Similarly to what I did with the star players I’d like to use this topic to give you an overview of how the morale system is going to work in its initial form. These are the main concepts:

1) Player morale will initially only be affected by official match participation. A player must have played a reasonable amount of minutes in a match (not 100% sure but I think this is around 35 minutes) to consider he participated in that match. If a player was not eligible to a match due to suspension or injury he will not have any impacts in his morale for not playing.
2) Only human managed teams will be affected by player morale, CPU teams are not smart enough yet to do this (they can’t manage even manage stamina yet, but they will)
3) Goalkeepers and youth players will not be affected
4) Each player will get its own morale profile and they get more demanding as they get older, meaning you have to use them more often in official matches to keep them happy
5) From a Neutral morale, after a minimum number of matches has passed (this minimum can be 1) the morale may transition to either Good or Bad depending on the player profile and how often he has played
6) After a minmum number of matches (higher than the minimum for the item above), the player morale may become Critical if he has not played enough
7) Players with Good morale level get a small performance bonus during a match. Similary, players with Bad or Critical morale get a small penalty
8) Players with Critical morale will be automatically transfer listed and the transfer price will its estimated values times a multiplier defined in his morale profile
9) Players with Critical morale cannot be removed from the transfer list
10) Players with Critical morale cannot have their transfer price increased above the value determined in item 8
11) Players with Critical morale will not renew their contracts
12) Getting the player morale out of critical will require a much greater effort than if you manage it properly between the three other levels. A player must play at a frequency corresponding to what would make his morale level Good in order to go out of Critical and back into Neutral (basically a morale reset).
13) Managers get one generic message in a turn where the morale of one or more of his players changes from Neutral into Bad
14) Managers get one message for each player whose morale reaches Critical level
15) Once a player is transfered his morale is reset to Neutral
16) Once a manager leaves a team all the players have their morale reset to Neutral
17) Morale level will be displayed in the player info screen and in a new Morale tab in the team players views
18) Player limit for teams will be increased to 40

Phew! I hope I haven’t left anything out. My intention is to have a trial period where the new system is activated with three changes from the above:
a) Critical morale players WILL accept contract renewals
b) Critical morale players transfer price will be ridiculously high
c) Player limit for teams will remain as 30

Once the trial is over all morale levels will be reset and all the “real” rules apply. This trial period should give managers a good idea of how each player morale varies according to their match participation and will give everyone a chance to provide us with feedback. Remember the intention is to make it harder for teams to just hoard great players without really using them. If you have a squad full of older players you will have to rotate them properly so nobody gets upset. And now younger players that were just sitting back waiting for his skills to be high enough to be selected will also have to be used every now and then or they will just want out!

I’m really excited about this, I hope you guys enjoy it when it’s on :-)

Let’s do it! Looking forward to the new changes

1) Player morale will initially only be affected by official match participation. A player must have played a reasonable amount of minutes in a match (not 100% sure but I think this is around 35 minutes) to consider he participated in that match. If a player was not eligible to a match due to suspension or injury he will not have any impacts in his morale for not playing.

If I got taken off after 35 minutes in a game my morale would go down, not stay the same.

I think it depends on the player. If we are talking about an experienced player I agree, but if we are talking about a young player that is yet to prove his worth he would be more than happy to have played 35 minutes. I’ll consider this a future enhancement to the system to make the minimum number of minutes played variable based on some parameters.

Instead of the player with critical morale being instantly TLed, I’d suggest the system used in the old Championship Manager:

- Unsatisfied player ASKS to be Transfer Listed
- If he is not TLed, or TLed by an unreasonable amount, he becomes so annoying that his behavior disrupts the whole locker room – i.e., the whole team morale goes down
- The player does not renew his contract (as point 11 above)

My point is: it is very unrealistic for a player to be automatically TLed. However, it is realistic for the player to so much pressure to the point that is better not to have him in the squad. Yet, you still have more than only 3 ticks to get his morale back

PS: one alternative would be TLing the player only at season end, rather than automatically at any time. This is even more realistic…

Another feature from CM that I liked was setting expectations – you hired the player saying whether he would be your star, an important player, or just to add depth to the squad. The more important the role, the more likely you were to hire the player – but you’d better fulfill the promise, otherwise the player would get upset soon.

The point here is: I have some players in my team that are far from being as important as other ones (even some old ones), and that should be OK, as long as this was agreed upon beforehand. I don’t want to rebuild all my reserve squad every year because they do not play enough, and they don’t want to look for a job every year…

Btw, most people prefer sitting on the bench of a great team than playing every match for an OK one…how is club ranking going to play a role here?

Thanks Fabio, I like you suggestions, I’ll add this to the existing task to enhance the system in the future. We’ll release the morale system without it so we can have it working earlier and if it proves to be too harsh during the trial period we can tweak it down a little bit…as long as it doesn’t become too easy ;-)

bq/ If we are talking about an experienced player I agree, but if we are talking about a young player that is yet to prove his worth he would be more than happy to have played 35 minutes.

I think personally that there needs to be a difference between playing 35 minutes as a sub and starting the game and being taken off before half time. I am assuming that this is not modelled at the present. I think that morale would improve if you were a young player that came on in the 55th minute and player for 35 minutes, but I still think that if you started the game and played 35 minutes and then the manager took you off 10 minutes before half time your morale would go down.

I got an alert with bad morale player, but i don´t know who he is… i don´t see any view with that info, can you help?

Go to Players, next to where you see Statistics you can now see he Morale

I thought it was a bit harsh to start with – some players that played last league match (before the system was on) are already with Bad morale because they did not play an international match in which I used the reserves. 1 match and they are complaining already? They are part of my first squad!

“18) Player limit for teams will be increased to 40”

When will this be introduced?

@Sniff I agree, this needs to be modelled more realistically in the future
@Fabio the bad morale after not playing just one match only happens for older players and it’s more an alert that such players are the more demanding ones. You’ll see that if you play him next match he will be neutral again
@Dimitri after the trial period when critical morale players stop renewing contracts and are transfer listed for more reasonable prices

So does this mean that I must play the same 11 players, and have the same 3 substitutes, for every single game?

My best striker has bad morale, but I have kept him mostly out of my league games and played him in every cup game to ensure his has high stamina.

To ensure good morale, do I just pick 14 players total, and play them to death now?

That is a good way to ensure bad morale for the players who won’t be playing any games.

From my personal experience it hasn’t been too bad so far, but that’s mostly because the players I have in Critical are the ones I’m not interested in keeping anyway. I have been trying to manage the ones I want to keep that are currently with bad morale to make sure it is manageable when things are for real. From the calculations I’ve done when creating the morale profiles if you have a large squad comprised solely of oldish players you would have to rotate them fully just to avoid them going into critical. That kind of makes sense as in reality you would have a mix of players from different ages, in which case you would probably try to manage them in a way that the ones you don’t use often but want to keep are just played occasionally to prevent them from going into critical.

Anyway, enough said for now, let’s see how things go :-)

I have a few players with Critical morale going to TL now!

I thought we were on trial mode – so I was actually testing how long it takes for them to get to Critical!!!!

What now???

Nevermind – just saw the TL prices are ridiculously high…

I don’t understand why players with critical morale are being transfer listed at silly prices. Surely the manager should decide if the player is listed, not the player?

The player is transfer listed as per the board decision so he does not disrupt the mood of the whole team. Currently there is no actual disruption, but this is to simbolize that. In a future enhancement of the morale system we may stop the automatic transfer list and cause some actual disruption instead so it would be in your best interest to actually transfer list the player instead of just leaving him there.

Regarding the silly prices they are there just for the trial period. When the changes are in for real it would be a tenth of what you see now, which is actually affordable by the biggest teams at the moment. You can always change the price to be lower than that limit if you really want to get rid of the player.

I agree with sniff. It is too hard. The morale scheme was introduced few ticks ago and took over like a hurricane.

a player sits for 1 game = bad moral…wheres he had good

games not being improved…but being further broken… 1st negotiations then came moral which is stupid because theres no way to praise players who perform well…and if 1-2 games sitting = bad moral then its dumb

I agree it is too hard so we can tweak it a bit, reset morale and continue the trial. I’m open for suggestions on the following (assume I’m asking about an experienced player, 30+ years old):

1) How many matches should the player wait initially before evaluating his match history and switching morale to either good or bad? This setting is currently 1, 2 or 3 depending on profile.
2) How many matches should the player wait initially before evaluating his match history and switching morale to critical if he hasn’t been playing enough? This setting is currently between 5 and 10.
3) What is the percentage of matches that would make the player morale good? Most demanding players have this set to 66% at the moment, needs to play 2 out of 3 matches on average
4) What is the percentage of matches that would make the player morale bad? Most demanding players have this set to 50%, 1 out of 2 matches on average
5) What is the percentage of matches that would make the player morale critical? Most demanding players have this set to 33%, 1 out of 3 matches on average

@Davison: we’l’l continue breaking it further until we get it right, that’s why I’ve come up with the trial for morale

My two cents on it:
1) 3,4 and 5
For all the rest, I think if the stamina for the player is too low (below 80) the morale should not be affect if the player is on the bench. You are giving then a well deserved rest.

Maybe all players should evaluate their matches halfway through the season and again at the end of the season?

I do agree that morale changes too quickly, some of my players have played 25+ games this season and have bad morale.

I don’t believe we should get a message saying about morale either, I get one every few turns now! Lol

How many matches does a player with bad or critical morale needs to play, to “restore” is morale?

Like someone already mentioned, maybe the speed that players get bad morale is higher than expected.

Can the morale feature be represented like the player skills? So it’s visible when looking at other skills, rather than having to click on each player to see their appropriate moral levels?

sounds good gabriel lol you know ill stick through it all… just quite frustrating tbh… thankfully i have managersim whom seem to have sorted themselves out quite well atm…but i still think this game could be better than MS….but needs to add the simular features ms has and expand on it… ill be patient ( but still will voice/vent my opinion)

i dont think a player should complain about being benched if 1) low stamina 2) poor work ethic 3) loses to many games when on pitch

this is why i think a praise system is necessary…as well as a punish system…. play well manager has option of giving that individual player a lil $ bonus check
play shittyass and the manager has option to suspend player from pay…. too many cards….poor performance…ect

So what happens when u dont have any players left to field a full team cos the way its going i wont have any players left becos half my team is being force sold and more will follow!

Young players should not be affected by the morale issue in the same way. They are happy with the contract and will wait patiently for any opportunity in the line-up. Another issue is the pace of reducing the morale to bad. Injuries, suspensions, overall team success should be included. Although, participating in friendlies should lower the pace of decreasing morale, but friendlies are not welcome anymore in this game.

Even though most of you haven’t replied directly to my questions this is great feedback! I’m working on something else and once I’m done I will reset the morale trial with less demanding parameters so we can re-evaluate. I’ll also add some of the feedback below to the planned enhancements to the morale system. Individual replies:

@Samir: good point on stamina, this is not currently taken in consideration

@Joseppi: not sure if we want to wait that long to evaluate morale, I prefer the every match evaluation especially on MediumTicker where a season takes 48 “real” days

@Rui: the first time the player alerts he’s in bad morale he should get back to neutral by playing a single match, that was one of the things I considered in the calculations. If we adjust the numbers though I won’t guarantee that will be the case. To give you a real example, let’s say the player tells you after one match that he is in bad morale and his profile requires 50% of match participation to be in neutral. If you play him in the next match he’ll go back to neutral, but then if you don’t play him in the following one he’ll go back to bad. This is the most extreme example we have at the moment. Restoring critical morale is much harder as the rule is he needs to play at a good morale level just to be back to neutral. Example, let’s say a player is in critical morale after not playing 5 matches and he requires to play 66% of matches to be in good morale. You will need to play him in 10 matches in a row (so he will play 10 out of 15) to get him out of critical and back to neutral. When that happens, the morale is basically reset meaning the history is lost and starts the counter again.

@Sniff: we ddin’t want to pollute the main player skills tab even more, that’s why I’ve added a morale tab. Maybe if we color code the player name itself in the player skills tab it would help?

@Davison: 1) agreed 2) what do you mean by that? 3) we can certainly factor in the match result to simulate the fact that the player realizes he’s not ready yet to be playing if he is losing too much when on field

@Northstar: hopefully we won’t get to that, certainly not during the trial. Once we reduce the demands and restart the trail we can re-evaluate, but we don’t want that scenario to happen!

@Dr. Gullit: they already have a less demanding profile but I agree we need to make all profiles even less demanding. Injuries and suspensions are already taken into account and morale is not reduced if the player was ineligible for a match.