I think a manager playing the game once a day must have the chance to manage his players morale. With an evaluation after 1,2 or 3 games this isn’t possible. I would make it 3,4 or 5 (at least for fastticker).
Do you take stars into count? A player playing on the same position as Messi or Ronaldo wouldn’t complain as much as a player who knows he has the same qualities.
A player knowing there are a couple of players better on his position?

What happens when you are on holiday? What happens with players who come back after loaned out?

Many questions but we are in a testing phase anyway.

An 18 year old player should be happy if he can play a few games in a season, I think?

Stars and relative quality are not taken into account yet. When you are on holiday morale will still be calculated the same way so you will have to plan ahead your squad rotation or ask someone else to babysit your team (as long as you let me know in advance). Loaned out players will still have their morale calculated based on the matches they are playing or missing in their loan team and when they’re back the calculations will continue on the owning team as usual, seamlessly.

In the first few years as a professional the player expectations will be lower. They already are in fact but certainly higher than they should be. I’ll do some changes and a reset on morale soon.

My 20 year old players are all critical now and I can’t loan them out cause no one will take them!

Anyway I wanted to make a suggestion.

Would it be possible to add more morale in? Eg, instead of only Good,Neutral,Bad and critical, would it not be better to have Very happy, Happy, Good, Neutral/Content, Poor, Very unhappy, Critical.

This way you might have more time before players become critical and would be easier to manage, although not really easy.

I like Joseppi’s suggestion

I also think it is critical to have clear roles for the players by setting expectations – age is far from being enough (and stars level is a good but not sufficient proxy). When you buy a player or renew the contract you set the role the player will have on the team (star, important, backup, youngster) and the morale would be affected by this. This should be fairly straightforward

When in a competitive bidding process, players should choose the team they are going to play in based in a combination of contract terms, team ranking and playing role (this is harder to create…)

Let’s see if you need extra levels once I change the parameters and reset the morale, I’m thinking it will be easier to manage. And we are definitely going to add the expectations thing when negotiating with a player, that makes a lot of sense! But that will come in a future enhancement, for now I just want to introduce the system in a manageable but interesting enough way ;-)

Well yet again ive started negotiations to renew a contract and offered 3k wage increase as my first offer. The player has cancelled negotiations straight away saying im too far away from what he wants even tho i havent a clue how much he wants. Now i cant even try again and so im now going to loose the player! Its really getting beyond a joke Gabriel!!

Wrong topic but I can reply anyway. 3k increase is too little, just have a look at similar players and it will give you a reasonable clue. I’m already working on a new investment area that will suggest a wage in the contract offer screen so you have a starting point.

I dont even know why uve changed the way contracts are renewed becos there was nothing wrong with the way it was. You started negotiations with an opening offer, they came back to you with what they wanted and u then had a choice of either continuing to negotiate or offer them what they wanted which was then accepted. Now u dont know what they want and if u dont hit on the right number they cancel negotiations and u have no option to try again. That is plain stupid and unrealistic. Yes the new investement area will perhaps help but shud of been implemented with the contract changes so that managers arent loosing players right left and center.

Both the contracts and moral changes should of been tested first to make sure they work properly and fairly rather than just thrown into a live game were they are now messing up peoples teams.

As I usually say, the rules are the same for all so you’re not the only one losing players. That’s not to say the rules are good as they are, it’s just to reiterate that nobody is being treated unfairly. The reason to introduce such change was to make contract negotiations something to give some thought about instead of simply offering any wage to start with and wait for the player to reply. There is no fun in that at all and it is also unrealistic as the players had very little say in the process. Now if you give him something that he consider far from his expectations he will have a say.

Morale was introduced as a trial exactly for this reason, so it doesn’t negatively impact anyone while it’s being tested. Unfortunately RubySoccer is not our real work at the moment so we cannot invest as much time as we’d like to thoroughly test all new features. We rely on live tests more often than not.

This morale rule is horrendous, I am going to be left with no decent squad players, two more want to leave, I had to loan out some of my squad. How are you supposed to keep up and coming players and field your best team also? Not for me I’m afraid. I can understand if these are playing no games at all, surely the friendlies must count for something? I will have to use youth players for injuries and red cards :(

Yeah there’s def still improvements to be made, morale changes far too quick most of the time.

I really liked both player morale and contract renewal changes. It makes player relation to the team more challenging, before this we could say players were like robots, used them as we wished and they would always behave the same…

In real life, if you dont plan to use a player, you either loan or sell him, in RS we can do this any time in the season…

Id happily loan players out however no club ever wants to loan my players even when they have good stats!

Glad to see this back to life after trial phase 2 started. First of all let me reinforce that nobody is at risk of losing their players during the trial, they will still renew their contracts even if they are at Critical morale level and I doubt anyone will pay the transfer price currently being set. That said I’ll give my directed responses as usual:

@midcheshire: don’t worry about losing players just yet, we will announce when morale is there for real and reset the values once again. Regarding friendlies…no, they don’t count for morale.

@Joseppi: from a starting point (when morale is reset or a player joins a new team for example) it takes between 3 and 5 matches for the player to first evaluate his match participation and his morale to move accordingly to Good or Bad and it takes between 7 to 12 matches for the player morale to go to Critical if he has not played enough in that period. From that point onwards each match will be included in the calculations and the morale may change after every match. Remember this is done as “percentage of last x matches that I’ve played”.

@Filipe: took the words from my mouth…or from my fingers in this case

@Northstar: as I’ve pointed out in a different topic and poll, there are too many good players so I think most teams end up hiring instead of loaning. I’ve changed the player generation process to rectify this, but it will take some time to see the results as existing players start to age. CPU teams may loan some good players but then we may have another issue related to how they evaluate if a player is good for their squads…this is going to improved soon.

Is this second phase of the trial any better? I feel I’m able to control morale a bit better…I still have 2 critical players that I wish were not critical but that’s because I didn’t setup my team properly over the weekend and used my default formation in most matches. I still have to field some really unskilled players from time to time so that they won’t go to critical, but that should be ok.

I have some additional ideas to put in place (apart from what has been suggested already) but I want to have further feedback before either starting the morale for real or starting a trial phase 3.

How about the idea (slightly borrowed from FM) that when you sign a player you can offer them a certain squad status. The squad status would then relate to their morale level. So if you sign a player and say they will be a first team player then never play them their morale will go bad very quickly, but if you signed a youth and said they’d be a squad player or a potential future player their morale would go down at a much slower rate from not playing.

At present it appears that morale is implemented on a linear scale, having different squad status’ would possibly make this more manageable for managers.

Comparing with the 1st trial phase, the 2nd trial is much better … However, I am very happy with the morale situation for the younger players which are lowering morale still too fast.

@Sniff: we’ll introduce the squad status thing in a later stage, but it’s definitely a great idea. Morale is not really linear, we have three different stages based on player age, within those stages it is somewhat linear, but the percentage of matches played demanded is very different between different stages.

@Dr. Gullit: agreed, I’ll wait a few more days and inroduce additional changes for a 3rd and final trial

Again another dimension added to the game. I’m anxoius to find out how it will be when it’s for real.

For totally newbies it will be strange at the beginning. Prevoiusly they had time to find out how the game worked. Now they have to understand morale right away, otherwise they will loose important players. Since there isn’t a manual at the moment and it will be hard to find everything on the forum they wouldn’t understand it entirely

Btw Is it possible to remove all the players that were ‘critical’ during the test phase from the transferlist. They pollute the transferlist.

How many minutes must a player play for him to consider he was used in the match?

Does number of minutes played or playing in the initial 11 have any influence?

I thought it was 35 minutes. Initial 11 or replacement has no influence, every player played 35 minutes will count for morale.

We acknowledge the game lacks a proper guide or manual for newbies. Once we catch up with the list of features we missed in the past couple years (more or less) we’ll have to do something about it so RubySoccer can attract and retain new users. The in-game help was a small step in that direction, but of course it is not complete yet.

Back to morale…yes, I’m anxious too! I didn’t remove the players from TL because I thought managers would do it themselves. And Dirk’s reply to Fabio’s question is spot on.

2 quick suggestions on this topic, Gabriel:

1) Can you change the Morale panel so that we can sort by morale status and rank by the morale %? It will make it easier for visualizing and thus managing morale

2) Loan market seems dead in the Fast Ticker. I have from Tac 94 to Sho 96 that I have been trying to loan for over 1 season. I find it hard to believe that no CPU teams can benefit from having those players (I do demand coaching 10, but I imagine there are plenty of teams with that feature). Having loaned players will help control morale levels for upcoming youths. Moreover, it can make the game more competitive as CPU teams will have better squads

1) I was thinking about that when trying to manage my players’ morale as well :-D

2) CPU teams had been artificially assigned coaching level 10 for a long time but that’s been changed. The new minimum level for them is 5 but of course they can go beyond that by spending their own investment points. That said, I don’t think many of them have coaching level 10 anymore so I suggest you try reducing your coaching requirements.

2) That’s unfortunate, but fair. I guess I’ll change my requirements…

Can we have an idea on the intensity of the critical morale player on the rest of the squad’s morale?

And does it matter if they are transfer listed or not?

@Fabio: each player individually will have an individual impact between 1% and 8% and the total impact will be the sum of all your critical players impact. The more experienced the player more likely he is to causing a greater impact. For example, let’s say you have 2 critical players, one with a 2% impact and the other with a 5% impact making the total 7%. If you hire a new player and he plays his first match in your squad his morale would go to 93% instead of 100% due to your critical players bad influence. It also impacts players that are not playing. Let’s say one of your players would go to morale level of 10% even without playing his first match in your club, either because he is low on stamina or he acknowledges he is not on par with your club level yet…in the example above he would go to 3% instead.

@Dimitri: it doesn’t matter if they are transfer listed or not.

And what is the effect of morale on performance?

Critical and bad morale players have the same small penalty on their own performance. They don’t affect the performance of their teammates.