No rhyme or reason that I can find, but worth knowing.

[Ben E Lou]

Sometimes you can max out suite prices and get a small number of (evidently) really rich people to show up and make an absolute killing financially.

After seeing someone do this with success in a MP league, I did a bit of testing. It doesn't always work. In fact, often it's a complete disaster. It looks like 2/3 or more of the attempts at this end with no one showing up and a big fat zero in suite revenue. I checked all the obvious things like average income and fan loyalty, and didn't find anything to indicate when it might work.

The tough thing here is that those who've figured out the system are already bumping up prices there, so how would you legislate against it? I've been working working on something to help people with MP strategy recently, and I'd already written the section on ticket pricing up when I noticed this issue. Here's a teaser on the whole thing, and what I wrote a month or so ago about this:


TICKET PRICES

This is probably the most misunderstood mechanism in FOF, so I’ll highlight it. If your seats are full, you aren’t charging enough money, and you’re not maximizing your revenue. I have no idea if this is how the developer intended it to work, but this *IS* how it works, so you can either play the game the way you think it should work, or play it the way it *does* work. This is *especially* true when it comes to luxury boxes. I want somewhere around 60-75% of those filled per game. That’s where the real money rolls in. To give a specific example, in the WOOF 2021 season, we were #1 financials. We made 190.1M in suite revenue—by far the biggest revenue number we had-and our total profit was 214.3M, so basically our entire profit was from suites. Apart from QuikSand, who also kinda gets the financial thing (he was right behind me at 187.7M), the next-highest suite revenue was 142.0M. That #3 box-revenue team had the maximum number of luxury boxes (19,900), but he’s screwing around charging nickel and dime prices to fill every one of them for every game. I have only 7,500 boxes, filled 5,200 per game, and made over 30% more revenue. Let me repeat that: I had 5,200 boxes filled per game, the other guy had 19,900 boxes filled per game. I made 190.1M on my suites. He made 142.0M on his.

Some other helpful hints on these.
· Apart from luxury boxes and club seats, do *NOT* increase your prices very much anywhere else from year to year. People won’t come.
· You can increase your luxury and club prices significantly from year to year without losing many people, and you’ll increase your revenue quite a bit by doing so.
· Again, if luxury boxes are full, you’re not maximizing revenue. All that miscellaneous stuff like concessions that’s dependent on attendance is a drop in the bucket compared to what you can rake in from overcharging for your suites. The WOOF has a stadium with the maximum number of seats (99,900) that averaged 98,600 in attendance last year: they made a massive 21.4M in concessions. I made 14.5M with my 61,800 attendance. His 6.9M lead there doesn’t come close to the 77M lead I had over him in suite revenue.
· To set your prices, look at one of your home games from last year. If you’re setting upper deck and your upper deck seats were full or close to full last year, increase them. Here are my attendance figures from a recent home game in the WOOF, and how I’ll probably change my prices for next year based on them:
<center> <table bgcolor="#ffcc00" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2"> <tbody><tr> <td> Section
</td> <td> Attendance
</td> </tr> <tr> <td> Stadium
</td> <td> 61,100 (70,000 capacity)
</td> </tr> <tr> <td> Upper Deck
</td> <td> 14,300 (17,100)
</td> </tr> <tr> <td> End Zone
</td> <td> 11,200 (12,400)
</td> </tr> <tr> <td> Mezzanine
</td> <td> 6,700 (7,100)
</td> </tr> <tr> <td> Sideline Seats
</td> <td> 9,700 (10,900)
</td> </tr> <tr> <td> Club Seats
</td> <td> 14,200 (15,000)
</td> </tr> <tr> <td> Luxury Boxes
</td> <td> 5,000 (7,500)
</td> </tr> </tbody></table> </center> UD: Tiny increase. ($85-->$90)
EZ: Moderate increase ($95-->$110)
MEZ: Significant increase ($130-->$155)
SID: Moderate increase ($165-->$185)
Club: Significant increase ($410-->$445)
Luxury: Moderate increase ($400,000-->$450,000)

[imdashep]

Interesting stuff, will definitely take these into consideration

[Alan T]

There used to be a "bug" (feature?) in OOTP that was similar where you could set ticket prices to $2 million per ticket or something crazy and make a killing. There was a "floor" set that you would never have a completely empty ballpark so you just had to find what the floor was and then it was a mathematical exercise to exploit it. In most online leagues that type of thing ended up usually being against league rules until it was fixed.

[MIJB#19]

Something tells me people have to see it in action, and work, before they believe it.

It definately sounds like something in the gamy-but-near-impossible-to-reasonably-police area. What's actually more interesting here, with there being a max on what one can ask, is there a maximum salary cap figure the game allows?

Additionally, I understand it's a risk-reward thing, but as the salary cap rizes, doesn't the risk get smaller and smaller, while the reward will stay somewhat constant relative to the salary cap figure (higher odds to fill one of the 999 tagged boxes, less income relative to the salary costs)?

[Ben E Lou]

I think maxcap is 999,900,000 or something like that. (maybe 999,990,000...but you get the idea)

[Yoda]

9,999,000 is the max.

[Yoda]

Something tells me people have to see it in action, and work, before they believe it.

It definately sounds like something in the gamy-but-near-impossible-to-reasonably-police area. What's actually more interesting here, with there being a max on what one can ask, is there a maximum salary cap figure the game allows?

Additionally, I understand it's a risk-reward thing, but as the salary cap rizes, doesn't the risk get smaller and smaller, while the reward will stay somewhat constant relative to the salary cap figure (higher odds to fill one of the 999 tagged boxes, less income relative to the salary costs)?

http://www.younglifenorthdekalb.com/woof/ben/profit.php

The top team made more than rest of the top 5 teams combined.

[MIJB#19]

I think maxcap is 999,900,000 or something like that. (maybe 999,990,000...but you get the idea)So basically there's a way tolimit this by making the maximum people can ask tied to the cap figure. Since $9.99M is the max for luxury boxes, it can be related to the $999M cap figure. A cap figure of $200M could be tied to a max of $2.0M for the luxury boxes. You could do the same thing for the other ticket prices, <strike>whatever they are</strike>.

Upper deck, end zone, mezzanine, sidelines: max is 9,999
club seats: max is 999,999
luxury boxes: max is 9,999,000

[MIJB#19]

Interesting, when failing to draw any attendance during a season, there's still a minimum ticket revenue. Suite revenue, concessions and parking result in a big fat $0.

[Yoda]

Revenue sharing?

[MIJB#19]

I simmed about a dozen seasons with a non-increasing salary cap, starting out with all the ticket prices at the max. After a while I started reducing by 50% and it took 5 reductions from the max to make some money on tickets (aside from the aforementioned likely revenue sharing). Even winning back to back bowls didn't draw attandence. Sample size be damned, that $970M profit sounds like a hitting the jackpot.

[Ben E Lou]

Interesting, when failing to draw any attendance during a season, there's still a minimum ticket revenue. Suite revenue, concessions and parking result in a big fat $0.Playoffs?

[Ben E Lou]

I simmed about a dozen seasons with a non-increasing salary cap, starting out with all the ticket prices at the max. After a while I started reducing by 50% and it took 5 reductions from the max to make some money on tickets (aside from the aforementioned likely revenue sharing). Even winning back to back bowls didn't draw attandence. Sample size be damned, that $970M profit sounds like a hitting the jackpot.
First off, I'm fairly certain that the ability to charge maxprice and have anyone else is limited to luxury suites. Second, I'd say it's possible that overcharging the proles might cause an overall negative hit, thereby limiting the ability to get anyone to come to the luxury boxes, too. Third, did you equalize cities?(I did in the bigger test I ran.) When I tested it a couple of weeks or so ago by creating a test MP league and setting all 32 teams to max suite price only (left everything else as-is), around 8 or 9 of the teams got a small handful of people to show up in the luxury boxes, and of course made a huge profit.

[Ben E Lou]

http://www.younglifenorthdekalb.com/woof/ben/profit.php

The top team made more than rest of the top 5 teams combined.Actually that may or may not be entirely accurate. The unexpected high number somehow borked either the Utility Suite or FOF. The luxury suite number for HRS in-game is different from the figure in my database. I checked several other teams, and in every single instance, the db numbers matched the in-game numbers. Either there's a variable type that Greg is using to store the number that can't handle the amount of suite revenue that Wade made, or there's a calculation in FOF between the time it's stuffed in the fju file and the time it's output that's messing it up in-game, and Greg actually is showing the right number. (Given the fact that the variable type that Greg uses in the actual db is wayyyyy more than big enough to handle either number, my slight leaning is that FOF probably has a reporting bug here, fwiw.)

In any case, DBUpdater/Interrogator have him at $974.4M in suite revenue, while FOF is showing him at "only" $646.7M. His profit in the Utility Suite is showing at $898.0M. In-game, it's $571.2M.

[Firefly]

Very surprising info!

The only thing that bothers me about using it is the fact that, unless I'm imagining things again, home field advantage is stronger the more fans are in the stadium.

Even if I'm not imagining I saw a study that stated that, the impact might be very small in the W/L column, but maybe worth a win every few/several seasons?

[Ben E Lou]

Firefly, that's still an untested theory at this point. I did put it out there as a possibility. There are some signs that point to it as a possibility, but there's nothing conclusive.

[MIJB#19]

First off, I'm fairly certain that the ability to charge maxprice and have anyone else is limited to luxury suites. Second, I'd say it's possible that overcharging the proles might cause an overall negative hit, thereby limiting the ability to get anyone to come to the luxury boxes, too. Third, did you equalize cities?(I did in the bigger test I ran.) When I tested it a couple of weeks or so ago by creating a test MP league and setting all 32 teams to max suite price only (left everything else as-is), around 8 or 9 of the teams got a small handful of people to show up in the luxury boxes, and of course made a huge profit.Excellent point, I didn't level the playing field, I fooled around with a random NFL franchise. Your testing method sounds better.

Additional theory: could it be that the odds are also higher when coming off a fully loaded stadium than when your team is coming off a season with only 20K fans per game?