facilities declining, is it a bug?

[cmorehouse2001]

Currently 9 years in and have spent the last 4 years with Oregon state. I've noticed that with every school I stay with the facilities grade goes down half a letter grade regardless of how much I spend on facilities. I always spend above the expected budget on facilities. I spent 45k on the OSU C ranked facilities, and it went down to C- the next year. I'm trying to spend the same amount again on facilities, but I don't know if I'm missing something? I haven't been able to get the board to upgrade the facilities.

[jolo240]

Facilities always decline eventually, no matter how much you spend within or above the expected budget allocation. This gives a bit of realism to the game.

[C-Bailey24]

Facilities always decline eventually, no matter how much you spend within or above the expected budget allocation. This gives a bit of realism to the game.

I don't see the realism. If i'm spending above the suggested amount then facility quality should be at least maintained. If i'm spending waaayyyyy above then shouldn't that be the equivalent to improving your facilities in some way? You hear about school's doing this all the time.

[nuwildcat]

Is there any reason to spend more than the expected amount on facilities?

[ezcar]

It is true that all facilities decline. BUT, in this case it should be maintained if you are spending Adequately on the facility. I can see spending more if you want even better upgrades. Thus declining wouldn't make sense in that case.

[Gary Gorski]

Ok lets break this down so everyone has a better understanding of how facilities work in the game.

You have a facility grade - the only way to improve that grade is to ask the board to upgrade the facilities. If you could improve the facilities just by overspending then everyone would easily get the facilities up to A+. The facilities also can drop after any season to simulate that things break down, get old, fall apart, technology moves ahead and so forth. Again if this did not happen every school would just eventually end up with A+ facilities. Your facilities also will decline if you do not allocate the minimum amount to them - remember allocating the minimum amount is doing the bare minimum to prevent them from falling into disrepair.

You have to think of it in terms of you have an entire facility with many different parts to it. If you ask for a facilities upgrade and you go from a B to a B+ think of that as the board authorized a brand new weight room. The next year it drops to a B and you're like what happened - we just did a facility upgrade but what happened is that while you upgraded the weight room and improved your overall facility grade you've been watching game film in a classroom on a projector and computer that hasn't been upgraded in the past decade and it's really falling behind technology wise so your facility is just back to being a B. If you are fortunate to get a major jump like moving from a C to a B in one upgrade consider that something big - you added a new wing onto the athletic facility with a new practice court and locker room and stuff like that.

So with that lets talk spending on them - what does it do? As I stated if you don't spend the required amount your facilities can decline but if you're supposed to spend lets say 30,000 just to keep them up how could spending an extra 10,000 really improve anything? That's peanuts when it comes to talking about renovating something. What spending extra does do is differentiates your facilities. If you and another team have B facilities and you spend 15,000 on amenities and they spend 10,000 then your amenities will be worth more to a recruit than the other team even though you both have B facilities. Think of it as plussing what you have. You took that extra 5 grand and bought a pool table to put into the game room at the facility while the other school just spent the minimum to keep up their game room. Does having a pool table turn a B facility into a B+? No of course not, it just makes your B better than their B.

The same holds true in the other areas - spending more means your facility impact is better than some other school with the same facility. Now if you're spending 25,000 with a B and an A school is only spending 15,000 the A facility is still going to hold more weight so it cannot overcome large gaps in the facility grades but that is the purpose of spending more than the bare minimum.

[NCAAhoops]

Thanks Gary for the explanation. I guess I didn't have a full understanding myself after reading this.