Ollfardh wrote:
I'm strongly against changing the crash ratio. It's a part of cycling, let it be a part of the MG as well.
I am even stronger against changing it for stage races compared to classics. Sorry, but that's just discrimination against teams aiming for the classics. No matter where you focus lies, there should always be a chance that bad luck ruins your plans.
But unlike RL when a rider crashes out of a classic race he starts at the next race while IRL he misses the whole classic season sometimes (see Boonen crash at P-N 15 (PN isn't a classic but you get my point) or Canc at E3 2015) while if a GT rider crashes out of a GT , they can ride the other one in RL (Contador and Froome at 14 Vuelta for example) but can't do at MG.
Just my 2 cents, as a neutral.
Edited by Forever the Best on 20-02-2018 16:32
The user formerly known as 'The Schleck Fan' Gracias Alberto.
What is the real argument for keeping crashes in the game? Do they bring fun to anyone? I think they are not. If my rider crashes (and injures/retires), I am a lot angry. If this happens to another manager, I am not happy either. They are just frustrating. Yes, they are somehow making the game more 'realistic', but we've already changed quite a lot of things in this game from 'realistic' to more fun. And making the game more even and less about luck is IMO a good thing. Thinking about that, I really can't understand why we allow crashes and don't allow random fitness. Would make the game more 'realistic', wouldn't it?
I hope we go for 0% ratio for the next season. Plus, I believe punctures would still be present in the game. Some lucky element would stay.
Roman wrote:
What is the real argument for keeping crashes in the game? Do they bring fun to anyone? I think they are not.
I like them, for me they make the game more fun.
I like the randomness and risk they bring, and that in turn can create exciting races with unique winners. And that it adds something to planning and team design, where you can risk a single rider approach but it could backfire or spread your resources wider to prevent a single bad result damaging the season but with less guarantee of result if things go well.
Plus i don't think they impact as heavily as some managers make out, especially in PCT and CT. Want to make GT's special, i don't care because i'm not in them. But in PCT and CT a single race crash is not destroying an entire season, however in PT with GT's i can see them being more damanging. But that's part of the risk-reward of the GT's which deliver big points if they go well.
Edited by TheManxMissile on 20-02-2018 16:54
Croatia14 wrote:
this wasn't entirely directed to you SotD (I know you're doing well with it), but more to the general risks of an "I pick one stage-race god and hope that he alone saves me" approach, that we have seen plenty of in the recent years...just wanted to emphasis that (the risk of) crashes can (and in my opinion should) be used as a factor in planning from the offseason on
Alright, sorry, I misinterpreted what you wrote then.
I partially agree with you, but some have been planning on a 1-1,2mio GT winner for years, and I really don't think that it should be more of a gamble to have him rather than having Bewley, Trofimov, Bakelants, Degenkolb or Swift.
The competition is already fiercer in that aspect, and the MO riders are in general more expensive. This is the top 20 wage list:
Spoiler
Pluchkin Aleksandr
Taaramäe Rein
Bakelants Jan
Ponzi Simone
Phinney Taylor
Schleck Andy
Tenorio Justo
Gesink Robert
Bewley Sam
Madrazo Angel
Van Garderen Tejay
Spilak Simon
Martin Daniel
Machado Tiago
Hagen Edvald Boasson
Amador Andrei
Van Avermaet Greg
Kudus Merhawi
Dombrowski Joseph
Trofimov Yuri
Summerhill Danny
That is 13 GC riders (2 can be used as puncheurs), 5 puncheurs, 2 cobblers (1 can be used as sprinter).
The same goes if we take the list down further. And it isn't just people buying those for crazy fees in the off season.
If we take away those from the top 20 who were purchased in the off season we get this instead. 14 riders were not picked up in the FA market. Out of those 9 were GC riders, 3 were puncheurs and 2 were cobblers.
So I definately think the risk/reward level is very unbalanced as it is. Not just for those risking it all by signing Pluchkin, Taaramäe, Bakelants or Ponzi to survive. Actually I think people are equally skewed towards wanting puncheurs to save their season. Why? Well, because they are often available. It really isn't that often to see the top top sprinters go for free in the FA market. The subtop ones goes once in a while, same goes for the top cobblers, but those just won't keep you safe. So either you have to gamble for balance, which some do, or gamble for 1 big point scorer and sufficient quality in their 2nd tiers.
That is always a risk/reward to pay high value for 1 rather than spreading out on 2-3 riders, but it makes no sense to me, that the value of a self-developped GC rider is higher than a self-developped puncheur/sprinter and still he is having a significantly higher risk when riding. That isn't balancing out the game, imo.
We can take a few examples:
Pierre-Henri Lecuisinier 525.000€
Timofey Kritskiy 700.000€
Both developped from scratch in their own teams. Realistically they will end up 6th and 8th in any given Grand Tour when the field of quality is spread out nicely. They have 39 and 43 racedays, hence can ride 1 and 2 GT respectively, most likely deciding 1.
Jack Bobridge 560.000€
Wilco Kelderman 525.000€
Both developped from scratch in their own teams. Realistically they will end up 6th and 12th in any Hilly Race, with the fiercest possible lineups. They have 43 and 46 racedays, and can both ride two Grand Tours, if they fancy. Realistically they will not ride any, as they can easily find atleast 35 suitable PT racedays elsewhere to limit their risk.
Despite Kritskiy performing OK, and Lecuisinier quite a LOT above expectation, both ended up below the puncheurs, who had 1) More RD, 2) Lower AVR wages and 3) Less risk with crashes
The average of these are:
Puncheur: 1046pts | 45RD | 543.000€
GC Rider: 887pts | 41RD | 613.000€
So what is the incitament to purchase GC riders? Glory I guess... But here we have a chance to actually bring the balance closer together, and we won't because of what? Risk/Reward? Isn't it obvious that the Risk/Reward ALWAYS goes towards not riding the Grand Tour? Unless you have a relatively crap GC rider, and the peloton is weak, or you own Taaramäe, Schleck, Pluchkin, Spilak or Dombrowski don't bother riding Grand Tours. Because the outcome will always be the same. It's cheaper to purchase a slightly worse puncheur, and his output will be slightly better.
That isn't really a difficult equation.
By bringing the crashratio in the GT's down, we don't hugely fancy GC riders. We fancy the riders riding a Grand Tour and risking 21 racedays. This TdF it would have favored, Taaramäe, Swift and Sagan.
TheManxMissile wrote:however in PT with GT's i can see them being more damanging. But that's part of the risk-reward of the GT's which deliver big points if they go well.
Except for the TOP TOP TOP GC riders, who would have scored an equal amount of points without a GT (Look at Spilak 2015) who is actually getting those "big points" from a GT? The sprinters? Nahh. I'm sure Swift could have scored his 250 points elsewhere. Demare? Also 300 points or so he could have easily scored elsewhere.
So that makes it: Phinney, Spilak, Taaramäe and Gesink when looking at this TdF solely. Spilak being the lucky one clocking 1500 points or something like that.
Before the race his PpRD was 60,5, so winning the TdF scored him 250 points higher than if he had raced elsewhere and kept his scoring level. Instead of TdF that could have been Deutschland, Dauphine and Tirreno, or more one day races, Switzerland and Dauphine/Tirreno. No matter what I think he would have scored roughly the same, unless he would have crashed somewhere... And that's the big hymn. Taaramäe would have scored better had he not ridden the TdF. Gesink probably too. Despite both getting top 4, and one even landing 4 stagewins.
So the risk/reward thing is absolutely in the "peanuts" category when i comes to rewards. The risk, however is HUGE!
The only riders where the risk/reward calculation is actually worthwhile is for the subtop riders (and even for those the risk is too high imo, as it is mainly due to luck with who else enters the race). So riders like Alarcon, Velits and Morton are likely very happy with their choice of risking a GT. Not because they went clear of crashes, but because they went clear of every single 85MO rider in the bunch, aswell as majority of the 84 and 83 ones. And that has got nothing to do with the risk/reward aspect imo. That is plain luck.
I don't mind the crashes really. Sure, I've been impacted far less than others (Just Nepom losing a decent place, Scarponi being useless in the TDF but still getting 25th and Pluchkin crashing in the Tirreno before dominating it. The market will balance itself should managers deem GTs to be too risky to spend big money on, other riders will become more expensive relative to the GT kings, and that would not be bad necessarily. An open market will ALWAYS balance itself, and now we know the real impact, which in my opinion is fairly limited apart from a few extremely unlucky managers like beagle.
Manager of Team Popo4Ever p/b Morshynska in the PCM.Daily Man-Game
What i've picked up from SotD's comments, is that GT's are not worth it unless you've got a real top GC rider and that crashes have only a minor/negligible impact on the risk-reward of a GT.
Or that sub-top GC riders are overpriced? or don't get enough RD's?
Roman wrote:
What is the real argument for keeping crashes in the game? Do they bring fun to anyone? I think they are not.
I like them, for me they make the game more fun.
I like the randomness and risk they bring, and that in turn can create exciting races with unique winners. And that it adds something to planning and team design, where you can risk a single rider approach but it could backfire or spread your resources wider to prevent a single bad result damaging the season but with less guarantee of result if things go well.
Plus i don't think they impact as heavily as some managers make out, especially in PCT and CT. Want to make GT's special, i don't care because i'm not in them. But in PCT and CT a single race crash is not destroying an entire season, however in PT with GT's i can see them being more damanging. But that's part of the risk-reward of the GT's which deliver big points if they go well.
Ok, if this is a majority opinion, then let's use 300% ratio and also use random fitness. If we love ranomness and exciting and upredictable races full of unique winners, they are clearly the best option for us. Would lead to fun and crazy races. Let's go random!
But surely removing crashes just favours the top riders immensely? I mean, if there are no crashes, the same riders just compete for the wins in every race (obviously GTs as well) and therefore there is no risk involved in the game whatsoever. It would just mean, buy Pluchkin win and repeat - would there be any fun in that? (and cost of top top riders would probably increase again.
That is partially why I'm still in favour of crashes, sure I've had whole races destroyed because of them but that doesn't mean we should remove them at all.
I'm also in favour of decreasing training costs for the lower stats as well, along the lines that was suggested in the thread already, but I'm against the +1 for a domestique idea completely, if you want that guy to be better then train him (you may if the costs were lower) or just buy a better rider.
Increasing CTs wage budget would be interesting for me, if that coincided with CT teams having to race a greater proportion of C1 races. Right now, CT teams can compete with PCT in a few races right now, for me it would be TTs, Repsol the mountains and so on - but none of us can really compete over a wide range of races that well. Increasing the budget would bring up the quality of these teams to be able to compete over 2/3 disciplines (note: not all) and that would boost the competition that way.
Personally, I'd get rid of C2 (integrate into C2HC) and allow CT teams to pick from C2HC bands for a total of 60RDs (God, this years C2HC calendar was shit for me ) and fill the rest of your allocation in C1. This would allow much more choice for managers so they can pick races they would do well in e.g. Mountain races that may actually have hill/medium mountain stages in them , and potentially more competition in these races as well.
John St Ledger in Team Bunzl-Centrica and Team U25
Crashes: I'm probably too biased to join the discussion about crashes, but they definitely ruined some fun for me this year (in addition to last year, where Morton crashed out of GC hopes in his only GT). Except of this year's Giro (where Morton actually crashed in an early stage, too) and Vuelta, I can't even remember a mountainous stage race, where Morton or Haig did not crash. Morton lost both T-A and TdS due to several falls, Haig (despite not being reported - no offense!) definitely must have crashed in Dauphine (dropping from 4 to 33 in two days) and he kept falling in his TdF outing (though not losing all GC ambitiouns here). Don't get me wrong: I know, almost every manager is effected by stuff like that, but as for my team, I'm done with crashes, like seriously. In addition to constant underperformances in TTs, it has really made for a frustrating season. And to be clear: I've reported tons of races this year, too - and there were way too many crashes for my liking. Even from a neutral point of view.
It's obviously a tough choice, whether to switch them off for a year or just lower the ratio. There's some pro and cons for both ideas. As for myself - and as said before, I may be too biased - I would be willing to give it a year without crashes at all. We've a lot of random stuff happening anyway (which is fine, except for those damn TTs), so I wouldn't mind the "crashes belong to cycling" realism issues here.
Lowering the ratio. Maybe. But roturn's research of those equipement stuff is concerning, at least for me. It's pretty obvious, that some riders crash several times in one stage or stage race. Might be just another random PCM hard coded stuff though. I dunno.
TTs: And biased, again I think we all agree, that the TT randomness is even worse than the other random daily form stuff going on in road races. Hepburn finishing 50th in a 60km TT? Yeah, why not? It's frustrating for everyone, who's been hit in almost every TT happening.
I would not go as far as cio though - simulated TTs may (I would need to test it first) have less random results, but the gaps are quite weird for sure. Wouldn't be much of an issue in classics maybe, but for all other TTs. I've been simulating TTs quite a lot lately (though not focussing on how random they are) and the gaps are way smaller/closer than in 3D played timetrials. Even in long TTs, there's often only gaps of a few seconds between the Top-10/20 riders of a TT.
As SN already said, I believe that 2-days-TT events could potentially replace the one-day TT classics. It wouldn't solve the whole problem, but it would at least slightly work against those hard feelings of random TT results. Just an example: I've tested such a 2-days-event most recently: a 81 TT rider (one of the top favorites of the event) didn't even Top-12 the first stage and would then go and finish Top-3 in the second. Finishing something like 5th or 6th eventually. I think it could be worth a try for the upcoming season. Even though it's slightly annoying for the reporter to do two long TT reports for one race
TheManxMissile wrote:
What i've picked up from SotD's comments, is that GT's are not worth it unless you've got a real top GC rider and that crashes have only a minor/negligible impact on the risk-reward of a GT.
Or that sub-top GC riders are overpriced? or don't get enough RD's?
Yup, basically...
So what do we want to do? Give them more Racedays? That won't solve the problem. That will only make the top level GC riders even more dominant.
Lower the wages? That will only work for established teams, hence giving them an unfair advantage, as newer teams will still have to pay 1mio+ for their GC riders.
So what could be done is lowering the risk of scoring absolutely nothing from the GT's for people to actually enjoy their riders finishing 5-6th in a Grand Tour and scoring aproximately the same - or slightly less, than they would have by spreading out their racedays elsewhere. And we could do that by tweaking the race frequencies.
I suspect that this will also invite some other riders, like Sagan, Lutsenko etc. only the slightly stronger counterparts... And IMO the Grand Tours is the big thing in cycling alongside the classics. It is one of the few races that has consistently been on the calender from the very beginning of the game, and IMO it hurts like hell, to see a Giro lineup, like the one we saw this season. Whether it being because of reduction in racedays or a combination of crash risk and reduction of racedays.
For me, the risk of crashing out made me plan Lecuisinier alternatively. Otherwise he would have ridden Giro/Vuelta. I suspect others might have planned like that aswell.
Honestly I see absolutely no benefits from riders ruining their entire season from a crash in a Grand Tour.
tsmoha wrote:
As SN already said, I believe that 2-days-TT events could potentially replace the one-day TT classics. It wouldn't solve the whole problem, but it would at least slightly work against those hard feelings of random TT results. Just an example: I've tested such a 2-days-event most recently: a 81 TT rider (one of the top favorites of the event) didn't even Top-12 the first stage and would then go and finish Top-3 in the second. Finishing something like 5th or 6th eventually. I think it could be worth a try for the upcoming season. Even though it's slightly annoying for the reporter to do two long TT reports for one race
If it is "just" for the classics, couldn't it just be done and then reported fictional? I mean, ride two TT's and calculate the average times and put that into the result list, and then let the reporter use his imagination to put something together in a text with some pictures?
We really don't need to read two almost similar reports for that IMO, if it is mainly done to level out randomness.
tsmoha wrote:
As SN already said, I believe that 2-days-TT events could potentially replace the one-day TT classics. It wouldn't solve the whole problem, but it would at least slightly work against those hard feelings of random TT results. Just an example: I've tested such a 2-days-event most recently: a 81 TT rider (one of the top favorites of the event) didn't even Top-12 the first stage and would then go and finish Top-3 in the second. Finishing something like 5th or 6th eventually. I think it could be worth a try for the upcoming season. Even though it's slightly annoying for the reporter to do two long TT reports for one race
If it is "just" for the classics, couldn't it just be done and then reported fictional? I mean, ride two TT's and calculate the average times and put that into the result list, and then let the reporter use his imagination to put something together in a text with some pictures?
We really don't need to read two almost similar reports for that IMO, if it is mainly done to level out randomness.
Nah - I would rather count the two TTs as stages itself and the final GC seperatly, at least that's my opinion. Probably would need a specially adjusted ranking points system for such an event (to get a good balance between the stage results and the points for the final GC), but that's easier to handle as stuff like calculating two TT results into one.
Obviously, those two reports did not need to be similar/identical and less text and just focus on the relevant times/splits would do, imo.
EDIT: Ah, I see what you mean If you would just count the final GC as the actual result? Would not need to calculate average times though. Just report, who did well in the first TT and who did well in the second (or who did Dubridgely bad in the first and who did it in the second TT) and show the final GC as the actual result without handing extra ranking points for the single stage results. Would work as well, yes.
An idea about Tour of America - I know that right now it's meant to be big risk and open for CT teams. I love that - especially the latter. But I would also love to see a little more reward for some teams. I wouldn't mind if it didn't happen - it's dynamic right now is kinda fun anyway - but just a thought:
Why not give it a C1M/CGT categorisation? The points would be somewhere between C1 and HC (could be HC, but this keeps the kinda low-scoring dynamic we have now but ups it a bit) and the process for entries (regular C1 entry) would be the same, so CT teams could still compete. Given it's ridiculously longer than any other PCT event this shouldn't be completely crazy right?
As said I kinda like how it is now so I don't mind if this doesn't happen, would like to hear some thoughts on it
24/02/21 - kandesbunzler said “I don't drink famous people."
15/08/22 - SotD said "Your [jandal's] humour is overrated"
11/06/24 - knockout said "Winning is fine I guess. Truth be told this felt completely unimportant." [ICL] Santos-Euskadi | [PT] Xero Racing
jandal7 wrote:
An idea about Tour of America - I know that right now it's meant to be big risk and open for CT teams. I love that - especially the latter. But I would also love to see a little more reward for some teams. I wouldn't mind if it didn't happen - it's dynamic right now is kinda fun anyway - but just a thought:
Why not give it a C1M/CGT categorisation? The points would be somewhere between C1 and HC (could be HC, but this keeps the kinda low-scoring dynamic we have now but ups it a bit) and the process for entries (regular C1 entry) would be the same, so CT teams could still compete. Given it's ridiculously longer than any other PCT event this shouldn't be completely crazy right?
As said I kinda like how it is now so I don't mind if this doesn't happen, would like to hear some thoughts on it
THIS ! 21 race day should pay more than 5-10 - that simple !
![imgur.com/KlJUqDx.jpg[/img[img]]https://imgur.com/yUygrQ.jpg](https://imgur.com/KlJUqDx.jpg[/img[img]]https://imgur.com/yUygrQ.jpg)
) and fill the rest of your allocation in C1. This would allow much more choice for managers so they can pick races they would do well in e.g. Mountain races that may actually have hill/medium mountain stages in them 
, and potentially more competition in these races as well.
I think we all agree, that the TT randomness is even worse than the other random daily form stuff going on in road races. Hepburn finishing 50th in a 60km TT? Yeah, why not? It's frustrating for everyone, who's been hit in almost every TT happening.
