Morale, Does it affect our sims?

[Bushito 1,945]

To be fair I don't even know if we have morale turned on in this league. I can't imagine how I have never asked this question before. I do know that morale does severely affect player performance if it is turned on. Now there are 2 types of morale in this league, there is team morale and player morale. I have had chats on how severely morale does affect the game back when I ran a GM league back in the day and from the responses I received I decided for that league it was best to turn it off. In discussions I've found a lot of people saying things like this.

 

"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)."

 

Now lets take a look at morale as it sits right now in this league. 

 

Standings                                        Team OVR                               Team Morale                                        Player Morale AVG

1.  7-1-0                                  1.   66                               1.   48                                            1.   44

2. 5-1-2                                   2.  66                                2.   43                                            2.   44

3.  5-2-1                                 3.  66                                3.   43                                            3.   43

4.  4-3-1                                  4.  65                                4.  41                                             4.   41

5.  4-3-1                                  5.   65                               5.  41                                             5.  40

6.  4-3-1                                  6.  65                                6.  40                                            6.  40

7.  4-3-1                                  7.  64                                7.  40                                             7.  40

8.  4-4-0                                  8.  63                                8.  39                                             8.  40

9.  3-3-2                                  9.  63                                9.  38                                             9.  39

10.  3-5-0                               10.  61                              10.37                                            10.  38

11.  3-5-0                               11.  60                               11. 37                                           11.  38

12.  2-5-1                               12.  56                               12. 35                                           12.  38

 

If you can't tell from this list, morale matters more than team overall. It is a small sample size though so I will need to revisit this at the end of the season. Prague doesn't make much sense to me but I predict they will fall in the standings as the season goes on. On the other hand Calgary which is my team has one of the better overall team averages but the Morale rating is keeping us from competing which is unfortunate. What do you think? Should the league turn off the morale setting and let the teams play on an equal field or should we leave it random so some teams get handicapped and create more randomness in the sim.

[uphillmoss 134]

we definitely should turn off morale, that way Calgary can start winning

[Beketov 8,642]

I’ve never looked hard at our settings since they were set up before I took over but so far as I am aware morale is turned as far off as it can be. I’m honestly not even sure if it can affect the engine version we use or if it’s only a V2 thing.

[Gustav 6,100]

I think there's another question to be asked here--does high morale cause success, or does success cause high morale? Difficult to determine causality in this case.

 

I've heard in the past that you can't turn off morale in our version of the sim, but that in this league it's set to the lowest possible effectiveness, so as to be (maybe) just about negligible. I've heard conflicting reports on whether or not it matters here--while we've got people like @Phil who insist that leadership (and in turn morale) really has an effect, and then you've got people like me who think it's worthless based on the one controlled experiment I've bothered someone to run (in 500 equal games, a player with high leadership did just about the same as, and even a little worse than, a player with it untouched). 

Edited November 18, 2019 by GustavMattias

[Bushito 1,945]

2 minutes ago, GustavMattias said:

I think there's another question to be asked here--does morale cause success, or does the success come from morale? Difficult to determine causality in this case.

 

I've heard in the past that you can't turn off morale in our version of the sim, but that in this league it's set to the lowest possible effectiveness, so as to be (maybe) just about negligible. I've heard conflicting reports on whether or not it matters here--while we've got people like @Phil who insist that leadership (and in turn morale) really has an effect, and then you've got people like me who think it's worthless based on the one controlled experiment I've bothered someone to run (in 500 equal games, a player with high leadership did just about the same as, and even a little worse than, a player with it untouched). 

I Don't think LD affects the player, try running a 500 sim run with 2 different teams, first team runs their captain with 99 leadership along with 2 assistants the same and the other team runs them at 40. Other than that leave the teams identical and I bet the higher leadership team has more wins as long as morale is equal. SImon has said that 2 points od morale difference can greatly affect teams. From even this small sample size that is easy to see. I can't remember if we can turn morale off with this version or even change it so that every team is equal but I can say for sure it affects the teams and in turn our standings.

[Bushito 1,945]

I also would love to open past files and see what the other seasons say about morale but I can not unfortunately. ALso would love to know if the morale is randomized every season or if we get stuck like this

[Dil 1,744]

*moral is based off of team standings/performance*

[Bushito 1,945]

9 minutes ago, DilIsPickle said:

*moral is based off of team standings/performance*

So why were the teams different before a game was played and why is morale the same on all the teams as it was at the start of the season. It may change throughout the season but it hasn't yet

 

[Dil 1,744]

Just now, Bushito said:

So why were the teams different before a game was played and why is morale the same on all the teams as it was at the start of the season. It may change throughout the season but it hasn't yet

 

it's been 8 games

[Bushito 1,945]

3 minutes ago, DilIsPickle said:

it's been 8 games

Yup, 11% of the season and no changes

[Dil 1,744]

Just now, Bushito said:

Yup, 11% of the season and no changes

[Tagger 2,722]

I don't know if I'm missing something here, but the Morale figures I'm seeing on the index and the Morale Figures I'm seeing in this article don't match. Going through Calgary's team, every human player has a morale of 42 and the individual average it gives at the bottom (the thing I'm presuming you said was Player Morale AVG) is 41. The only other teams that have human players with more Morale (and that's 43) are Toronto and Vancouver. 

 

Spoiler

 

Also, I'm personally not the biggest fan of using Team OVR as a gauge for how good or bad a team is, cause it focuses a bit too much on the increase that any depth player has on the CPU players, which given the amount of minutes those CPU's play, isn't necessarily a good judge of a team. 

 

It would be nice if our league was a little more transparent with our sim settings though just so we're all clear where we stand, something I've been saying for a while. 

[Bushito 1,945]

27 minutes ago, Tagger said:

I don't know if I'm missing something here, but the Morale figures I'm seeing on the index and the Morale Figures I'm seeing in this article don't match. Going through Calgary's team, every human player has a morale of 42 and the individual average it gives at the bottom (the thing I'm presuming you said was Player Morale AVG) is 41. The only other teams that have human players with more Morale (and that's 43) are Toronto and Vancouver. 

 

  Hide contents

 

Also, I'm personally not the biggest fan of using Team OVR as a gauge for how good or bad a team is, cause it focuses a bit too much on the increase that any depth player has on the CPU players, which given the amount of minutes those CPU's play, isn't necessarily a good judge of a team. 

 

It would be nice if our league was a little more transparent with our sim settings though just so we're all clear where we stand, something I've been saying for a while. 

I got my numbers from the actual file we use to update lines so the numbers on this portal are not what is in the actual sim

[Beaviss 4,949]

morale correlates to winning so id assume the teams winning more games have higher morale.

[Bushito 1,945]

6 minutes ago, Beaviss said:

morale correlates to winning so id assume the teams winning more games have higher morale.

Morale is the same as when the season started before we even played a game, so explain that.

[eaglesfan036 4,583]

Perhaps morale does effect the sim, but this was not a good example to use. Only 11 games into the season, and the standings are largely impacted by who teams have played. Teams that have played the Davos of the world 4 times already are obviously going to have a better record than a team that has played Seattle and Moscow twice. This all will even out over the course of the season. I remember a few season back Malmo started off in first place as the new expansion team and everyone was freaking out. Malmo eventually wound up missing the playoffs because all schedules even out over the course of the season. 

[Nykonax 1,550]

1 hour ago, Bushito said:

I Don't think LD affects the player, try running a 500 sim run with 2 different teams, first team runs their captain with 99 leadership along with 2 assistants the same and the other team runs them at 40. Other than that leave the teams identical and I bet the higher leadership team has more wins as long as morale is equal. SImon has said that 2 points od morale difference can greatly affect teams. From even this small sample size that is easy to see. I can't remember if we can turn morale off with this version or even change it so that every team is equal but I can say for sure it affects the teams and in turn our standings.

so i did this just now with the SHL league file, but only did one season. It gave like 8 more wins, but was also just one season so could be sths randomness

[Bushito 1,945]

2 minutes ago, eaglesfan036 said:

Perhaps morale does effect the sim, but this was not a good example to use. Only 11 games into the season, and the standings are largely impacted by who teams have played. Teams that have played the Davos of the world 4 times already are obviously going to have a better record than a team that has played Seattle and Moscow twice. This all will even out over the course of the season. I remember a few season back Malmo started off in first place as the new expansion team and everyone was freaking out. Malmo eventually wound up missing the playoffs because all schedules even out over the course of the season. 

Obviously not the best example, but like I said, I will revisit this at the end of the season and definitely keep an eye on it from now on.

[Bushito 1,945]

6 minutes ago, Nykonax said:

so i did this just now with the SHL league file, but only did one season. It gave like 8 more wins, but was also just one season so could be sths randomness

Yeah the main question from me is how much effect does it have and would it even be worth dumping points into leadership, for me it's a no as of right now

 

[STZ 5,280]

Scotty Campbell morale was set at 99

[Beketov 8,642]

6 hours ago, Bushito said:

I got my numbers from the actual file we use to update lines so the numbers on this portal are not what is in the actual sim

The index you use is 100% the same as the sim, there’s no way for it not to be. The discrepancy is likely that games were played between your data and Tagger’s data and morale changes per game. Doesn’t do anything so far as I’m aware but it does change.

[Beketov 8,642]

Fun fact of the day: Back when the league was made and we were running an old ass version of STHS we set up these settings and that’s where the “morale does nothing” narrative was born because we set it to do as little as possible.

 

Fast forward to now. I just skimmed through the manual and found a “morale disabled” option. I believe this was added in later versions. I figured if I popped into STHS I’d see it checked and we’d be able to put this to a rest however that doesn’t appear to be the case. “Morale disabled” is unchecked, at least in the VHLM (which should have the same sliders). So without further testing my best conclusion is that right now morale does actually have an effect. How much of an effect is hard to say obviously but it’s not completely disabled.

[Bushito 1,945]

3 hours ago, Beketov said:

The index you use is 100% the same as the sim, there’s no way for it not to be. The discrepancy is likely that games were played between your data and Tagger’s data and morale changes per game. Doesn’t do anything so far as I’m aware but it does change.

What is in the index and what is on the file don’t match for me. I had the latest file open and I have been recording them from the edit lines page of STHS and the numbers I have in this article are the latest and unchanged from the previous week. In a conversation with Simon staff I was told that 2 points of morale can make a big difference between teams. I can imagine 13 would be huge, even with lower settings. I personally think it should be turned off

[Beketov 8,642]

44 minutes ago, Bushito said:

What is in the index and what is on the file don’t match for me. I had the latest file open and I have been recording them from the edit lines page of STHS and the numbers I have in this article are the latest and unchanged from the previous week. In a conversation with Simon staff I was told that 2 points of morale can make a big difference between teams. I can imagine 13 would be huge, even with lower settings. I personally think it should be turned off

It’s something worth discussing, I don’t believe we were aware the option to completely turn it off had been added. However I don’t think it’s reasonable to mess with settings like that during a season. Something to test over the next few weeks to check it’s viability and then use starting next season perhaps.

 

As for the discrepancy I’m inclined to blame the client side but I don’t k ow an actual reason. There is no different versions of the index. What is uploaded that you pull the client file from is what’s outputted from the program.

[Phil 5,015]

15 hours ago, Bushito said:

I Don't think LD affects the player, try running a 500 sim run with 2 different teams, first team runs their captain with 99 leadership along with 2 assistants the same and the other team runs them at 40. Other than that leave the teams identical and I bet the higher leadership team has more wins as long as morale is equal. SImon has said that 2 points od morale difference can greatly affect teams. From even this small sample size that is easy to see. I can't remember if we can turn morale off with this version or even change it so that every team is equal but I can say for sure it affects the teams and in turn our standings.

 

And this is why Bushito likes to draft me!