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As well, you can also look at the opportunity cost to stay in the league, since that's probably going to be lower than demoting if you can pull it off. Looking at Naismith and the NBBA, teams sitting in 6th-7th don't have too incredibly high of records. Heck, depending on the conference, it wouldn't be hard to make 5th or even 4th with a losing season.

It's far more trouble than it's worth to try and rebuild those teams and compare salaries from last season, but how much on average would it take to build your roster a little to be able to come in 6th or 7th instead of 8th? If you can build just enough to survive relegation then you don't have to worry about angry fans the next season and you can keep on moving in your league bringing down that extra TV contract the next year.

The team that had demoted from Div. 1 to 2 last year rebuilt their fan base after about half the season as they won almost all of their games. I think there is no question that you are better off promoting even if you demote the year after.

I still don't think it's an accurate representation of fan response, though. If a new team that has promoted every season in its existence makes it to a very high level and then gets demoted, it's a bit unreasonable that all their fans would suddenly abandon them. My issue with the fan support system in general is that there's no adjustment for difficulty. A 12 season-old team in a country with 23 active teams gets as much of a bonus for promoting into their premier league as a 5 season old team would making a run from a tougher country's DV to their top league. And you as a manager might feel good about yourself for starting poorly and scrapping thing together to make a run/sneak in as the 4 seed in a really tough conference, but your fans consider the season a failure.

I don't see the relevance of promotion/demotion figures. There are clearly several situations (especially pro leagues, but some stronger IIs) where a team has no realistic chance of staying up, but gets penalized for even trying. This also doesn't address the upstart team who promotes and barely stays alive as a #5 or #6 seed, which should be considered a great success but is considered a failure by the fans. These situations get blanketed by majority success in your numbers, but they exist.

Did you fully consider all of these situations before implementing the change? Because I see a lot of managers realizing they're suddenly screwed, despite being extremely successful, because of this change. The fan survey, as it stands, is irrational and unrealistic if it doesn't consider league strength. (It considers a manager's "effort to improve the team," so the competitiveness variable exists already!) It seems as if this discussion is exposing the fact that the fan survey isn't nearly comprehensive enough to reflect reality. I'm not sure how much you looked into this, or how many theoretical situations you looked at (case-by-case, not with general percentage stats like those you provided). But the floor probably needed an altered fan survey as a companion.

As it stands, maybe it's only 5%-10% of managers who are screwed by this change, but that's still a large number.

Last edited by RiseandFire at 4/26/2011 10:52:42 PM

Uh. Where did I say that other countries should be punished?

Yeah, it doesn't even out at all. We've been playing for almost the exact same amount of time, yet you have a twenty-three thousand seat arena. It is a known thing that teams starting out in a small country have accelerated economic growth. Cool, that's great. I really don't care about that. What I care about is how unresponsive fan support is to league difficulty. If I'm in the toughest DIV league in my country, and I make the playoffs as a first year team, I should at least sell out my playoff games, no? If I pull an upset of the one seed an advance to the second round, I should probably see an increase in fan support, right? As currently constructed, these things don't happen (and if they are accounted for, the effect is so minor as to be negligible).

Still, nowhere in my post did I say that I want teams from other countries penalized. All I want is for fan support to react realistically.