A thought on finances in text sims...

[Ben E Lou]

I just played a season of FOF4, and had a thought. This was my third season as GM in this career. Here is how I've done in each season:


Season 1: 8-7-1, 44 profit rating
Season 2: 10-7-0, Wild Card team, 14 profit rating
Season 3: 12-5-0, Division Champ, lost in Conf. Semi-Finals, 8 profit rating

Here is my first thought: in real life, a new GM and/or coach that had such a track record over his first three years wouldn't be fired, even with the bleeding financially. Why? Because the fans would go NUTS ("All that Rankin Smith cares about is money! He fired the guys that got us a championship-caliber team!)

However, upon further thought, I realized something else: in all likelihood, a GM or coach wouldn't be able to SPEND the way i've spent. Even with the salary cap, the GM would be given a budget to work within in a specific year, and bonuses, coach and scout contracts, etc. would be subject to that budget. OOTP5 handles things this way in a non salary cap career. The more I think about it, the more I think it is the right way to go. Thoughts?

[Alf]

FBPro and ConManager already work this way. You have
- a salary cap
- a maximum bonus money you are able to spend each year

That already works for the players. You could extend that to the staff too (without it counting towards the players salary cap though).

[Bee]

I think this gets into having different owner "types". Some (like Dan Snyder) may be willing to give out huge bonuses and pay a college coach $5 mil a year, but others will try to hire the cheapest coaches and won't sign players if they demand big bonuses. There really needs to be something in place that forces a player to work within a yearly budget.

[JAG]

What Bee said.

[CraigSca]

I never really thought of this, but I did notice I have always lost huge sums of money in FOF4, but there never really seem to be any repercussions.

However, since Jim has allowed this to occur, I'm thinking it may allow you to roleplay ownership, as opposed to having it hard-coded in the game. For instance, you could say you have a George Steinbrenner-esque owner where money isn't an issue, or have breaking even monetarilty be an issue (like every other owner in the free world ).

[sabotai]

I agree with Bee on this. Owner types that give GM's a specific amount to work with would be the best way to go to offset the "unlimited" budget we get in FOF.

[Leonidas]

What I would like to see in the new FOF that OOTP has is the ability to retain earnings. I get sick of having a net profit of $10 or $15M and then it all disappears and you start from scratch each year. Like OOTP, I'd like to see the option to mandate how much money a team is allowed to retain and use the rest to distribute among the other teams. With this in place then it could go ahead and nail you for overspending, or even disallow you from doing it.