I don’t want to be the person that is always complaining, but I’m still not convinced about the implementation of morale at present.

I am currently having to sell 3 of my 20 year old players, who according to my scouts will be brilliant players. I have to sell them though as they are currently not good enough to play and so have developed critical morale. So therefore they won’t re-sign a contract. This is not a bug, this is how morale has been implemented, they don’t get game time, so they’re not happy, fair enough.

My question is, how can a manager keep a player like this? Essentially I am hurting my team’s prospect in the long run, to maintain the relative success that the club is currently achieving. I’m not asking for a morale reset or anything like that, but I am wondering if morale can be implemented in a slightly different way. For example morale levels dependent on player age. So young players are affected a lot less by not playing, whereas older players would be affected more, due to their careers coming to an end and so wanting to make the most of the playing time they have left. Then maybe a morale level for 25-30 year olds or similar. I think what I’m asking for is tiered morale levels dependent on player age.

At present it seems to me to be virtually impossible to keep all players happy and win games and be successful. I could be wrong, I have been before and will be again, but feel I should air my views. I would also be interested to see what others think, both managers and developers.

I do think it is hard to keep young players happy when playing in tough leagues.

My teams are in South America which has relatively easy continental cups (at least during the group phase), so I have been managing to give my youngsters some field time. I realize this is much harder in Europe, especially if you are playing in the most competitive leagues (Spain, England, Portugal…)

My suggestion is make rules for them to play after the 55th min if you are winning by 2-3 goals…and yes, there is some risk involved there

What I do think would be quite helpful is to have a more active loan market – that would probably strengthen computer teams and give our youngsters a higher morale. Especially on Fast Tick there are 90+ players listed on loan that are simply unwanted!

I currently ignore morale for 17/18/19 year olds, 20 year olds I try to give games or loan out. But I also think it is (too) hard to avoid critical morale for young players.

I’m playing in Spain and I don’t find morale too hard, maybe if you have 10 youngsters -20 yo, but I can manage it.

I have 3 young defenders, they played 7 – 9 games and have neutral morale. Let them play 35 minutes against lower ranked teams. They won’t be critical anymore.

Morale is already tiered and based on player age. We have 3 different morale tiers, one for the youngest players, one for middle aged players and one for old players. The older the player more demanding they are.

The differences between the tiers are:
-critical percentage: below this number the player morale becomes critical
-bad percentage: below this number the player morale becomes bad
-good percentage: above this number the player morale becomes good
-minimum number of matches before the player morale goes out of neutral
-minimum number of matches before the player morale can go to critical
-negative influence when the player morale is critical

Even within tiers that are small differences to increase the diversity of player behaviour. On top of that, players that are below the current squad quality level receive a small percentage on their morale even without playing, to represent their acknowledgement that they are not quite ready yet. I see two things that could change to further adjust morale, we can either increase this percentage players receive even when not playing or reduce the requirements of the youngest player tier to make it even harder for them to go to critical.

Either way, I don’t want to make it too easy so you don’t even have to think about it but I want to make it closer to reality. I tend to agree that the way it is it is hard to maintain a nice pool of young players for the future without them going to critical. A youth team playing their own competition would solve that ;-)

Could you check morale of Casado (Sevilla – mediumticker)? He played 3 of 4 matches and went to bad morale. How is that possible?

The match history for morale does not go away from one season to the next, so it’s not only about 3 out of 4 this season. It all looks fine regarding the calculations, I guess it’s just this piece of information that you were missing :-)

Cheers

I’m confused why my players morale in the fast ticker is so horrible. I have played pretty much the same team (if possible) all season, yet everyone, even players that have played every available game seem to hate me! Is it just a personal thing? :)

I believe you’re the first one (or at least the first one to voice it) that has fallen into the trap of allowing multiple players to go into critical. When we changed the behaviour of critical players so that they were not automatically transfer listed we also made them negatively impact the morale of other players. That is fine if you have just few critical players, but once you’ve got a high number others will go into critical much easier in a domino effect.

Looking at the effect now for the first time in practice it feels a bit harsh. In order to prevent this you should have either addressed the morale issue once it appeared or get rid of critical players once their number started to go out of control. I’m not saying you can’t get out of it now, you probably can, but it will require selling/loaning out most of your squad by the looks of it.

Ok, that is fair enough, I haven’t managed the squad well at all. But on a positive side, I’ve not lost the plot and it’s not spite that is causing it. Guess I’ll have a clear out!

Why are GK’s excluded from morale? They seem to be the only people I can keep happy, maybe I should get 11 of them!

Well, most clubs in real life use only one GK for years and only use subs if their main one is injured. Given that, it seemed unfair to have them complaining in RubySoccer of lack of playtime. Maybe after the new player evolution model is in place we can come up with a way to have morale for GKs.