Broken Bat - Bug Reports: Precipitous Drop in Fan Mood

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

Post ID	Date & Time	Game Date

#72300	03/27/2020 4:17:53 am	Nov 4th, 2044
PrivateSnowflake Joined: 01/06/2015 Posts: 1166 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 VI.5	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: 400 Charleston Hawks II.1	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 Florissant Falcons VI.21	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: 400 Charleston Hawks II.1	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: 400 Charleston Hawks II.1	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 VI.5	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: 400 Charleston Hawks II.1	@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