Recent Posts by Gabriel Cesario
4,164 posts(s) found
I think I’ll add a morale rating column with a % to give more detailed information to managers on morale, along with some other changes for the last trial phase. That will be quicker than catering for additional statuses as you suggested, Joseppi. Not saying we’re not going to do it in the future, I just want to simplify the initial design so we can deliver it quickly.
@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
That’s because they evaluate the last x matches, starting from when I last reset morale (or from when you or they joined your team, whatever is later) and up to a pre-determined number of matches, but they only change morale for the first time after 3-5 matches, so even if you played them in the last match it could mean they played 1 out of 5 which would give them a 20% match participation ration that could take their morale to bad level depending on their profiles.
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.
Morale is still under trial, that’s the only reason why the players accept renewals and the transfer prices are silly. Once we are happy with the parameters and the trial is over the transfer prices will be what you see now divided by 10 and the players will NOT renew contract. You’re right, that’s the whole purpose of the thing :-)
@Davison: the last couple years don’t count, we did virtually nothing on them
@Sniff: this is a result of the poor way in which the board evaluates your squad in comparison to the others. In your case your team seems to be highly rated by the board, as a result every victory gives you a little bit and every draw/loss takes a lot, making it too hard to recover from a bad board rating. What I’ll do is I’ll bring forward the task to review the way squad quality is calculated and see if that improves the expectation and performance calculations. If it does not or is not enough I’ll bring forward the task to revisit the way the board evaluates the performance until we get it right.
Thanks for the feedback guys.
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.
A new investment area has been added: Negotiations. This area of the club will provide you advice on how much to offer a player you are negotiating with. The highest the level more accurate the suggestion. All clubs have the maximum level on this area to start with so they can experience the full benefits of it. Next season you will be able to decide how much to invest in this area as you do for all others. Hopefully this will mitigate some of the negative impacts of the enhance player negotiations.
You will see the suggested wage when offering a contract to a player and the wage field will come pre-populated with the suggestion (except when you are looking at an existing negotiation, in which case it will come populated either with your own offer or with the player’s counter offer as usual). I am yet to add the suggested wage to the mobile version of the contract offer screen.
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.
The parameters for morale calculation have been relaxed a bit and morale has been reset for all players. It was clear from the discussions in the forums and from personal experience that players were being too demanding. I have not yet done any of the suggested enhancements to the system apart from changing existing parameters, let’s see how this works out first and move on from there. Oh, and this is still a trial so you won’t lose your players due to morale just yet.
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 ;-)
I’ll introduce the Negotiations investment area soon to provide advice on how much to offer a player during contract negotiations. Keep an eye on the announcements in the next few days.
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.
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.
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
Contract Negotiations
With 96% of manager participation in the poll, here are the results:
11% – I think players should not have a say, change it back to what it was
25% – Keep the system but change it a little bit, players are being too harsh
26% – Add a Negotiations investment area to advise the salary that should be offered to a player
30% – Don’t change anything just yet, let’s experiment a bit more
8% – No answer
So you can see that 81% of the managers want the system in, at least for now, but the majority of those would like to either tweak it down so players are not too harsh or enhance it via the Negotiations investment area. For now we’ll please the 30% that would like to experiment a bit more and our preference is to add the Negotiations investment area (as is for 26% of the managers) so if opinions don’t change when we get to develop it that’s the approach we are going to use.
Thanks!
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.
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 :-)
The match counting for morale effects started once I announced it in the forums, the history of matches until then doesn’t matter. From now the history will matter and the player will always consider the percentage of the last x matches that he has played to determine its morale level. Whenever I said in the overview that morale is reset (when the player join another team or when he goes out of critical for example), this counter is reset as well.
I think for teams playing multiple competitions that have to naturally rotate their players due to stamina the morale system will work well. Those who usually don’t have to rotate due to stamina will end up having to do it due to the negative effect on morale if you don’t.
Bummer, I will investigate but I’m expecting it is going to be hard to find what the issue is.
@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
The trial period for the player morale system has just started! Please take some time to read the overview of this feature on this topic and also what is going to be different during the trial period. We already have some good suggestions to make the system more realistic in the future and these are all noted, but what is posted there is pretty much how the system is going to work to begin with, except of course for any adjustments that prove to be necessary after the trial period.
How long this trial will last will depend on the feedback we receive, we just want to make sure everyone is comfortable with it and has experienced all the different situations they can face due to player morale. If you just ignore morale for now because you won’t actually lose players you may lose the chance to learn how to better manage it when the trial ends. It will also help us understand how easy/hard it is in practice to keep everyone’s morale out of critical, to bring a player with critical morale back to neutral, to have your main players always with good morale, etc.
Cheers
Well, you cannot divine it, it’s all about an informed guess based on what other players earn :-)
I think this deserves a poll!
It is not about percentage increase, it is about how much you offer compared to how much he wants. Let’s say your player wanted 20.000 and his profile tells him to reject offers that are lower than 75% of what he wants. He would have cancelled negotiations in this scenario.
I still think this change is being tough on managers just because nobody really paid any attention before on how much they paid for different players.
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 ;-)
In your case it is not a bug, that team now have a friendly with Inter on turn 116, therefore the invitation he sent you has been withdrawn.
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.
My personal approach is to look how much similar players are earning and offer something similar. Don’t forget to consider stars when looking for similar players. The main goals of the system are:
1) Stop the easy negotiation pattern most people used (me included) where the manager offers a salary the player would never accept so he/she can see how much the player really wants when the initial offer is rejected. Negotiations are now something you need to give a little more thought to.
2) Give some personal touch to players with the different profiles
3) Introduce a mechanism by which managers can lose a player to improve the transfer market
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 :-)
Davison, you continue to offer very constructive crtiticism, thanks for that.