you would add and other ways to make money in game more fun.

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