GM-RiP, Thanks. I agree more info is needed on the subject, and this subject peaks my interest too much to pass up the excuse to discuss it! I believe there is limited yet compelling evidence supporting some kind of a connection between PR managers and merchandising, and your observations further support that. You seem to be trying to support a different idea that rewards do not always scale with the purchase of a higher level PR manager. I'm trying to keep an open mind about how PR managers work, but I think what has already been observed is important.
As I recently discussed
(155171.3), I had increases to my merchandising week after week. Then on one week, I decided to make no other changes but to downgrade my PR manager. Immediately after the next financial update, I began to experience drops in merchandising that continued even though I maxed out my fan surveys and had a very good league and cup performance. Others have reported merchandising adjustments when changing PR manager levels, which gives me a greater confidence that there is likely to be an impact tied to this change. Although observations regarding the changes seem to vary, one thing that I have seen consistent in discussion is that people observe some kind of change to merchandising when changing PR managers. You just said you observed an increase to merchandising after downgrading the PR manager. Would you not agree that either a negative change or positive change is still a change?
Edit: Sorry, my post was long so I missed the follow up about the NT player which could reasonably have an impact. I can state however, that in my example no other changes were made, including purchase of players or anything before I observed my merchandise to drop.
Again, if we go by the game manual, the specialty of a PR manager can influence whether or not a game is won or lost. The manual also states that fan surveys affect both attendance and merchandising. It is therefore logical to conclude based on this additional evidence that there is at the very least, an indirect impact to merchandising by PR's with specialty. I can think of sensible reasons why we may be observing effects, but I won't speculate. Just because something isn't written in the manual or seem to be sensible though, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" - Carl Sagan
I think we would agree that there is a risk to investing in more expensive PR managers when so little is known on the topic. I don't mean to confuse the discussion here. I am just genuinely interested in anything more that might be discovered about PR managers. Thanks for your comments.
Last edited by bonespawn at 10/19/2010 12:49:39 AM