Is Leadership More Important than we Think?

[JardyB10 4,865]

JARDY BUNCLEWIRTH RE-SIMMED S47 WITHOUT THE THREE MVP CANDIDATES. THE RESULTS WILL SHOCK YOU!

 

As most of you have very little reason to know, I recently was involved in an atrociously long podcast with @Streetlight and @boubabi the night before the VHL Awards were announced. In said podcast, we mainly discussed who we thought should win what, and what our reasoning behind each selection was.

 

Toward the end of our five hour conversation, we decided it would be fun to test how New York, Vasteras, and Helsinki would have performed in S47 if they were missing Thomas O'Malley, Lord Karnage, and Bismarck Koenig, respectively. Our main goal was to see which team would suffer the most without their star player. It wasn't the most scientifically accurate test, as we were forced to assume all the teams used their initial lines and final rosters and attributes for the entire season. Not to mention no two full season sims will ever be the same, so the results were doomed to be meaningless. Nonetheless, we pressed on, scientific accuracy be damned.

 

The results ended in hilarious fashion. Not only did New York not win the Continental Cup, they didn't even make playoffs. Instead, a Max Molholt and LSP led Toronto Legion stormed into a playoff spot, on the back of .907 SV% TOR G. Their worst human scorer, Pete Stockton, had one more point than New York's leading scorer Lloyd Light, who finished with 68 points or something.

 

Meanwhile in Europe, Riga shaped up to be the contender we initially presumed them to be. Mason Richardson wasn't only the best defenceman in the league, but an MVP candidate. And Hans Wingate once again transformed into a Wingod, easily leading all goalies in SV%. With their European competitors sufficiently nerfed, Riga was easily able to make it to the finals, where they easily dispatched the Seattle Bears in five games.

 

We all had a good laugh at the lunacy of it all, and soon after ended our conversation and I went to sleep. I found myself later wondering, "Why didn't Riga perform that well in real life?" Sure, it must have helped to be playing against slightly worse Helsinki and Vasteras teams, but they still had, on paper, the league's best defenceman and goalie, both of whom massively underperformed. Surely Koenig and Karnage couldn't have single-handedly stifled both of them.

 

But then it came to me: What about morale? Morale has never been disabled in league history, though it is a little understood component of STHS. I don't even understand it. What I do know is that every player has a Morale attribute, and that it fluctuates during the season (presumably depending on team wins, player performance, maybe ice time, etc.). There is also a Team Morale, which again, fluctuates throughout the season, likely depending on team performance. All of these attributes are automatically reset to 40 (maybe 50 I'm too lazy to check) at the beginning of each season.

 

So what does Morale do? Well, according the STHS manual:

 

Quote

Morale - Affect all game stats at beginning of game. The higher the stat, the higher the players performance boost will be. (It's combined with the Team Morale)

 

Now, Simon T isn't very good at English, but by the seems of it, he seems to be saying that a high morale actually gives a sort of "boost" to the player's attributes and/or performance.

 

Now I know for a fact that, by late season, trash teams and players have severely low morale. Like, 20-30ish, depending how shitty they are. While good teams and players have it nearly maximized by the end of the season.

 

Which brings us to S47 Riga Reign. What happened? Well, I could try to check specifically, but what I think may have happened is that Riga had a rough and unlucky start to the season. Maybe they went on a couple of long losing streaks off the bat. This would have decreased their morale, and therefore not given them any kind of performance boost. Meanwhile, this may have been the opposite case for their main competitors. By playoffs they probably had middling morale, while everyone else's was high. In fact, I just checked, and you can actually see this on the Team Rosters! These are the following Morale levels for playoff teams, entering playoffs:

 

NYA: 82

SEA: 46

RIG: 44

HEL: 72

STO: 54

CAL: 41

 

(Actually I decided to look at the playoff morales as well, and it appears as though Team Morale is automatically maxed out when a team reaches playoffs (which makes sense), while player morale is reset to 40. Also it appears that player morale doesn't fluctuate nearly as much as team morale does during the season. But I'll leave the above info because it's still interesting.)

 

So on that note, what I think happened in the "re-season" is that instead of losing and putting themselves in a hole right away, they perhaps went on an early winning streak, setting themselves up for an advantage for the rest of the season. As for playoffs, perhaps that's where Helsinki and Vasteras' disadvantage paid off. I dunno.

 

Which, finally, brings us to our titular subject; Leadership. And Experience for that matter. What do those attributes do, according to the STHS manual?

 

 

Quote

Experience - The higher the stat, the better his morale and his team morale will be. Limited effect on faceoff.

 

Leadership - The higher the stat, the better his morale and his team morale will be.

 

 

Indeed, it allegedly seems to DIRECTLY affect morale, which I'm beginning to believe can put a team at a big advantage, at least during the season. That could be huge, no?

 

However, the key word in that last paragraph was "allegedly." Looking at the S47 Team Rosters, you can easily identify a reason to doubt these attributes' effectiveness. And that's the fact that individual player morale DOES NOT seem to be scaling upward with the player's LD and EX. In fact, almost every player shares the exact same MO with every other player on their team, regardless of their performance throughout the season or LD and EX.

 

But honestly, to me, that leaves more questions than answers. Are individual player's morale locked to their surrounding players? Is the effectiveness of Leadership and Experience collective? i.e. If everyone on a team had high EX and LD, would they all therefore have higher Morale all around? When it comes to the overall Team Morale, does the effectiveness of those two attributes even contribute a drop in the bucket compared to the team's overall success? Is this all just a V1 engine bug that is drastically different in later engines? If so, is that a contributing factor as to why all the V2 tests I do are inconsistent batshit insanity?

 

CONCLUSION: As with all things, the only way to answer these questions is with further testing. Might be I'll run a few full season tests with certain teams having all players with max LD and EX, and others with min. Then maybe I'll take a better look at a full season V2 sim. Or maybe I don't have time for that shit and I won't.

 

For now, I think it's some worthy food for thought when considering your player builds, especially since Leadership doesn't depreciate.

 

This was way longer than I was planning, but I think it's worth the read.

 

- JardyB10

[Knight 1,289]

I thought you turned that shit off?

[scoop 3,425]

1 hour ago, Knight said:

I thought you turned that shit off?

Tbh yeah I thought he had morale turned off

[Munk 1,298]

Click-bait, don't read... Morale should be off or always reset to 80 after a week, it makes a difference and can cause skewed results. It can prolong winning/losing streaks based on "morale". Though it's also fair to say that maybe people should invest more into the mentioned attributes but I'm not sure how much they actually affect the results. Like you said, more testing is needed. However as a simmer all this article shows is how incompetent you are.

 

 

fgt 

 

#munk4commish

Edited March 15, 2016 by Munk

[BOOM 8,738]

There was a podcast? It was recorded, yes?

[CowboyinAmerica 2,887]

Mostly it's funny because I'm one of the few players who actually did invest in Leadership - 70 the entirety of last season.

[Beketov 9,021]

24 minutes ago, CowboyinAmerica said:

Mostly it's funny because I'm one of the few players who actually did invest in Leadership - 70 the entirety of last season.

The player build guides have always said to do that but, honestly, I've never been able to tell if it makes a difference or not.

Edited March 15, 2016 by Beketov

[STZ 5,357]

Jardy just turned his morals off not the morales..

[JardyB10 4,865]

Dammit people, at no point have I ever said morale was off. As far as I know, at no point in 8 years has it ever BEEN off. If it was, why would Leadership ever be available to update? 

[CowboyinAmerica 2,887]

Also, the real important news here:

 

11 hours ago, JardyB10 said:

Toward the end of our five hour conversation, we decided it would be fun to test how New York, Vasteras, and Helsinki would have performed in S47 if they were missing Thomas O'Malley, Lord Karnage, and Bismarck Koenig, respectively.

 

 lives (in all of our hearts)

[Kendrick 4,741]

33 minutes ago, JardyB10 said:

Dammit people, at no point have I ever said morale was off. As far as I know, at no point in 8 years has it ever BEEN off. If it was, why would Leadership ever be available to update? 

I specifically remember Scotty telling us it was off.

[Beketov 9,021]

24 minutes ago, Kendrick said:

I specifically remember Scotty telling us it was off.

I recall this as well but sadly the search function is off on the original board so I can't just search for the word "morale" to find it easier. No way am I searching through all Scotty's posts just to prove Jardy wrong.

[Molholt 2,185]

tbf, Jardy said he's never said it was off - and as far as he knew it hadn't been ever. Not that it never had been 100%.

[JardyB10 4,865]

Indeed, recall I actually wasn't here for the first 15 seasons. So I've never had Scotty as a simmer. And I don't know why he'd go through the trouble of adding a whole system for adding Experience. Or why no one would have questioned it for 8 years. So forgive me for thinking otherwise.

 

Also I've been simming for at least 25 seasons, so we've had morale for half the league's life, minimum. So it can't possibly suddenly be an issue. 

[Beketov 9,021]

Just now, JardyB10 said:

Indeed, recall I actually wasn't here for the first 15 seasons. So I've never had Scotty as a simmer. And I don't know why he'd go through the trouble of adding a whole system for adding Experience. Or why no one would have questioned it for 8 years. So forgive me for thinking otherwise.

I'm not even blaming you, the last line of my above most was mostly in jest.

 

We could be entirely wrong as well, but I do remember having a discussion about morale early on and deciding that it would make things feel too random so we turned it off. That decision may have been reversed at some point though; or never existed in the first place and Kendrick and I are just not remembering things well.

[Knight 1,289]

I thought leadership effect was turned off, not morale. Or some aspect of it at least that made it fairly useless to update.

[Kendrick 4,741]

1 hour ago, Molholt said:

tbf, Jardy said he's never said it was off - and as far as he knew it hadn't been ever. Not that it never had been 100%.

You're right, which is why I mentioned that Scotty said it was off. So as far as Jardy knew sure, all I did was say that it was off at some point.

[Molholt 2,185]

Just now, Kendrick said:

You're right, which is why I mentioned that Scotty said it was off. So as far as Jardy knew sure, all I did was say that it was off at some point.

 

Was in relation to TGF's proving Jardy wrong comment, which was a joke mostly anyways, methinks. 

[NotAVHLM-GM 1,858]

You're welcome New York ;)

[scoop 3,425]

2 hours ago, Beketov said:

I recall this as well but sadly the search function is off on the original board so I can't just search for the word "morale" to find it easier. No way am I searching through all Scotty's posts just to prove Jardy wrong.

http://z11.invisionfree.com/vhl/index.php?showtopic=9100

 

I did a Google search of "z11.insivisionfree.com/vhl scotty morale" (not actually in quotes, that's just the exact phrase I searched) and found it quickly enough.

 

For anyone too lazy to click, here's what scotty (not Jardy) said on the subject on at least this one occasion:

 

Quote

Not to ruin this, but I have it set so that Morale has almost no effect on the games

 

Quote

WELL, there is a slider to determine how much Morale effects the game going from 1 to 99.. I think i have it on like 3 or something.

 

[JardyB10 4,865]

^ There's a good lad.
 

Though I just checked and the Morale slider is actually at 25 these days. I don't imagine I would have adjusted it at any point either. Still not that extreme.

As for David's speculation, there doesn't seem to be any option of adjusting how effective individual attributes are. Unless you're thinking of the overall formula, which just seems to be exactly what it sounds like, and shouldn't have any effect on the attributes themselves.

[Knight 1,289]

5 minutes ago, JardyB10 said:

^ There's a good lad.
 

Though I just checked and the Morale slider is actually at 25 these days. I don't imagine I would have adjusted it at any point either. Still not that extreme.

As for David's speculation, there doesn't seem to be any option of adjusting how effective individual attributes are. Unless you're thinking of the overall formula, which just seems to be exactly what it sounds like, and shouldn't have any effect on the attributes themselves.

 

Well if Morale was set to a slider of 3 as it was when Scotty was simming, that would pretty much render it a useless category to update (as Leadership affects Morale).

 

I wasn't aware the sliders were different since then, but it's a pleasant surprise. Maybe I was aware - I just forgot.

[scoop 3,425]

10 minutes ago, JardyB10 said:

Though I just checked and the Morale slider is actually at 25 these days. I don't imagine I would have adjusted it at any point either. Still not that extreme.

Perhaps @sterling adjusted it?

[JardyB10 4,865]

4 minutes ago, Knight said:

 

Well if Morale was set to a slider of 3 as it was when Scotty was simming, that would pretty much render it a useless category to update (as Leadership affects Morale).

 

I wasn't aware the sliders were different since then, but it's a pleasant surprise. Maybe I was aware - I just forgot.

Very true.

 

1 minute ago, Streetlight said:

Perhaps @sterling adjusted it?

Either that or Scotty didn't know what he was talking about when he said "I think I have it at 3 or something." I don't know. For all I know I could have been playing with it four years ago and accidentally saved it or something (though I extremely highly doubt that). Or maybe this is all @Draper and/or @Higgins's fault!

[scoop 3,425]

Just now, JardyB10 said:

Either that or Scotty didn't know what he was talking about when he said "I think I have it at 3 or something." I don't know. For all I know I could have been playing with it four years ago and accidentally saved it or something (though I extremely highly doubt that). Or maybe this is all @Draper and/or @Higgins's fault!

Or he knew what he was talking about, but that it was said before he added to Leadership with Jenskovic and decided to turn up the slider.