Form too reliant on morale?

Hi,

Didn't know exactly where to put this but I thought I'd stick it in here. I'm not normally one to have a big whinge if I'm doing badly on the game and on previous FMs I've had a mixture of good and bad performances at various clubs.

However on this game I keep getting ridiculously bad runs. I had a network game where I was Palace and after a decent start I went on a run of 27 games without a win, of which I lost 22 (don't ask why I didn't resign...) and I've now taken over a Preston side who, again after a good start, have now taken 3 points from 14 games. Before anyone says, I'm not just a crap manager and the players I brought in weren't too bad I thought. But regardless of what I tried I couldn't turn it around. These weren't always games where we were just hopeless either, often we'd create chance after chance but just not put them away.

Could be wrong, but I put it down to morale - as soon as that goes down, it seems like it just becomes impossible to win. You can see it in the match engine too: defenders walk towards the ball and get beaten by strikers they've given a 10 yard headstart to and midfielders misplace basic short passes. The worst ones though are strikers. Strikers on poor morale totally lose the ability to finish, often going on runs of 10 games where they won't score but will manage to average a one-on-one miss a game or sliding all their shots a good 5 yards wide of the target, and obviously if all of your strikers are like this then you've got no chance. This just wouldn't happen in real life, no matter how low a striker's morale is, they wouldn't just become embarrassingly poor in front of goal game after game. And it definitely wouldn't happen to an entire squad over a period of 3/4 months.

I can understand that morale makes a difference, and maybe it's just me not being able to find a way around halting a bad run, but after a few games without a win I know I'm not going to get another one for a long, long time and it's never been like that on any FM game prior to this one. I don't like resigning from clubs unless I have to but it gets to the point where you're approaching a crucial game with every single player on very low morale and you already know deep down that you've lost.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant but it is something I've been considering for a while . I'd be interested to know if anyone else has had a similar experience and whether there's anything that could be done about it for future games/patches.

Cheers,

Steve.

Ye look at tevez and balotelli, there morale must have been very low, yet they still produce world class performences, more so tevez..

I think morale totally domminates form in FM2011, and I don't like it.

Morale seemed totally overpowered in 2010 (which I only demoed) and seems to have continued into 2011 - to such an extent that it seems to be more important than anything else and that getting your team talk right/wrong can be the difference between playing like Brazil or playing like Local Pub Utd. I think it needs toning down too.

Morale being way too erratic and simplistic in its nature magnifies this problem as well. Why is it that as a team expected to finish bottom of the league losing 1-0 against a top side means a significant drop in morale for anyone involved while a draw against another relegation candidate or in a cup game against lower league opposition has hardly any effect?

Morale being way too erratic and simplistic in its nature magnifies this problem as well. Why is it that as a team expected to finish bottom of the league losing 1-0 against a top side means a significant drop in morale for anyone involved while a draw against another relegation candidate or in a cup game against lower league opposition has hardly any effect?

Good point. Also if you play as a team with numerous rivals who are better then you get and thus you are likely to lose to them, you get hit with unhappy fans and board as well as low moral!

Moral definiatly has too much of an effect on this years instalment

I don't remember it destroying strikers performance in fm 05-10

well, we could all be wrong you know. maybe in the real world all of the clubs are dependant on how good their club psychiatrist performs on a consistant basis

i say we hire a hypnotist and see him work his wonders.

i would say moral is pretty much the most important thing in football now a days, you can have all the ability and tactical genius in the world, but if you players dont believe in you or your team then its all worthless, on the flip side of that you can have a very average team performing very well because of moral, i used the example before but look at Rangers in the EURO cup a few seasons back, a very very poor team yet with a good bunch of guys in the dressing room feeling confident in themselves got them all the way to the final.

Look at Rooney at the start of this season, obviously he did not have a good moral and wasnt feeling himself and his form suffered HUGELY yet in recent weeks as he gets more confident we are seeing him play like we know he can.

i would say moral is pretty much the most important thing in football now a days, you can have all the ability and tactical genius in the world, but if you players dont believe in you or your team then its all worthless, on the flip side of that you can have a very average team performing very well because of moral, i used the example before but look at Rangers in the EURO cup a few seasons back, a very very poor team yet with a good bunch of guys in the dressing room feeling confident in themselves got them all the way to the final.

Look at Rooney at the start of this season, obviously he did not have a good moral and wasnt feeling himself and his form suffered HUGELY yet in recent weeks as he gets more confident we are seeing him play like we know he can.

It's not so much the effect form has at times, it's how rapidly it gets bad and how long it lasts! You can really struggle because you have some awful games at season start and then for months your team plays badly.

And the fact that it's so simplistic. There's no difference between losing 1-0 to Man Utd in a good performance and getting properly outplayed by a team bottom of the league. You'll get the same morale hit because the game can't see the difference. And then you have to go through a tedious routine of praising/criticising your players just to get it back up to acceptable levels. This game is supposed to be entertaining above all. Going through every player to have the exact same 'conversation' is the opposite of entertaining. It's dull.

And the fact that it's so simplistic. There's no difference between losing 1-0 to Man Utd in a good performance and getting properly outplayed by a team bottom of the league. You'll get the same morale hit because the game can't see the difference. And then you have to go through a tedious routine of praising/criticising your players just to get it back up to acceptable levels. This game is supposed to be entertaining above all. Going through every player to have the exact same 'conversation' is the opposite of entertaining. It's dull.

Bang on the money. Fans were even worse (in FM10 especially).

Draw with Rangers or Celtic at home with a provisional club was met with a poor response from the fans spokesman while god helpyou if you lost!

And the fact that it's so simplistic. There's no difference between losing 1-0 to Man Utd in a good performance and getting properly outplayed by a team bottom of the league. You'll get the same morale hit because the game can't see the difference. And then you have to go through a tedious routine of praising/criticising your players just to get it back up to acceptable levels. This game is supposed to be entertaining above all. Going through every player to have the exact same 'conversation' is the opposite of entertaining. It's dull.

I was going to write a more detailed reply to this thread but I'll just cut and paste yours. Bang on the money.

It's not so much the effect form has at times, it's how rapidly it gets bad and how long it lasts! You can really struggle because you have some awful games at season start and then for months your team plays badly.

form can change in an instant tho, look at chelsea this season, they were flying beating everyone, pumping loads of goals past the smaller teams, then Wilkins leaves, moral plumets and since they have badly struggled, Wayne Rooney again is a good example, flying last year, easily one of the best form strikers in Europe, feared by teams, then gets injured and his moral drops a bit, then has big personal problems and it plumets to the point where he couldnt hit the side of a barn with a cow. Moral and form can fluctuate in an instant in the game and in real life, warrented the game could give us more options and choces in order to resolve this but its an ongoing feature that will be tweaked and improved probably with every version and patch they release.

As for the games against big teams, again i can see what you guys are saying, but no one likes losing, especially if you have run a close game, using my team Aberdeen as an example, we are expected to lose to Rangers or Celtic when every we travel to glasgow, its pretty much a given for most SPL teams, doesnt mean im not gutted every time it happens, no matter how well we played and how close we ran them and even if we were screwed by the ref i am annoyed at my team for not delivering. I bet Crawley players went home gutted the other day, they will be proud they did so well but gutted they got so close only to miss out on the chance of a replay so in effect their moral may have dropped, its up to the manager to remind them how good they are and to manage moral, again it comes back to us needing more options and ways of countering this, again which will come as the feature developes more.I do things could be worder better in terms of fans feedback, something like "the fans are not happy at losing but can appreciate the effort the team put in" something like that would make more sense i think.

this game does have to draw a fine line between life and being a game, where do you draw the line tho, form and moral play a huge part of football, to ignore them would be silly, but at the same time as people say you dont want to spend half your game time having private conversations with unhappy players, the same goes for most parts of the game, its a delicate balance between making it very realistic and being a game.

Hull a season or two a go were flying then went on an almighty bad run when morale dropped.

i would say moral is pretty much the most important thing in football now a days, you can have all the ability and tactical genius in the world, but if you players dont believe in you or your team then its all worthless, on the flip side of that you can have a very average team performing very well because of moral, i used the example before but look at Rangers in the EURO cup a few seasons back, a very very poor team yet with a good bunch of guys in the dressing room feeling confident in themselves got them all the way to the final.

Look at Rooney at the start of this season, obviously he did not have a good moral and wasnt feeling himself and his form suffered HUGELY yet in recent weeks as he gets more confident we are seeing him play like we know he can.

good grief, what utter nonesense. how on earth did you come to that conclusion? we are talking about professonal sports people here, most of these guys are out there to make a living. look pal, most of us have tried to play team sports and i honestly can´t recall the team getting all bent out of shape due to the manager´s pep or tactical speaches. ok, if a player lost their parents or maybe lost their girlfriend or boyfriend they might be a little under the weather but the way it is portrayed n the game is way out there, man.

i can prove it: you know how some players are leftfooted or rghtfooted and some are either, well i´m a neither. but we had this coach that was world class motivator, always going on about how we should believe in ourselves and give it all we got and so forth. i personally really felt the passion and went out and gave it all i had, it still didn´t turn me into anything more than mush.

we all remember the wayne rooney story. just before the world cup he went to court to try and slap on a restraining order well knowing that his escapades were going to cause him a lot of problems. he was going to have to answer a lot of questions and be under the spot light intensively. he might have buckled under the pressure and his recovery time might take a little time, the people he probably let down we not going to forget it right away. i am sure, let me repeat, i am totally sure it has nothing to do with some lame team talk, interaction or some press conference.

maybe morale has an effect to some extent and usually is due to personal matters, but not that rollercoaster ride that is presented in this fm. i wouldn´t necessarily say that the feature should be removed totally, but it wouldn´t be a bad idea to adjust it somewhat so it doesn´t turn into utter shambles. i honestly hope you don´t think that the way fm presents it in the game even remotely represents the real world

Yup, morale plays too big a part for my liking too.

Some good points here, and I'd like to elaborate on a couple of them.

First off, I don't think anyone is denying that morale is important per se, but that it has far too great an impact. On top of this, most of your means of influencing morale come from the most tedious and repetitive parts of the game. The issue isn't one of realism or not, but one of gameplay - which should always be the prime consideration for a game. It's easy to get hung up in the realism debate and lose sight of the fact that the primary aim is for the game to be fun to play. I'm not the only person who finds team talks, player interactions etc. rather bland and repetitive. After all, there's not much more to this side of the game than choosing options from a list. That's neither realistic, nor fun. So if this side of things is going to be so important, it needs to be more fun. I don't really have any suggestions on how to improve the interaction with players because I'm aware that interacting with a believable AI is basically impossible and so things need to be abstracted to this kind of basic level. But I do think that making a game heavily reliant on repetitive multiple choice questions makes for a shallow approach to a "thinking man's game".

I don't mind the idea of team talks themselves - they're pretty quick to take care of, it's the inane press conferences that are tedious (+ players throwing hissy fits for random reasons when you have a private chat). But the team talks are regularly overpowered. Teams come out and play completely differently far too often based simply on whether you got your team talk right or wrong. The upshot of this is that the other parts of the game that should also be important are undervalued IMO, in particular the quality of players and the suitability of your tactics to your players and opposition. The same players playing the same tactic look like Brazil when you get the team talk right and play like a pub side when you get it wrong. In fact they can go from Jekyll to Hyde within the same match just because of the right choice from a list at half time.

It just seems silly that "Football Manager 2011" is really "Team Talk Manager 2011" with the tactics and transfer system add-ons included for free (OK I'm exaggerating a bit, but you get my drift). Surely there should be more depth to the game of this type than picking a response from a list of 5 choices or so.

Definitely agree. My Ipswich side were 13 unbeaten going into a game at Old Trafford, we lost 2-0 but were down to 10 men from the 28th minute and since then I lost 3 games in a row with the players morale going from Very good or Superb to Poor to Very Poor way too quickly. Very hard to get the morale back too. Hoping its sorted a bit in the new patch.

I agree about morale, it works both ways as well. If you are all green I rarely lose.

Morale is indeed too effective...

That wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the little detail we don't really understand how it works

You're on a 10+ games winning streak, the whole squad has Superb morale, you're exceeding the most optimistic expectations, yet an unexpected poor result/performance (and the subsequent negative team talk/press conference) will just undo everything, and your team will go through an epic run of awful performances.

And you won't be able to sort it quickly either, unless, maybe (maybe is the key word...), you want to gamble on the infamous Private Chat "workaround"... whose outcome is far from being consistent/guaranteed...

Very poor morale - 5% of stats

poor morale - 2 % of stats

normal morale - 0%

good morale 2% of stats

Very good morale +5% of stats

morale shouldn't change if your lose away either only at home games in my opinion

Morale is more important than tactics or the strength of yourclub in this years version. It really irritates everyone who plays the game.