Promotions losing popularity too fast

[Hive]

I've been working on a september 1995 mod and is pretty happy about it except for one thing which I cannot seem to solve: the promotions drop way too fast and way too far when not human-controlled. Within 2-3 months, almost all companies fall to cult when managed by the AI - even WWF, who starts at the highest ranking. And I simply cannot fathom why, as I wouldn't say the workers are poor (they do sometimes tend to be used poorly though, but that's another strange matter). And the economy and industry levels are set to "high and falling" in the US. It's not all that hard to find success when controlling the promotions as a player. Any suggestions as to what could be done?

[Derek B]

Could be a few things. The most obvious is the ratings the promotions are getting. If their shows are rating low, then they are going to lose popularity quickly and then they are going to fall in size. Most obvious way to sort this is to increase the skills of the workers involved, as they are what are generating match ratings. Secondly, it could be down to poor bookers. A good booker might pull out ratings a couple of grades higher than a bad booker, so check the booking skills of head bookers. And lastly, regional importance. Promotional popularity is based on the popularity in each region multiplied by the importance of each region. If the importance of each region is low, then it will be hard to maintain enough importance in each region to maintain a high promotional size, so you could raise the importance of each region to compensate for all the promotions. It sounds like you might be suffering from the last one if all promotions are struggling. Look at the default Cornellverse for an idea of how high regions should be set and that should give you a good base to work from.

[Hive]

Thanks for the input, I will look into your pointers.

[G-Prime]

Worker overness might be too low also, or your products could be incorrect for the workers you have (WWF's roster would struggle in a Modern environment, ECW's would struggle in a Pure environment, etc)

[BurningHamster]

I had a similar problem when doing early tests for my 1996 mod and found that region importance was a big factor as was slightly underrating a lot of workers.

[Hive]

Well I've checked importance, and it's unchanged from the Cornell verse importance. So that shouldn't be it... It shouldn't be overness either, as I'd say that's pretty well-adjusted. The skills could perhaps be a bit higher, but the skills aren't a problem when I run the promotions myself. It's more than possible to set up good matches with the rosters available. About product settings, I'm not all that sure about what the various settings mean and what the differences between eg. 'modern' and 'traditional' are. I have more or less just used the product settings from the mod I built my own upon, and then just modified them slightly. Below is an example, the product settings for WWF. Feel free to comment on any perceived errors: [IMG]http://www.slargos.se/slarfor/uploads/post-2-1228741411.jpg[/IMG] Since it's easy enough for a player to succeed with the promotions, it could perhaps be the AI bookers being too poor. However, I'm unsure as how to improve them. The only booking settings I could find was in the 'business' category, and seemed to be limited to preferences and not skills. Or am I missing something...?

[BurningHamster]

I found for my mod I had to increase the importance levels a little, so they are a bit higher than they were in the Cornellverse. Could you try just bumping them all up 2-5 points and see if it sims any better? Your promotion settings don't look too bad. Mine are similar in my mod (just a lot of your low settings I have on none) and I find WWF and WCW despite being at war both remain about the same size. The other thing I would ask about is how are the stats in terms of overness? How popular are your workers and how big are you promotions? I found I had to bump the overness of a lot of my workers up a bit higher than I thought they deserved in order to make my game sim more accurately. I also had my promotions set at international and they usually remained about this level for a fairly long time.

[Derek B]

Booking reputation = booking skill. At least from a CPU point of view. The higher it is set the better the booker will perform and I've never noticed the value change over time. For major companies I would make sure that their head booker is set to at least 70 to be able to make them competent, more if you think the booker is actually very good. A quick guideline that I'd use would be to make sure all the workers in the main event of the major promotions are over enough to make a decent main event. I don't know the rosters of the time, but generally the entire main event scene of a promotion should be at least C+ over across the country... anyone lower than that would probably indicate a very weak main event scene, which might be what you are after. As I said, I don't know much about the rosters of the time.

[Hive]

[QUOTE=BurningHamster;538340]I found for my mod I had to increase the importance levels a little, so they are a bit higher than they were in the Cornellverse. Could you try just bumping them all up 2-5 points and see if it sims any better?[/QUOTE] I'm unsure quite how importance works. But are you saying it will be easier to get good results the higher the importance in the various regions is? Or am I misunderstanding? What's especially puzzling me is that the promotions' importance does not fall with their popularity. I played a test game as WCW where I raised my popularity from international to global while WWF fell from global to cult - yet they were still #1 promotion, because their importance stayed the same... :confused: [QUOTE]Your promotion settings don't look too bad. Mine are similar in my mod (just a lot of your low settings I have on none) and I find WWF and WCW despite being at war both remain about the same size.[/QUOTE] I first tried removing the war between them, as I thought that was running them to the ground. But it had no effect, the end result was still that both dropped to cult. [QUOTE]The other thing I would ask about is how are the stats in terms of overness? How popular are your workers and how big are you promotions[/QUOTE] WWF is global and WCW is international. Everything else in USA is cult or below. Interestingly enough, I have yet to see a promotion controlled by the AI increase it's popularity - only the other way around. [QUOTE]I found I had to bump the overness of a lot of my workers up a bit higher than I thought they deserved in order to make my game sim more accurately. I also had my promotions set at international and they usually remained about this level for a fairly long time.[/QUOTE] That's the thing: I feel that I already have the overness of many workers pretty damn high. If I tweak it up much more, I'll end up with half the roster of all companies being main eventers... I'll give you some stats: WCW has 8 guys with B+ or more popularity and WWF has 10. WCW has 10 guys with between C- and C+ popularity and WWF has 11. Shouldn't that be good enough...?

[Hive]

[QUOTE=derek_b;538349]Booking reputation = booking skill. At least from a CPU point of view. The higher it is set the better the booker will perform and I've never noticed the value change over time. For major companies I would make sure that their head booker is set to at least 70 to be able to make them competent, more if you think the booker is actually very good.[/QUOTE] I see. I thought the 'reputation' setting only determined his popularity in regards to getting hired in such a position. Thanks for clearing that up. Regardles, WWF has Pat Patterson with 89% respect and WCW has Eric Bischoff with 95% - so that shouldn't be the problem either. [QUOTE]A quick guideline that I'd use would be to make sure all the workers in the main event of the major promotions are over enough to make a decent main event. I don't know the rosters of the time, but generally the entire main event scene of a promotion should be at least C+ over across the country... anyone lower than that would probably indicate a very weak main event scene, which might be what you are after. As I said, I don't know much about the rosters of the time.[/QUOTE] As I wrote in my above post, I'd say I have plenty of workers who's over enough. This whole thing just really puzzles me. :confused:

[BurningHamster]

WWF probably shouldn't be global at this point, taking into account they were kind of in a down period and were pretty much only active in North America and the UK. It's hard to grow when you are already that big, but that's just my opinion. If all of your AI promotions are dropping in popularity maybe you are underrating skills, overrating the popularity of a promotion, or the importance for regions is hammering you. Possibly a bit of everything. I wish I could explain importance better, but the thing is that it doesn't influence match ratings but rather popularity. If you have 100 pop across the board in the US the game world will not read it as being 100 because each region has lower importance. If the importance of the Great Lakes is 85, then your popularity there is effectively only going to be 85 I believe? That is, you lose 15% of your popularity in that region and cannot ever get above the maximum level set by the importance. I think that's correct, but if I am wrong someone will surely correct me. Seriously, if all your promotions are shrinking try boosting the importance across the board and sim again. It's bit of a balancing act to get right, it took me quite a while just to prevent WWF and WCW from dropping to cult within the first couple of months but once you set it at the right level things will make more sense.

[bobinc]

Depending on the world importance settings there can be a fine line from Cult to global. You could maybe give these a try. Tweak with the importance of some of the US locations as that is where the 2 are based. Don't have to tweak all of them but you have to have some of them set pretty high. (Tri-state, South East) Based on how these are all set can make a big difference in the difference from cult-national-international-global. Maybe you want to to tweak the promotions overness. Play with the ranges as to what your game world considers high and low range for each level. Maybe the promotion needs to start with a bit less overness (example lower national rating instead of a higher one) to allow the matches to fit the size which they can then attempt to build upon. Maybe look at how the Cornellverse promotions are laid out and use it as a base to set up yours. It is sounding like the promotions may be right on the line of a size change and if they drop then they can workers and can start a bit of a spiral. Depending on the combination of settings you can have a global promotion fall to cult with 4-5 bad matches. Sometimes you have to tweak reality to fit the game not the game to fit reality. Can I suggest posting your game world settings and promotions popularity for the troubled ones? Might help some.

[Derek B]

Given that the champions are going to be headlining a lot of shows and are the focus of the promotion, show ratings will generally fall in line with the levels of matches they are capable of putting on. WCW would be Hogan or Giant I guess, so you are looking at guys with less than great in ring skills but some great entertainment skills and overness. If the WCW prodcut is rated more on performance than popularity, that is going to really hurt their show ratings because neither of those two are likely to be able to carry a good wrestling match, though Hogan should be fairly competent (like Liberty/James Justice in the default Cornellverse). WWF's World champion is Diesel, right? Well.... same argument as above really. He might be pretty over but his in-ring skills leaving something to be desired. Both companies are going to be suffering from having a relatively untalented champion, which will be dragging down main event matches and then entire shows as a result. So unless the CPU decides to switch to a better in-ring worker, or both companies have matches rated more on popularity than performance, neither is likely to succeed for long.

[Hive]

Thanks again for your responses people. I will drop WWF to international and add 2-3 points to importance to each region and then run another test. If that doesn't help either, I'll post more screenies with data that might help you guys pinpoint the faults. But for now, I'll try the importance tweak suggested by several of you. As for the main eventers, they're perfectly able to put up a good match. What guys like Hogan, Wight and Nash lacks in in-ring abilities, they more than make up for in star quality and overness. And if you use them right, they do stellar matches.

[Hive]

It seems the importance boost did the trick: in 4 months, both WCW and WWF rose to global size. Thanks for the help, guys! :) I still wish I could tweak the AI bookers, though... they really set up the weirdest matches. I'll give some examples from this test game I ran's WCW: They split up tag teams for no good reasons (I saw Knobbs and Saggs fight seperately or together with other people than each other) They join other people for no good reason (I saw WCW run a Hogan & Johnny B. Badd vs. Arn Anderson and VK Wallstreet match - among other things) They give lower end main eventers title matches (Arn Anderson received one vs. Hogan when people like The Giant and Ric Flair are available) ...and so on. I don't suppose there's any way to increase the logical skills of an AI booker...?

[eayragt]

Well, logical booking is not something that really happens in a Sports Entertainment feds. You can't always have the top two wrestlers fighting each other for championships, so "lower end" Main Eventers will get title matches. I mean, hell, CM Punk and The Great Khali have never really been popular enough to be Main Eventers in WWE, but both have had title runs. As for tag teams, I can see your point. Sometimes the AI seems to split up established teams, but at least if you're in a Tag Team you don't just get stuck there for your entire career - you do have the chance of breaking out as a singles star. It may be because the tag team members are growing further apart in popularity, or maybe the AI has identified varying "destiny" in the workers. Or due to something I've never even considered (perhaps the AI has turned one of them?). If I look back on the results when I'm booking, I do see some of the same features - less deserving wrestlers getting title shots, two men who recently feuded teaming up. I can justify them as I know why these were booked this way, and this is something that can't be done with the AI. Although maybe that's poor booking too :). Always possible

[Derek B]

Odd tag teams often happens because of the way the booking engine is written. When the AI is off to book a tag match, it selects one worker for one of the sides... then it looks to see if they have a regular tag partner, who they will then almost always pick if there is one. If there isn't a regular tag partner then the AI picks someone of an appropriate level to team with them. It's just that this is often a worker who actually is part of a regular team. It will then go on to pick their opponents, usually a team of similarly picked workers of a different alignment (where appropriate). In tag title matches the champs usually get picked first (I think) and the right kind of opponents are then picked. In tests for the draft game it was common for me to see a midcarder teamed with Miyamae go up against Shimedzu (no available regular partners left) and another midcarder. It made me sad... a lot, but I've tried to fill my midcard with teams on that to avoid such things happening. :)