Broken Bat - Bug Reports: Precipitous Drop in Fan Mood

Forum >> Bug Reports >> Precipitous Drop in "Fan Mood"

Post ID	Date & Time	Game Date

#60166	07/25/2018 6:12:27 am	Jan 22nd, 2037
hurstdm Joined: 01/18/2017 Posts: 576 Murfreesboro Moo Cows V.3	I first added this in the "Help" forum. Now I think it's more of a bug. The Murfreesboro team hasn't had a losing season since 2026. I took over in 2035. I created a press release that year to commemorate our (momentarily) best "Fan Mood" in the game, something like 150+. Since then, Murfreesboro was promoted to League V. The team won 94 games there and stayed in 1st place literally all 2036, then they were just promoted again. We went 7 amazing rounds in the Cup competition. Inexplicably, I suddenly seem to have a Fan Mood around 89. We went 9-11 for October of last year, but were in first place the whole time, playing rookies. We lost our league championship series 0-4. Is that the only explanation? Another disturbing data point: Three of the four teams relegated from my league last year all have a "Fan Mood" currently equal to or higher than mine (Pirates - 90, Beavers - 89, Crusaders - 90). There's no way this is working as intended. Are the fans really that unforgiving? Why would the team get a sub-par, below average Fan Mood rating after being promoted twice in a row and making a great Cup run? What is there to be upset about? Losing a playoff series? That's brutal and capricious. I bet it'll also really hurt my finances this year. I feel like this has to be a bug. My fans should be ecstatic. It's demoralizing and unrealistic. I'll take this post a step further and daydream/suggest a pseudo-code system for Fan Mood: * Average Fan Mood should swirl around 100. * The code checks/alters a team's Fan Mood after every game actually played by a team * Points are added/subtracted after every game for position in the League, not for wins/losses. Something like +1 for 1st place, -1 for 6th place, and all the shades inbetween (+.6,+.2,-.2,-.6). * Points are added/subtracted after every game depending on which League the team is in. Fans prefer teams in Legends League and get bummed about League VI teams. This affects Fan Mood more subtly. Something like +0.1 for Legends, -0.1 for L.VI, and all the shades inbetween. * Points are added/subtracted after every game played to bring a team closer to the average (~100). Teams with a high Fan Mood are always pulled down. Teams with a low Fan Mood are always pulled up. Every game, this pull is something like (150/Fan Mood - 2) Getting an accurate average Fan Mood score of ~100 might be achieved through adjusting this formula. * Points are added for playing knockout stage Cup games (+1?) and Playoff games (+1?) - never subtracted. Teams playing deep into the Cup will get a small boost after every game played. Teams achieving a playoff at the end of the season get a small boost after every game played. If a Cup series goes 3 games or a playoff series goes 7 games, the teams are rewarded with this slight extra boost. * No points are added/subtracted at the group stage of the Cup. * Points are added when events occur that add Prestige. A Cup win or any Championship trophy win will increase the Fan Mood by a significant amount (+10?). * (Optional) A team's Fan Mood is increased slightly (+1?) for every all star selection, all league selection, rookie of the year, MVP, and Cy Young.

#60167	07/25/2018 7:23:20 am	Jan 25th, 2037
EchoBravo34 Joined: 07/08/2014 Posts: 57 Sioux City Catfish IV.8	I think it is because you released a bunch of players. I think fan mood drops when you release long serving players. The fans are sad to see them go. I would defer to others, I could be making this up, but I've noticed strange drops like you experienced before and found correlation with release of veteran players.

#60168	07/25/2018 7:52:44 am	Jan 25th, 2037
newtman Joined: 11/02/2013 Posts: 3343 Inactive	Losing in the playoffs, especially getting swept will take 20 points off your fan mood easy. Fortunately fan mood doesn't really matter beyond being a factor in your attendance.

#60491	08/15/2018 6:50:09 am	Apr 25th, 2037
hurstdm Joined: 01/18/2017 Posts: 576 Murfreesboro Moo Cows V.3	Here's another data point. In 2036, for League V, the Moo Cow stadium was 27,500 and we maxed it out almost every time. We lost in the playoffs and dropped from a Fan Mood of around 120+ to less than 90. I expected to modify my ballpark to hold 32,500 (+5000) or 33,000 after promotion. When I saw the precipitous drop in Fan Mood, I set it at 31,500 instead. I've had 9 home games in League IV. I'm averaging around 29,000 customers. If I assume the drop in Mood made me lose 3,500 tickets every home game (32,500 - 29,000), that's around $50k in revenue every game. Multiply that by 80 home games for a loss of around $4M from what the Moo Cows expected this year. That's a serious chunk of change, and a strange penalty. It also can't be the intended result of a team getting promoted but losing in the league playoffs. Feels like a fixable bug.

#70640	01/12/2020 5:42:31 pm	Jan 15th, 2044
hurstdm Joined: 01/18/2017 Posts: 576 Murfreesboro Moo Cows V.3	Time to mention this again. The Rohnert Park Rebels have a current fan mood of 85.98. That's bleak. Not "average" fans. Not restless. The Rebel fans are clearly unhappy. Why would they be unhappy? The team was first place in League II last year. They're being promoted to Legends for the first time in team history. The fans should be ecstatic, right? Nope, they're miserable because the Rebels were swept 0-4 in a 4 game playoff at the end of an otherwise successful season. The Farmington Hills Cardinals, relegated from the same league as the Rebels, have a higher Fan Mood right now. Redonkulous. This could and should be fixed. Perhaps the Fan Mood system should be overhauled as suggested above?

#70645	01/12/2020 11:18:26 pm	Jan 15th, 2044
MukilteoMike Joined: 08/09/2014 Posts: 3294 Inactive	I agree. It is absurd. Unfortunately the game ramps up the value of playoff games. I imagine the idea is to make sure the winner is bumped up significantly. The problem is it's a zero sum system, so the loser drops like a rock. I just had an aha moment about it. Each level winner should get a standard increase no matter how many games are played. The negative impact should be split on the two relegated teams, not the team that lost the playoff.

#70647	01/13/2020 8:37:51 am	Jan 15th, 2044
lostraven Joined: 07/02/2016 Posts: 1279 Corvallis Ravens Legends	+1 to Mike's idea.

#70667	01/13/2020 6:25:46 pm	Jan 15th, 2044
hurstdm Joined: 01/18/2017 Posts: 576 Murfreesboro Moo Cows V.3	-1 to Mike's idea, mostly because I wouldn't like adding additional negatives for anyone. It sucks enough to be relegated without suffering extra Fan Mood penalties. I just don't want the situation like Rohnert Park's to cause Fan Mood collapse. I re-read my pseudo-code in the top post and still support it. The easiest solution is just to have playoff games completely exempted from Fan Mood. Or possibly both teams get a uniform bump of some kind for promoting regardless of how the playoff series goes. Lots of easy ways to fix this, even without an overhaul.

#70672	01/13/2020 9:34:28 pm	Jan 15th, 2044
MukilteoMike Joined: 08/09/2014 Posts: 3294 Inactive	You can't give points without taking them away somewhere. It doesn't make sense to penalize a team for winning their division and losing the playoff. That makes them worse off. The only reasonable thing is to penalize teams that get relegated. And face it, a team that gets relegated loses fan mood in real life. Do it here, too. Updated Monday, January 13 2020 @ 10:08:35 pm PST

#70674	01/14/2020 6:35:53 am	Jan 15th, 2044
hurstdm Joined: 01/18/2017 Posts: 576 Murfreesboro Moo Cows V.3	Why exactly can't you give points without taking them away somewhere? Sure you can. These are baseball fans. They're happy by definition because they're watching baseball.

#70678	01/14/2020 7:55:43 am	Jan 15th, 2044
MukilteoMike Joined: 08/09/2014 Posts: 3294 Inactive	It's the same principle as rating--the loss and the gain from every game MUST balance each other out. If you only add, all become elevated over time. That would basically be inflation. Rating and mood changes are and must be zero sum events. I did think your last statement was funny, though.

#70688	01/14/2020 12:59:21 pm	Jan 15th, 2044
lostraven Joined: 07/02/2016 Posts: 1279 Corvallis Ravens Legends	This interaction exemplifies how I perceive some of your ideas for the game, hurstdm. From my perception, you have a tendency to strongly favor making aspects of Broken Bat much closer to real life baseball. And the idealist in me empathizes with you in that regard. The realist in me, however, lets loose a soft sigh. Much like the ideation of making catcher training more like real baseball, I see a similar approach to "they are baseball fans." You want the current problem to be fixed by a more idealistic approach to the game, perhaps without being reminded that it is in fact a bunch of code turned into a game, which has to be balenced. Where Mike and I seem to agree is that we're still actually playing a game, replete with programming, and calculations, and numbers, and perhaps even algorithms. Making games involves significant elements of balance in order to make it more fun. Sure, the overall game loses some realism in the process, but those compromises and tweaks, the gives and takes are in the name of keeping a player base interested in the game. Mike is saying, I think, that much like the U.S. approach to the economy (albeit not a game to be played, unless you're a wacky stock trader) there's inflation to be dealt with, and one way to deal with inflation is through both up and down adjustments. Updated Tuesday, January 14 2020 @ 1:00:57 pm PST

#70692	01/14/2020 6:43:36 pm	Jan 22nd, 2044
Rock777 Joined: 09/21/2014 Posts: 9651 Haverhill Halflings III.1	I don't follow fan mood very much in the game, but its possible your thinking of it in the wrong way. I don't think you can compare two teams and assume that the team with the better record (in real life) has better fan mood. If you are a Patriots fan, you consider a lose in the playoffs (even the Superbowl) to be a devastatingly poor season. If you are a Lions fan you consider consider a .500+ season to be a huge success. Fans have different expectations for their teams, and fan mood can swing wildly in real life too. Not saying the algorithm couldn't use some work. But fan mood isn't a simple linear graph.

#71675	02/24/2020 7:52:46 am	Jul 7th, 2044
El jefe Joined: 04/21/2017 Posts: 224 Urbana Cubs II.1	That's true Rock, however when your team sucks for 10+ years and you have a great season to get promoted to the next level, your fans are going to be ecstatic regardless of the playoff result. I think there has to be a bump for promotion that offsets any negative from a playoff loss. E.g., last year in D5, I sold out almost every game at 27K. This year in D4, I've had a lot of games with around 29/30K. I would have expected the attendance bump to be a lot higher, but my fan mood was destroyed after losing in the D5 playoff last year

#71690	02/24/2020 2:22:13 pm	Jul 8th, 2044
hurstdm Joined: 01/18/2017 Posts: 576 Murfreesboro Moo Cows V.3	Double huzzah to everything the Cubs just said! Steve, take note!

#72282	03/26/2020 11:46:45 am	Nov 1st, 2044
hurstdm Joined: 01/18/2017 Posts: 576 Murfreesboro Moo Cows V.3	I've got to bump this thread again for a RIDICULOUS example. The Bloomington Thunder just won the Legends League East. They led the league pretty much wire to wire and finished with 99 wins, 8 games up, with a +208 run differential. They lost the playoff in 5 games. The Thunder's current "Fan Mood" is 98.86. As counterpoint, the Moo Cow "Fan Mood" is 113.52, but we finished the Legends League East in 4th place and 16 games back. As further counterpoint, the Minneapolis Tigers are being relegated out of the Legends League in 5th place, but they have a current "Fan Mood" of 104.03. Just one more example, the New Britain Cubs are relegating out of II.1, but their current "Fan Mood" is higher than the Thunder's at 101.80. Bloomington's fans are less happy than these fans?!? RIDICULOUS! Please fix this, Steve.

#72300	03/27/2020 4:17:53 am	Nov 4th, 2044
PrivateSnowflake Joined: 01/06/2015 Posts: 1181 Bloomington Thunder Legends	Bloomington's fans are less happy than these fans?!? RIDICULOUS! Please fix this, Steve. The crazy part is, 100 is the median of fan mood. So my fans are unhappy and will be less inclined to come to games and buy merch. Hard to imagine fans are unhappy coming off a two year run that includes a championship, a Cup, and a division title. BrokenBat fans behave like Atlanta Braves fans. (oooooo!)

#72336	03/28/2020 9:33:50 am	Jan 15th, 2045
Holmes Joined: 11/07/2013 Posts: 1175 Inactive	I second that. The playoff impact on fan mood is completely ridiculous, and it has been for ages. My current example: Laredo and Manhattan both just promoted from II.1. Yes, Manhattan has better overall numbers because the East was slightly better in interdivisional play, but both teams nailed the win one series before the season ended, and both teams finished four games up in the division. Manhattan won the playoffs, and we're at 121 fan mood while Laredo is promoting to Legends with a fan mood of 96. How can a team promote and have a below-median fan mood?

#72342	03/28/2020 11:06:08 am	Jan 15th, 2045
MukilteoMike Joined: 08/09/2014 Posts: 3294 Inactive	It's bad, bad, bad and illogical. The solution I proposed, which is listed above a bit, is probably the best idea I've ever had about this game. (I need to brag here today because I'm getting destroyed over at the horse Sim, Track King, and am distraught over it.) Simple. Effective. Appropriate.

#72343	03/28/2020 12:01:34 pm	Jan 15th, 2045
hurstdm Joined: 01/18/2017 Posts: 576 Murfreesboro Moo Cows V.3	Boo to the Magician idea. Yay to the Moo Cow idea. But they're both better than Steve's idea. (Even though the majority of Broken Bat is well-coded.)

#73066	04/23/2020 7:12:29 am	Apr 29th, 2045
Ken_Kennilworth Joined: 11/26/2019 Posts: 405 Charleston Hawks Legends	Bloomington's fans are less happy than these fans?!? RIDICULOUS! Please fix this, Steve. The crazy part is, 100 is the median of fan mood. So my fans are unhappy and will be less inclined to come to games and buy merch. Hard to imagine fans are unhappy coming off a two year run that includes a championship, a Cup, and a division title. BrokenBat fans behave like Atlanta Braves fans. well, not on 4/21/2020. The median, or the team ranked 378th in Fan Mood, was the Long Beach Long Horns, with a mood of 100.3; the average of all teams was 99.5159 Team 387, the Tuscaloosa Cardinals, had 100.1 to be the closest to 100, while Team 394, the Melbourne Raccoons, were at the league average with 99.5 (I determined that by copying the rating webpage into a spreadsheet then sorting/averaging fan mood.) that data gem indicates to me that fan mood may not be zero-sum Well, what to do about this fine situation? one suggestion would be to add to the schedule page the fan mood on the day of a game...that would enable tracking/measuring game by game changes in fan mood and determine if mood is zero sum, if some games (Cup, Championship or ones significant to division races) have greater impact on fan mood. It could remove some of the fan mood mystery. But will it make this game too much of a science rather than an art?

#73069	04/23/2020 8:12:33 am	Apr 29th, 2045
JohnnyBoi62 Joined: 06/21/2019 Posts: 356 Inactive	Ken it’s just my personal opinion but analyzing group fan mood ratings and finding them average out a few decimal places off of 100 is not the impetus of a structural broken bat accounting crisis. Perhaps there is a bug in the math and it’s good to point out, but in the grand scheme of things that’s not undermining game play. Non analytically it seems that cup play affects fan mood more heavily. Could be Steve trying to emphasize it since some people just see it as extended spring training. Doesn’t prestige already act as a small, non degrading financial boost based on prior success? In my mind fan mood should track with recent win/losses. Largely it does. The extent to which it does can be debated, but on the whole it seems to be working nearly perfectly (down to a few decimals as you pointed out).

#73073	04/23/2020 11:40:45 am	Apr 29th, 2045
Ken_Kennilworth Joined: 11/26/2019 Posts: 405 Charleston Hawks Legends	in reply to JohnnyBoi lol, well I agree that it is not an accounting crisis, but it had been claimed that Fan Mood changes were zero sum, i was sharing the results of my testing that claim. Is the finding a game changer? Probably not...as you alluded to, by itself it won't change anyone's decision except maybe to encourage further research. I feel it is most likely the average should be 100 but the game designer/programmer did not build in a test to ensure that after each mood update the average is still at 100. If so, it's the game owner to decide if he want to put that in--I respect the owner's choice. My goal is to understand how the game operates so I can improve my play. Fan mood effects attendance, and ultimately stadium sizing...knowing how mood is calculated and how volatile it is leads to better decision imho. You mentioned prestige. According to the game manual, merchandise sales are influenced by prestige...i find no connection of prestige to attendance per the manual nor per any forum posts--maybe you know of some link to revenues other than merchandise? You've mentioned in this thread that playoff games and perhaps cup games impact fan mood more than league games...that sounds like a relatively simple study for which test for Cup games can be gathered this weekend. Thank you for the idea, another social isolation project! Updated Thursday, April 23 2020 @ 1:33:16 pm PDT

#73081	04/23/2020 6:30:14 pm	May 3rd, 2045
Ken_Kennilworth Joined: 11/26/2019 Posts: 405 Charleston Hawks Legends	okay, thanks to the dialog with JohnnyBoi, i did some more work on Ratings & Fan Mood. And I would like to begin this post by quoting a post by MultioMike made a few months ago. #70678 01/14/2020 7:55:43 am Jan 15th, 2044 It's the same principle as rating--the loss and the gain from every game MUST balance each other out. If you only add, all become elevated over time. That would basically be inflation. Rating and mood changes are and must be zero sum events. I did think your last statement was funny, though. MukilteoMike Mike, your claim about Rating & Fan Mood is logical, but only half true. Ratings is zero sum (1% of the losing team's points are transferred to the winning team after each game) but Fan Mood is not...I haven't figured out the how the change in Fan Mood is arrived at. Please try, as I did, recording your team and your opponents Rating and Fan Mood before and after a game. If you get the same result I did, you will see Rating changes are zero-sum but Fan Mood isn't. Here is the data from 1 of the 10 games I looked at tonight: Date 4/23/2020 League Date: May 4, 2045 League V12, East Division Game Final Score Charleston Hawk - 6 Vero Beach Gulls – 0 Fan Mood Charleston Before 142.81 Charleston After 143.95 Change 1.14 Vero Beach Before 112.54 Vero Beach After 110.29 Change -2.25 Ratings Charleston Before 150.06 Charleston After 151.46 Change 1.4 Vero Beach Before 139.60 Vero Beach After 138.20 Change -1.4 I did this for all 10 games of my division tonight. The pattern held with Rating changes, and also the non-zero-sum pattern with Fan Mood. I invite all players to repeat my work and see if indeed they get similar results. Then please share your findings and thus validate or disprove the finding. Just how to calculate the change in fan mood I haven't figured out. I suspect some sort of ELO system similar to that used by Professional Chess, Jeff Sargrin College Football or Five Thirty Eight's MLB. If anyone has any ideas on how the computation of Fan Mood works, please share. Thanks in advance. Updated Thursday, April 23 2020 @ 6:50:41 pm PDT

#73524	05/12/2020 1:08:21 pm	Jul 9th, 2045
hurstdm Joined: 01/18/2017 Posts: 576 Murfreesboro Moo Cows V.3	Another bit of strangeness about "Fan Mood": The Moo Cows just played some middle round knockout stage Cup games with the New York Lancers. Both teams are in Legends League. The Moo Cow Rank is around #10. The Lancer Rank is around #2. These are two top tier teams, head-to-head, in an important Cup matchup. Apparently, the Fan Mood algorithm thinks these games are very important and losing them really lowers Fan Mood. Broken Bat fans do not like to lose Cup games. But if true, they sure don't bother to show up and attend Cup games. The Cowabungalow holds 49,000 fans. The attendance for these two high-powered matchups was 37,708 and 38,698. Why would this be true when our fans clearly value these games so much, according to Fan Mood? Shouldn't these be sellouts, especially if the Fan Mood algorithm gives Cup games heightened importance? Not only that, but the Cows are in the same league as the Lancers. We've played them 6 times in Murfreesboro already in 2045. Every single one of these games had higher attendance than our supposedly high-powered, high-steaks, head-to-head, crazy important, nail-biting Cup games: 44,380 41,871 47,023 46,407 45,682 48,011 I don't get it. Do the fans care about the Cup or do they not care?

#73561	05/13/2020 7:14:48 pm	Jul 16th, 2045
Ken_Kennilworth Joined: 11/26/2019 Posts: 405 Charleston Hawks Legends	@hurtsdm interesting points about attendance Cup Game v Legend Opponent--thanks for adding that piece to the attendance puzzle re: Fan Mood changes Cup v Regular season games--i hope you've seen my posts about the formula for fan mood changes for league games...and that Cup games use the same basic formula except that the resulting change is 1.5 times greater. So far, during the knock out Cup games, the 1.5 factor remains...perhaps the factor will increase for Cup quarter/semi/& finals? We will see... and for playoffs, the factor may be even greater (i suspect 2 times, but won't know until playoff time). re: attendance -- your games v Lancers are interesting...it appears cup games use the same attendance formula as a Division IV or III league game. from work i've been doing to figure out how game attendance is determined I think a couple of things may be true (aka my hypothesis on attendance): 1--there are floors (approximately 15,000 or slightly less if bad weather) and caps, (around 48,000 for top league, maybe more during playoffs)...these floors and caps were put in during 2015 (approximately 25 seasons ago?) 2 -- within the range between those floors and caps, a formula using fan mood, league level & perhaps team rating calculates a preliminary attendance, and then that preliminary number is modified for weather and some random fuzzy variance. the formula for preliminary is something like this: Fan Mood times 2000 + (6 - League Level) times 5000... alternatively it could be ((Fan Mood + Rating) times 1000) plus (6 - league level) times 5000... not sure which just yet, but some teams with high ratings and low fan moods seem to have greater actual attendance that the first formula would forecast. these formulas seem to give numbers that are usually within a thousand or two of actual game attendance for levels 2 through 5---level 6 low fan mood teams run into the floor, while Legends bump up against the cap...i'll admit the precision of these formulas is not good -- my looking into this area was to help with setting stadium size at the start of a season. anyway, your games v Lancers seem to fit the formula using level IV or III league levels...also my team played the Lancers in group play and i was looking forward to a share of a 50,000 fan gate for the two games in Lancer Park...i was disappointed it was only 30-32k for each okay, now for a devils advocate comment--your games v Lancers are bonus games and give your extra revenues (~$450,000) even though they are less than a league match. a smaller bonus gate is better than no bonus gate again, thanks for pointing out the seeming inconsistencies, the more we know, the better we can manage/perform Updated Wednesday, May 13 2020 @ 7:32:42 pm PDT