Quote:
Originally Posted by Kilborn
Team has 4 nationally extremely popular players, 7 locally extremely popular. Team leads its division by 7+ games, has the best Starting Pitching in the American League and hits the 3rd-most HRs. Season is entering the last 6 weeks, and team is in position to have a first-round bye.
And fan interest drops. SMH. That aspect of OOTP is broken.
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In 1997 the Braves moved into Turner Field, won their division, and drew 3.4 million fans. Eight years and eight division titles later, the Braves drew 2.5 million fans. The Braves kept winning games and they kept losing fans. Evidently, fan interest in the real world is broken too.
I think there's a tendency on these boards for some to assume that winning teams should just keep getting more and more popular and drawing more and more fans. But that's not true in real life, so why should it be the case in OOTP?
Tying fan interest to things like signing popular players may seem unrealistic, but there's some evidence to suggest that there's at least a correlation there. The Phillies, for instance, finished 2018 with a record of 80-82 and drew 2.1 million fans. After signing Bryce Harper, the Phils finished 2019 with an almost identical record (81-81) but improved attendance by over 500,000.
More importantly, from a game perspective, signing or retaining a popular player is something that the gamer can control. Many of the other things that a franchise might do to increase fan attendance - such as advertising, improvements to the ballpark, outreach to the community - aren't part of the game. Maybe OOTP should include those sorts of things, but I think most gamers prefer OOTP being a baseball management simulation rather than a marketing-accounting simulation. Oh well, to each his own.
In truth, there isn't some magical formula for increasing or maintaining fan interest in real life. The 1997-2005 Braves is a good example. Why did the Braves keep winning while Braves fans increasingly stayed away from the ballpark? I've had people explain that Braves fans "only support the team in the post-season." That may be true, but then that just reinforces the notion that fan interest is an inexplicable riddle. Why does one team draw fans even when it loses, while another loses fans while it continues to win? Maybe the ballpark is in a bad neighborhood. Maybe there's not enough parking. Maybe the peanuts are too salty. Who knows?
All of those things could be modeled in the game, but then people would come on these forums complaining that "I spend all my time calibrating the optimal saltiness of my ballpark peanuts when all I want to do is manage a baseball team." There have to be some trade-offs between realism and playability in any game. Maybe OOTP hasn't found the right balance here, but I haven't seen anyone propose a model that does it any better.