Posts tagged "Player Mood"
Cap on fickleness of superstars
This is a small change that you probably won't notice, and in a lot of seasons it won't even do anything. But in some situations, it makes the game less annoying.
This suggestion came from sebastmarsh on Reddit where (in addition to making some good feature suggestions) he has been posting about the strategy/tactics he has used to basically beat BBGM. Like he won 100 championships in a row in insane mode, that's basically beating the game.
One of the things he found annoying was related to re-signing really good players. With the player mood system in BBGM, really good players are less likely to be willing to sign with you. The thinking is that they are so good that they can afford to be picky. That makes sense and isn't changing.
The annoying part was for really really good players, like MVP caliber players and beyond. For those players, even if you do everything right, they still can have a decent chance of leaving your team. Because of this, you sometimes find yourself hoping your player doesn't get too good. Like if you already have an MVP, you might hope he doesn't have another year of good progs, because at that point he might be so good that he refuses to re-sign and you're basically forced to trade him.
Improved identification of rookie contracts in real players leagues
The new player mood system introduced last year is working pretty well overall, but there are some small issues with it. One is related to a mood bonus given to players on rookie contracts, where it says "Eager to sign first non-rookie contract" and gives a big +8 bonus. This gives BBGM something like the NBA's restricted free agency, because it results in your drafted players being less likely to refuse to re-sign. (For FBGM and ZGMH, it only applies if you diasble the hard cap setting.)
Some people have noticed that the bonus was not correctly applied for some real players in historical leagues. Why? Because it was kind of hacky code. It identified "rookie contract" by comparing a player's draft year, the expiration year of their contract, and the length of a default rookie contract for their draft round.
This works fine for random players, since their rookie contracts all are generated by the game and all follow that same formula for length. But it's a bit tricky for real players leagues, or for custom league files, because they may have different length rookie contracts.
Today I have changed how rookie contracts are stored in the game. There is now an explicit rookie flag in the contract, so a player contract looks like this internally if it is a rookie contract:
Player mood improvements for AI team re-signings
Today I released two improvements based on last month's player mood update related to how the AI re-signs its players, in both Basketball GM and Football GM.
First, let me explain how AI re-signings used to work. It's always been a dirty little secret that the AI did not obey the player mood system. That was true of both the old and new player mood systems. Instead, there was a single formula to give "the probability a player re-signs with a team", meant to capture both if the team wants to re-sign the player and if the player is willing to re-sign. The end result of this formula was that high value players often became free agents, but there was no way to reliably predict which players would end up in the free agent market.
To improve on that situation, today's two changes are:
New, completely redesigned player mood feature
Basketball GM has always had a concept of player mood. It was the red/yellow/green rectangle you saw on the free agents page, along with descriptive text like "Insulted by your presence" on the negotiation page. But it had a lot of drawbacks.
One major problem with the old mood system was that it did not give you much information. Why is a player happy or sad? Who knows. Behind the scenes there was a logic to it, but it wasn't displayed to the user, leaving you to guess why a player felt a certain way.
Even worse, mood was not displayed during the season. So you'd go into free agency with no idea whether you'd see the dreaded "Refuses to negotiate" message next to a player's name. That made it very difficult to plan ahead for players who are planning to leave.
You may have noticed that the previous paragraphs are all written in the past tense. That's because Basketball GM now has a brand new mood system, that fixes those major problems from the old system and introduces some nice new features too!