Subject: Questions & Answers

The rule is there to avoid cheating. Otherwise some people would make gamemasters' job very hard by creating new teams and buying from their better teams for ridiculous prices.

Except you don't start out with enough money to buy players at ridiculous prices...

4M for 25 year old OR200 player is a ridiculous price and with few players like that, you've already earned tens of millions which is a lot for low-division teams...

Why are we asked to specify whether we want to pull the goalie if losing in the last 2 minutes? Why would we NOT want to pull him if we were losing?

maybe because a 1 goal loss will be good enough to secure a playoff spot and you don't want to risk because losing by 2 goals would not get you through.

Ah, thanks. I sometimes forget how closely the hockey game is modeled after soccer.

Are sponsorship offers based purely on arena size, or also based on likelihood of actually filling those seats?

In other words, am I better off building a 15000 seat arena, if I can only fill 8000 seats, so that I can get better sponsorship offers? Or am I better off spending that money on improving my team & facilities, so that I can win more, so that I can sell out the seats I already have?

I have a 10,200 seat arena now, am not selling out. I'm building another 2500. I'm trying to figure if I should plan on building another 2500 next season, or if I should spend my money elsewhere.

The Arena is the most important part of the game. If you didn't start on day 1 with a decent to good team. Which is pretty much everybody.

And it's not even about the Media deal, but I'll cover that first. The Media deal, no matter how bad your team is, will always be enough to cover your Arena's daily expenses (this was Ziggy's or zomg's theory). At the beginning of my rebuild, the entire purpose of which was to build the Arena, I had the worst team in the league and the biggest arena by quite a lot. The Media deal ended up being short around 50k per week. That was with a terrible deal.

The real payoff is in ticket sales. Even though I had the worst team in II.1, I still led the league in ticket sales by a huge margin. Even though I finished 19th ahead of a dead team, I still made more money overall than anyone else in the league.

I don't remember the exact numbers, but as the the 3rd-4th best team in II.4 last season, I made over 300M. Just from the fans. It was something like 230M from tickets, 30M from Skyboxes and 40M from Souvenirs. That doesn't include any sponsors.

Thats all well and good, but it doesn't really answer my question (or I missed your point somewhere). If my arena isn't selling out, then I won't make any additional money in ticket sales. Whats the point of having a larger arena if there aren't enough warm bodies to fill it? (UNLESS, as I said, there is a benefit to sponsorship deals, if they are based more on POTENTIAL attendance rather than REAL attendance).

So again... am I better off making my team BETTER, so more people come to my games, so that they fill the existing seats... or am I better building more seats with the knowledge that eventually, someday, they will come?

Sorry Media deals are based on Potential attendance. But the real attendance will come if you are building bigger stands. I prefer to get to building Triples asap.

Just from what happened during my rebuild, I think attendance is based on a % of the available seating. As an example, if you have 100 seats, then 50 people might show up to watch a bad team. If you have 10,000 seats, then 5,000 will be there.

THAT, is precisely the answer I was looking for. Seems like an odd formula.. not sure I follow the logic there... but so be it. Full steam ahead with the stands then. Thanks!

Stands are the way to go. I built to 20,000 at the end of last season and am in a great spot. I average under 17,000 per game with the new penalties for playing VL, but the media sponsor still pays for my weekly expenses like Tujague said. Actually I get more from media than my weekly expense. On top of that, I get over $8 million/ game based on that average alone. Selling out I rake in about $10 million/ game between tickets and merch. Go for the stands.

Helps when you sell guys for 87M

That helps no matter what you're trying to do with your team. It has no impact on attendance, however.

Yeah, I remember voicing the theory that the media deal would always at least cover expenses, and it just about does even in the worst case scenario of a huge arena in a low league. Ticket sales are just pure profit on top.

I think attendance follows a more complicated formula than just % available. It seems to work more like a certain minimum number will attend (if you've got room for 'em all) based on team OTRs and time of the season and so forth, and then you can gain an additional % attendance boost if you've got extra room.