Morale Opinions?

[Kramden23]

I was hoping to get some feedback from commissioners that use or have used morale and what you feel the positives and/or negatives are? Also what your default to start the season is for team morale and players morale and where you set your morale slider?

[dunkie23]

We use morale and I think it's a great option.

Players go on hot and cold streaks throughout the season and it affects each player's ratings positively or negatively.

What's great is that we have a farm system so an organization might have a slumping pro player and farm player playing so well that he needs to be called up at the expense of the pro player. It adds a dynamic value to the sim, rather than most GMs just playing the odds and keeping a steady lineup based on rating alone.

Sometimes it may mean moving a guy from the 1st line down to the 3rd, or vice versa.

It really does give GMs one more realistic thing to consider managing their teams.

We have the default morale set at 50.

[Foo]

Morale have too much impact on a simulation and like it was posted earlier by another user, the calculation of the + and - should be redefine for better results. I use engine 1.5 and since this engine is almost perfect and don't let place of a little "randomness" or luck in the game, I put the morale to 15 and that do the trick (it gives more realistic results then engine 2.0 that have too much random in it). I have bad teams able to beat top seed once a while and even some making the playoffs. As a group that's what we were looking for but if you don't, just disable morale you'll be disappointed.

[dunkie23]

I should clarify... Our slider setting is 25 while each player's morale starts at 50. We also have fluctuating rating ratings through the season set at the lowest. We are still running V1 of the simulator.

[36Henry]

I've maintained for a long time that Morale is the ugly duckling of the STHS experience. I believe it to be a potentially great feature, but as Foo alluded to in my experience it can have too much of an impact on the game-play even at low settings. And I think that is partly why many leagues choose not to activate it at all. To me that is a shame because I'm a firm believer in the potential of Morale being a tremendous aspect of the STHS experience as players and teams going through ups and downs over the course of a season adds another dimension for the managers to handle.

Another aspect of Morale that I'm not entirely happy with, and one I've expressed before, is the fact that it remains the only rating we're not able to control through external sources. The "Update Ratings" function where we can easily load a new set of ratings into the Sim from a csv-file doesn't cover the Morale rating. This means there's no flexibility at all with this rating. There are only two options when it comes to Morale; either not run it at all or run it the way the Sim runs it (which many people find too intrusive or powerful).

That is why I've bugged Simon for a while now about adding a functionality where Morale would be opened up to manual editing just like all the other ratings. My proposal has been to add a feature where Commissioners could load a csv-file (like the Assign players to a team feature) consisting of just two fields: Player, Morale.

A feature like this would open up a wealth of opportunities for leagues to play around with Morale in completely new ways. Those who feel the Sim's way of adjusting Morale is too strong could easily create their own method of smaller variations in Morale and just upload a file after each simulation. Other leagues could go much further and create ever more elaborate scripts for Morale manipulation to really explore new levels of realism and interesting game-play. And, perhaps most importantly, those who enjoy Morale just the way it is would be able to keep playing the game they love as the actual mechanics of Morale would be left untouched to please that crowd.

It would be very interesting to see if there's anyone else who would find such a feature useful or interesting, either as something they would be using or something to at least explore if it was created.

[Foo]

That's a way to do it but only guys with a descent knowledge of programming would be able to use this feature. Also, it's a lot of work to do.

I would prefer this:

having a morale tab with all the "fructuation factors" in it that all commish should be able to edit manually. Just like the overall calculation setup. I mean all of this for a rating that have no effect in the game?

exemple:

Players socres a goal: +4 (each league should be able to edit this information for their own league)
Players have been traded to a bad team: -4
etc. etc.

[36Henry]

It wouldn't mean a lot of work at all actually and it certainly wouldn't require any knowledge of programming other than the most basic Excel skills. And if people on the community would share solutions it would be even less work overall. Especially for Simon compared to the solution you proposed (I'm assuming my solution involves less work on his part as opposed to yours).

Also, a main advantage of my proposal would be that each league for themselves could choose which factors to include in the Morale calculations, rather than using only the ones coded into the simulation. In other words, my suggestion is to offer the community an alternative to how Morale is calculated in the Sim, not just an adjustment of it.

[Kramden23]

Thanks for the responses and input everyone, I really appreciate it!

We currently run V2-sim engine 1.5 and really like the results we get, but while lower-level teams sometimes do in fact get wins over top-tier teams, the other side of it is that all 16 playoff spots are already locked-up by the all-star break.

Since we switched to V2-sim engine 1.5 our last six cup champions have been the #1, #1, #1, #2, #5, #1 best record teams in the league. So there really isn't much suspense as to who is going to come out on top in the end.

We are looking to add a little bit more randomness to our results without it being too crazy like an 8th seed sweeping it's way through the playoffs, so that's why I wanted to get opinions before we decide to implement the morale feature in our league.

Foo, you said you put the morale slider at 15 but what do you start your players at the start of the season? And btw, your website is ridiculous! Big props to whoever put that together!

[Foo]

Thank you, I'm a little bit crazy!

I start them at 99 since it is much easier to drop in morale in the STHS. I think you'll be pleased with the results. it should give you exactly what you want cause we had the same problem then your league: Great sim results but no suspense at all in playoffs. Morale mix that up well but not too much.

[Foo]

It wouldn't mean a lot of work at all actually and it certainly wouldn't require any knowledge of programming other than the most basic Excel skills. And if people on the community would share solutions it would be even less work overall. Especially for Simon compared to the solution you proposed (I'm assuming my solution involves less work on his part as opposed to yours).

Also, a main advantage of my proposal would be that each league for themselves could choose which factors to include in the Morale calculations, rather than using only the ones coded into the simulation. In other words, my suggestion is to offer the community an alternative to how Morale is calculated in the Sim, not just an adjustment of it.

Ok I may need some coaching because I don't understand how you'll do the following in minutes each day:

compile all today games stats for all players Pro and Farm (this is huge)
compile injuries
compile trades
compile rosters movements (Pro-Farm)
compile healthy scratch
etc. etc.

It takes me 2 minutes to sim and update each day, it would take me at least an hour each day to do what you propose so that is why I would love to have a fully customiable morale in the STHS. I don't want to change the morale impact in the sim engine so it is not so hard to do I guess for Simon to have a tab option like the Overall.

[Kramden23]

I start them at 99 since it is much easier to drop in morale in the STHS.

Do teams start the season at 99 too?

I really like your idea of the morale calculator, that way you could choose what to apply and input the value. Something like this would be really cool.....

[Foo]

Yes that's the main idea.

yep all at 99

[Kramden23]

Hey Foo, one of the concerns is that using the morale option will just make the strong teams stronger and the weak teams weaker. I was hoping you could address that.

[Owen]

Just saw this... I think the morale calculator is a great idea! I also would like to see team and player morale be separated. As far as I know, you can either have both active or neither.

[Foo]

Hey Foo, one of the concerns is that using the morale option will just make the strong teams stronger and the weak teams weaker. I was hoping you could address that.

No, from what I've seen in testings and seasons, morale give chance for poor teams to win games against the best teams. Using Morale is like gaging your random results that are impossible to set in engine 2.0. That is why I set morale at 15-20 for a minimum random impact but still an impact on the results.