Obviously there will be the normal ability to choose Z number of races outside these packages, so yeah it seems like a solid solution (to a problem that didn't really exist but whatever) for the lower divisions...
Of course if we now get a load of new reporters this will all be for nothing
I like Roman's basic idea and I like the idea of packets of races. What we do not want is to make this new system tilted toward a specific type of terrain. The race packets could be 50% of one terrain and 50% balanced of the other terrains. You could also have 1 or 2 generic packs with no specific terrain bias but balanced for all terrains.
This would allow specialized teams to still specialize but then be forced to ride some of all the remaining terrains. AMEXpc was built this season to compete as a cobble team and we did well in those races. Our secondary focus was sprints and that has been a disaster.
We have raced on the hills and in a few short tours but without uphill leaders we have earned few points. I am not unhappy with our choices and it looks like we may just avoid relegation.
It would be very difficult to look forward to a race season where a specialized team was forced to give up races in their chosen terrain to be forced to ride in races they have little or no chance to compete.
The bottom line is we all recognize that we need a smaller schedule with more teams per race. The Admins need it, the reporters need it and as team managers -yes- we need it. No matter what we decide to do, some will be unhappy, some will be happy. However, remember this it must be balanced, so that specialized teams can compete, but compete does not necessarily mean to promote.
I look forward to the challenge of next season. It will bring change and that will be good.
========================================= Team Manager of AMEX - Navigon
Editor of the Cobbler
I also like the idea of packages, but i think it will be very important and tough to balance them. If there would be 8 packages and cobbled race in every one of them, wont we have pissed cobbled teams,that cant enter all cobbled races?
Or it can lead to some of the packages being "overpowered" in eyes of majority of managers, while there are not enough spots for everybody. But that is similar to popular HC choice races now, so should be fine if balanced well.
Would there be a cross over between divisions with the packages?
There are a number of CT riders who can comfortably compete with PCT level riders and win on occasion. This ability can net some very nice point gains for those teams, as can the wildcard appearances in the HC races. The packages sound division locked, which would exclude CT teams from competing with the PCT teams in some of these races where they could genuinely match up with them.
Or that only be restricted to the Z race days outside the packages? Just another aspect of to perhaps consider
And more of a direct follow on from Avins...
How would this change then affect Goals? Would goals still be available for Continental Tour rankings? Or what if you select several goals from one Package, only to be denied entry to said package...
Which builds into some of my worry about the packages. If you do get denied entry to one of your chosen packages you are clearly going to be stuck in a package that you didn't want, the reason probably being that it did not give you a good chance to score points. Suddenly a chunk of season is pretty wrecked through no fault of your own.
Obviously countered by balancing the packs out...
Sorry if i seem negative on all these ideas, just that such a radical change is a big deal and hence should only be undertaken if it is going to work fully. I'd rather have a 15month season than a broken/poor quality game...
Avin Wargunnson wrote:
I also like the idea of packages, but i think it will be very important and tough to balance them. If there would be 8 packages and cobbled race in every one of them, wont we have pissed cobbled teams,that cant enter all cobbled races?
Or it can lead to some of the packages being "overpowered" in eyes of majority of managers, while there are not enough spots for everybody. But that is similar to popular HC choice races now, so should be fine if balanced well.
Oh I hadn't thought of that. That is kind of an issue. Of course it just means that teams have to re evaluate their teams.
TheManxMissile wrote:
Of course if we now get a load of new reporters this will all be for nothing
We will need new / more active reporters no matter what the system is. It's not a good thing to have a 15 month season, no matter what you might think.
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Obviously, common sense will be applied when deciding the packages. Theres not going to be a cobbles race in every package. There isnt enough cobbles races to do that and also have cobbles in the 'free to select' sections!
Selecting packages will be exactly like selecting HC races this season. Assign 1 to your preferred choice, 2 to your next best and so on. For PCT, with 30 teams and 24 spots, the chances of you not getting your first couple of choices are pretty low. With HC races this year, it was pick 12 races from 20. Two teams failing to get their 10th choice was 'worst case'. Packages will be known before goals, so you'd be stupid to pick a package-race in a goal and not then give it a high priority. And if you do that, you should be safe. Its not the same as a CT team picking a popular C1 race as a goal last year, where all PCT teams had entry priority over them.
Some of you are trying to think up anything negative that you can about the idea, and some of those points arent very well thought through. I've not seen any reason for not proceeding with packages in some form, so the fine details can be ironed out when there's a bit more of a known structure to them. It would save the panicy 'what if' scenarios being thought up here, when some of those are scenarios that simply won't happen.
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It might be a good time for now, to see if there are any non-calendar structure related suggestions?
Edited by SportingNonsense on 23-01-2014 14:37
Maybe the reporter's thread would be a better place, but i'm just throwing this in before i forget about it: we - the reporters in particular - may do a list of races, that should be the first victims of a smaller calendar. Races with bad slopes or heavy loading time, for example. Tour of East Java comes to my mind for example.This way we could also optimize the gameplay (when speaking of bad slopes, at least). I may start a thread though, if that's fine with you, SN
Firstly, I have to say I experienced old CT for 2 seasons, so I know what I am writing about, trust me. To be honest, I promoted to PT mainly due to a big luck. If I remember right, I got my team in Tour of Luxembourg where there weren't many teams, something like 7 or 8 and my Efimkin won that race and he totally dominated that race. Race later, Tour of Denmark, there weren't too many teams either and I got 1-2 overall with a big luck thankfully to a great cyalogical PCM AI. And with these two races I climbed from almost bottom of the table to almost the top where I carried on till the end of the season somehow, even I really didn't have team good enough for it. This still stays in the game and I really think we need to minimize chances of a total luck with getting into races where is the low amount of teams.
Tour of America. Ok guys, I agree it may not possibely work in how PCT works. But I really don't think that race would just give points to teams which has GT riders, no. If the profile of the race is good enough, it could give many opportunities to almost all type of riders. Many times the biggest scorers from GTs are teams which didn't have overall expectations. There could be lower amount of other climby races than it is for now too. And the motivation for people to send here their leader would be quite big, if there would be given bigger amount of points than for C1 race. But well, we can do this without ToA as well, but I mainly want to say, it could work as a race for PCT teams quite easily.
And the good thing about this - it would allow PCT teams another way to gain needed experience points to max out their riders. It could take then only 2 seasons to max out a rider from 4.00, so there wouldn't have to be the absolute need to loan out riders to PT for PCT teams. But Tour of America would only work if there would be 24 PCT teams. And we really can do that, we have at least 1 PT, 5 PCT and 6 CT with how it is looking right now with activities of managers. Don't you really think there would be enough teams to promote from every division?
Back to Tour of America. One Grand Tour doesn't make it all a climber oriented PCT. If implemented right, it can really work. For example, cobble teams could send their sprinters and hilly riders to haunt stages. That brings me to my idea of that fixed race days only for PCT teams. I really believe, if there will be a nice all-around mix of HC races, that wouldn't affect any type of team. In ProTour, I have many races I wouldn't want to race, if possible, as I don't have good enough riders to score good points there, but still I think I am in overall really competitive. So, climber teams would still have their climbby races, but you would still have your races for cobbles, spints and hills. Only new thing for you would be - you would have something around 40 race days you don't want to race. But still, that would be the same story about teams who are in for climbers or puncheurs, they would have less other HC stage races, if there would be Tour of America as a GT. But I really don't see a problem with an idea 24 teams competing in all HC races (approx 80 race days) against each other.
I have to say I fully agree what roturn and SotD are saying here. I think everybody is racing some races which you really don't need to ride now already as well. But what you can do, that's a good thing, I believe. It can't be possible to be competitive in every race possible, this game would get a little bit boring I believe. If every manager would have money for a great rider for every type of terrain, it would be only about luck how PCM generates the results, not much about managerial abilities how you create the team. That number of fixed days could work similarly for C2. Fixed race days would bring increased need for having all-around squad, but that was always needed if you wanted to have a big chance to promote. At least I always thought that.
I don't think low amount of money would be a big deal in CT, every team has same conditions and even PCT and PT don't have enough money to be amazingly competitive in every race they are in. But as I never managed a team there, maybe it could be possible to add some extra money to CT teams after these changes to balance it a little bit, if it will be needed.
I am not the biggest fan of regional rankings, in my opinion it is too much work for not a greatest result, but that's probably only my opinion. The biggest priority really should be in my opinion to set an initial system of Man-Game to the one which will exploit the system of PCM the most and will bring the greatest fun with possibly the lowest amount of work for SN and reporters. What these regional rankings brings to us? If I remember right, for a really big amount of work, it gives us 'only' an addition into race goals. In my opinion it is not realy worth of it, but if SN don't mind to do that, why not keep it in the end. It will only mean a really, really hard work to select races, how to keep it all balanced all-around with types of races in continents to give teams similar chance to win, how to keep it balanced in PCT and CT at the same time and so on.
Instead of that (or extra to that), I would suggest bringing in a little bit different system in addition to changes I suggested earlier. If we have fixed HC and C2 calendars, where everyone would compete in every race, plus a C1 'selected' calendar, we could have HC, C1 and C2 'Tour'. Results in these 'Tours' could count not only as (extra) options for race goals, but we could even decide who will promote from them. We could have top 1 or 2 PCT teams from HC and C1 tours to promote to ProTour in addition to current 4 (or could be 2) top PCT teams, who are going up right now. Same could be applied to C1/C2 Tour.
Why wouldn't this system work in C2? I really don't know. You would have a small C2 Tour of something like 60 to 80 races where yeah, it would be a little bit about having deep team as well, but still the best riders matters the most and the best team wins after all. I think it would even be more enjoyable for CT teams as if there would be only CT teams in C2 races, they could experience a win way more often. Plus there would still be C1 Tour where everybody has same chances to win, to compete and to show the face of your team and it does not matter if you are from CT or PCT. C1 would still be the majority of race days you would compete in.
Even as an extra motivation, hypothetically, if a CT team would be so good to beat all PCT teams and win C1 tour, that team could promote from CT right into PT. It would be almost impossible, but could be a nice new feature of the game. The relegation could be decided in similar ways or it could stay in the way, how it is now - there is a matter of opinion if teams should be punished by going all in to win one of these tours. This system, if implemented in a right way, could bring an extra dimension into the game without too much extra work, as it goes well with my system.
The main problems with current system aside too many reporting to do, how was greatly described by Smowz. This game is too much about luck to get your team into a race, where is riding a little amount of teams. This is why I am all in to suggest to make races full of teams and riders. That can be only done IMO with 24/24 leagues, because otherwise it will be too hard to implement right and to balance it for both PCT and CT.
But still, the main question is how we would decide in my system roughly that joint 100 racedays for PCT+CT will be enjoyable. If we will stay with current system, we will never get full line-ups in all races, so we need to change that. If we force teams to race races they don't want to race in HC/C2, we should give managers that needed choice to choose your preferations fully in C1.
Race packages could be a good way how to do that, if implemented right. In general, it is a brilliant idea and it could be easily decided what everyone wants to race, by giving priorities to packages they want to race the most and they want least to race in, how it is now with HC races. But I think it couldn't work as packages with 20/25 random race days. It would only work if races in these packages would be full of race of mainly one/two types - so 20/25 race package of cobble/hilly races or climby races or something like that. Why? If there would be 'forced calendar' in other ways, I think people should choose what they want to race, in that way. Mainly, people still always want to race same types of races. But, I would see probably a better solution for this thing.
I would suggest making these race packages, but to put races from the same geographical area into one package. There would be mainly similar types of races in one package, but surely not all races in a one package should be raced in mountains, for example. There should be a few races in every package for riders of absolutely another specialization. But not too much, as there would be an unbalance versus that all-around HC and C2 tours. But this is a thing to a discussion. But IMO this could bring more chances for lower quality of riders to shine, if there is for example a hilly race in a sprinters package, some riders with 75 HIL could have a little bit better chance for a big result after this change.
If these packages would be pre-made in approximetely same sizes of 15/20/25 race days, it would be way easier to select calendars and it could in the end keep regional rankings in the game. Every package could have its own rankings (or two/three/xxx packages in total could in total form a ranking). These rankings could be useful for race goals/bring money for teams and to keep that regional aspect of the game in the game. Maybe there could even be bonus points in total rankings for winning/being in top 3 in these package ranking - but I am not really a supporter of this, but everything is possible, if we set the system in a right way to be fully changable to a great enjoyment. The only thing which would be needed to control would be the distribution of races into packages. But could be perfectly done, IMO.
For example, you would have 'Australian package' - you could have Down Under Classic, Herald Sun Tour, Tour Down Under, Geelong Tour, The Emerald Race and Tour of Southland there. In total, it is 31 race days. You can remove a stage day from a race and have 2 packages of 15 or, you move a race or two into HC/C2 category and get 20/25 race days. Or you can remove a race from PT completely. You can have similar packages like 'African package', 'German package', 'Benelux classics package', 'North American' package and so on. This would make tha game even more regionally based, than it is, possibly. And it seems like you enjoy regional thing of this game a lot.
Well, I don't really know, how it would suit the game the best, but I think this could be really easily managed system and the only thing you need to control is the same size of all packages, good balance in characteristics of races all packages (to give equal chances to everyone to have race calendar they want to have and not to have people who got package they really don't want too much) and to keep overall number of race days in packages on 100.
I don't know if I am missing something with all these my suggestions and considerations, but if this was implemented, I really believe this game would be easier to run, we would get faster seasons, and it would be more enjoyable and more fun at all. It would bring new ways how to succeed in lower levels, new motivations to build your team and we really wouldn't lost anything important. For example, myself, I want to build my team as a Czech (and Slovak) team. You can still build regionally your team, nobody says you can't, these changes won't affect anything of that! The only problem with this could potentially be, that PT could be too boring after this! What do you guys think?
Oh, and I am really sorry about lenght of my ideas, but I really want to share my thougts with you and to try to help the game.
I am with Manx on this one.
I dont li the idea of these packages, just lower the number of races generally which get no teams, making sure that the races are still spread over Mountains, Flat and Cobbles.
I want to be able to choose my races if I get in not have quite a few of them given to me.
But really, what exactly does it do for the game? I agree that undersubscribed races are a problem, but in the end there don't seem to be to many of them, and it also happens in real life, where L.L. Sanchez wins a sprint stage st Tropicale because few top teams/riders were there. And except for that, it just means you can't make a calendar to suit your team properly. You can decide what sort of package you want, but it also means all the top mountain riders will be in the package(s) with the most mountains, meaning teams with outsiders for those races will struggle, whereas the way it is now, the chances of being in loads of races with all the best riders seems to be very slim.
It also simply doesn't make the game any faster. It would be just as efficient to just cut a few races, and bring dwn the amount of total race days like that. Perhaps there could even be some sort of a vote to get rid of the most unpopular, or just cut the most severely undersubcribed ones, or the ones that cause extreme difficulties, or don't add as many new ones for the ones that fall away because there's no PCM 13 version available; the possibilities are sheer infinite.
Again sorry if i'm getting too involved for somebody that's not in the game. (Yet! )
Some very good things being said. With the packages what I would do is leave everything the way it is but I could request, instead of every single race, the Australian package and German Package, along with other races.
I generally dont like the package idea. So what, we save a month or so. We would save more time by having guys report who can put a report up everyay or two.
Dippofix wrote:
Again sorry if i'm getting too involved for somebody that's not in the game. (Yet! )
Don't mind voicing your opinion, especially such constructive and well-informed input as yours might increase your chances of getting a spot in the end
Gotta make my mind up in that package discussion first.
We could definitely use more active reporters of course, I suggest we could make interest in reporting races a criterion to evaluate 2014 applications to possibly increase the pool of available reporters that way.
I'm fine with Packages, as long as they are implemented well. I'm just worried that such a wildly different system may not work and ruin an entire season.
If SN and the rest can organise it well i think it will be a great challenge and solution. I'm just putting the emphasis on if...
I do think the big gaps (apart from the WC's hasn't been masses this month, and a couple of months back when Cio first was absent and we had 2 months or so of not a lot) are more of a problem than under-subscribed races. Remove those 3 months and it's around 12-13month season. Which, considering the expanded CT division and Mini-Man Game requirements, is not too bad.
Obviously that is best solved by more reporters, but they don't seem forth coming.
Just a thought but have you tried asking for reporters in the stories section? or in the general career discussion? it might be that there are people on teh forum who would be interested in reporting who don't tend to look at the man game forum otherwise so wouldn't know you are looking.
You can't really compare this here to LuLu, who should be grateful to race at any race with his new team.
Also it really does fasten the game cutting the needed reports down.
When you need less reports the game is faster if we assume the game would have the same pace, then we would have been already finished with the season with even having all new national champions.
Luis Leon Sanchez wrote:
It will also generally be faster if there arent long breaks like at the moment. There havent been anyaces, except WC, for quite a while.
Do you really expect that the reporters at the moment, primarily all busy with university or other stuff (for example Smowz) should give an f to their stuff to do just for the Man-Game??? Because it reads like this
Then we have new reporters who also have something called real life and then? Whats then the advice? Gathering again new reporters but wait there aren't unlimited reporters here?
For the Man-Game looking at the history and where "we" are now there were always new reporters but then got busy, so just getting new reporters isn't clearly THE solution here. The game grew and grew so there needs to be some kind of stop and what Roman adviced is clever.
Cutting down race days and fixing them to a PT style and still more people get involved in the Man-Game by maximizing the resources of PCM (22 teams a race).
Where this is negative just because you can't win the PCT by avoiding tough competition is beyond me.
Well no one of the negatives have thought about but you remember you can still win stages and get points by breakaways etc.? Ok, not in cobbled races obviously but still.
Even in a race you would expect absolutely nothing you can achieve something.
Like (I have already forgotten it oops) where a PCT team won a PT event (Deutschland Tour?) just because of this.
So overall stronger competition still could be great.
Team Bianchi - 2012 Man-Game ProContinental Tour Champions
![imgur.com/KlJUqDx.jpg[/img[img]]https://imgur.com/yUygrQ.jpg](https://imgur.com/KlJUqDx.jpg[/img[img]]https://imgur.com/yUygrQ.jpg)
What do you guys think?
)
Because it reads like this
