I'd absolutely love that but I'm biased so others should decide that.
My support for giving Martin his old stats back doesn't depend on whether Sagan gets his old stats back or not.

@Croatia : iirc there was a tiny symbolic compensation of 50-100 given. That shouldn't really influence the decision (if anyone can be bothered to look the amount up I can pay the amount back post-transfers if needed)

then I'd 100% say yes to both

I have been working on the new minimum wages and while doing that also tweaked the formulas for the AVG and Race Days.
The average should now correspond better to the scoring potential of riders. Overall I kept the formulas from PCM14 but now specialities that tend to score lots like stage racers are a little higher rated, on the other hand timetrialists for example now have a lower average. Also allrounders like e.g. Sagan get a little bit added to their AVG value.
With the new race day formula I gave second tier riders or helpers a bit more days. Top stars have a few less race days then what they used to have.
Every rider with an average of 71,5 or less has now the same min wage of 100. Overall riders that are no team leaders can now be signed cheaper. I guess this should prevent unbalanced teams like we had this year.

Take a look at the new values: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rmss5bc57re....xlsx?dl=0
Please do comment and let me know your oppinion on this, so if I'm totally off with something I can still change it.

Hi Bikex - here are some random thoughts to hopefully kick off a debate

When the top rider is scoring double the WT points of the 20th best rider I can see why a bit of rebalancing might be called for. Seven less race days days for the very top Stage Racers as opposed to three less for the 20th best rider will even things up a bit. The lesser stage races might open up a bit for the 2nd tier leaders to score a bit more as the top tier will only have the race days for 2 grand tours.

Top Sprinters loose 4 race days so are slightly better off than the top Stage Racers.

In terms of race planning and engagement of the managers of the top Stage Racers I am a little concerned that fewer race days may mean less interest, which I don't think is the intention. My gut feeling is a top Stage Racer should be able to race 2 grand tours and at least 1 other stage race like the Dauphine, or a few classics. But that is status quo in terms of race days. Maybe we could increase the race days of tier 2 leaders more keeping top stars where they are, not sure how this would play out.

One thought is maybe the points available in Grand Tours are too high and that's driving some of the large difference. Might be tricky to get a balance as it could end up being more profitable to avoid Grand Tours and we wouldn't want the stars avoiding the big races.

Minimum wage adjustments are an overall gain for my team and I did think the pricing of domestiques was a little high so looks OK to me, do the same calculations apply to renewals as well? If so we could have a fair bit more cash added to the game for the transfers season.

Here are how the changes affect my team. No massive changes, Cav gets 2 less days, all rounder Keukeleire gets 4 less, Bardet stays the same and my TT guys and super-domestiques get plus 3 or 4.

Rider		New Avg	Avg Diff	New RD	RD Diff	New Min Wage	Min Wage Diff
Cavendish	Mark	79.8	-0.8	56	-2	580	20
Bardet	Romain	78.8	0.5	53	0	500	50
Coppel	Jérôme	77.2	0.8	59	1	390	20
Dumoulin	Tom	76.9	0.2	60	3	370	-10
Matthews	Michael	76.3	-0.6	67	1	320	-70
Blythe	Adam	76.2	-0.8	67	1	320	-80
Hepburn	Michael	75.6	0.2	64	4	280	-50
Chevrier	Clément	75.2	0.8	65	3	260	-40
Keukeleire	Jens	74.6	-0.1	67	-4	220	-90
Morton	Lachlan	74.6	0.8	67	3	220	-60
Barta	Jan	74.4	0.6	68	4	210	-70
Viennet	Emilien	73.5	0.8	71	4	170	-70
Guerin	Alexis	73.5	0.8	71	4	170	-70
Pedersen	Mads	73.2	-0.8	76	4	150	-140
Gouault	Pierre	72.8	0.2	73	6	140	-100
Alcaraz	Victór	69.9	-0.8	85	6	100	-90
Rambaud	Alan	68.9	0.7	84	7	100	-30
Smith	Edward	67.6	-0.3	88	10	100	-20
Mihajlovski	Aleksandar	67.5	0.8	88	7	100	0
Delaval	Colbert	66.5	-0.3	90	9	100	-10
Fritsch	Max	66.1	0.8	91	7	100	20
de Laet	Quinten	65.7	-0.3	92	9	100	10
Imai	Kenichi	65.6	0.2	92	8	100	20
Couturier	Damien	65.2	-0.8	96	7	100	10
Otsuka	Tetsuya	64	0.2	96	8	100	30
			2.8		110		-820

I like the idea, although maybe total budget needs to go down a bit as well because I think most teams will have a lot of free budget after this change.

Thanks for your comments, I already feared that my post went unnoticed.
@D2B: Top Stage Racers also have 4 race days less. The reason for 50 being the lowest race day number this season is because of fitness trainings bought from research. I think the interest in the top riders still remains the same as the scoring potential is still much higher even though they now have little less race days.
In the last 2 seasons all top stars basically always rode the same 2 Grand Tours, I wanted to make them to ride only one GT and more smaller stage races and classics instead a little more likely than how it is with the current Race Day numbers. But with the Fitness Trainer one WT stage race and 2 GTs is still possible.

Maybe I reduced the minimum wage a little bit too much. 820 less is quite a lot and for some teams I imagine the number is even bigger. I think I'll slightly increase the MinWage again. Lowering the budget is of course also an option.

@Bikex - OK thanks for the clarification.
Happy with the change if you intend to make race participation a bit less predictable, hopefully it will keep players interested with a new planning challenge.

Agree the budget reduction looks a bit too much, happy to see my bit of number crunching helped

Very pleased to see you are trying to tweak the setup to keep ICL interesting, looking forward to the end of the season and beyond ...

Meh not happy with the lesser race days for Contador obviously but I guess for the balancing it's a viable option and may help against top scorer's influence. However this means that the GTs will get even weaker with the startlists and they wern't really that awesome to begin with this season (looking at you Giro). But maybe that's just because the depth his missing in the DB, compared to MG.

Didnt notice this . A few thoughts below in no particular order:

- I like the min 100 wage for every rider
- With the min 100 for everybody i would remove the minimum spending budget for DTs. You cannot simply waste spots to random 30 wage riders and therefore, the rule is not necessary anymore.
- i think the minwage for WT quality riders are okay, doesnt need to be any higher. just keep in mind that MinWage is not equal to requested wage in renewals for leaders / high scoring riders and let the market decide for most riders.
- I'm okay with the race day changes

Where did we end with the scouting by the way? I remember sending some stuff

R2 is still open, guess it will be for a wee while yet but not sure.

It's (finally) about time to close scouting round 2. Until tonight I still you can still send something in. These are the teams that already have so in the past months:
Vegeta Cycling Team
Filliers - Mora Pro Cycling Team
Illes Balears
Sugoi - Xanterra
Bunzl - Centrica
CarbonSports Cycling - Lightweight
Italo - Ventilair
SAP - Bianchi
Leopard - Evonik Pro Cycling
Suntory Lucozade Sport
Team Peugeot
VisitUkraine p/b Nemiroff
Credit Suisse Pro Cycling


If you miss this round, don't worry there will be another one after the U21 World Championships.

Now the first part of Round 2 is done, but for the riders several teams bid on there will be silent auctions now. I'll sent you a table which will look like this:

TeamID

Rider

XY

XYZ

100

You then just copy the list put it in a reply to me and then change the 100 to whathever new bid you want to make. 100 is the smallest amount you can put there. The highest new bid will get the rider. If two bids are the same, a randomizer will decide where the rider goes.

I'll give you 24h for that, as it's really easy to do. If I don't get a reply all your bids will stay at 100.

The used talent focus money will stay the same, if you don't manage to get the rider you'll of course get that money back. Riders not included in that list, who you bid on, are already on your team now.

Whoops made a small mistake, all messages I sent so far went wrong, I'll send it again in a moment

There were some interesting names in that pm

Now, who were these riders again? Cannot even seem to remember the names I sent months ago

The riders where i dont get a PM are signed for 100?
Edit: nevermind, the answer is there

I didn't even do this for my team due to family problems.

you asked me to do it for you and told me who to sign

1/9 smh