Ollfardh wrote:
I don't know if big changes can be brought to the table or not, but since we're talking about it.. MG statgain system always seemed to be missing something for me. Personally, I found the ICL statgain system far superior. Since that game is dead now, perhaps (with Bikex's permission) it's worth taking a look at?
Don't think we currently have the bandwidth to rework the whole system with the help available. If someone can come up with the new system, it can be considered.
I had a quick go at doing this previously, so will see what else I can come up with - will aim to have something pulled together by the weekend.
- We want to have races with a TT that aren't TT races but TTs create so much bigger time gaps than other stages any non-GT race with a TT is liable to become a TT race (see this year's PN). This is a constant challenge for us in race design. Having spent a bunch of time on this I am not sure there are a lot more calendar fixes we can do without eliminating TTs from all races that aren't supposed to be TT races or making them all really short.
I would say PN became a ‘TT race’ due to other aspects - the hilly stages had zero selection namely. That’s a game version problem - if a similar route is used for PN or TA next season, making the hilly stages harder is an easy fix. Even now it’s very apparent hilly stages aren’t producing gaps really at all in this version, and addressing that will go a long way to solving other problems.
"Making the hilly stages harder" is not an easy fix. For a couple of reasons:
1. In PCM 22 if you made the hilly stages harder they became climbing stages - the hilly guys didn't win. The original design had a harder stage that was taken out for this reason. This may not be true in PCM24 but we didn't test it as we wanted to see how things went with the parcours we had. We will look at this but I don't think you can assume it is easy.
2. We only have one active stage maker - so if we can't find a stage of just the right "hardness" and it has to be edited . . . .
3. I just don't think hilly stages are that selective in real life - so you are asking the game to do something it wasn't designed to do. 40ish guys finished within a minute of the winner on both stage 2 and 4 of last years TDF (which I think were both classic hilly stages) And that is guys like Pogi and VDP going hard and in a GT where many riders have no incentive to stay at the front. On stage 5, which was a 33k TT the 40th placed guy lost 3 minutes.
While I haven't looked that much into this at the moment I have always wanted a training path that does some combination of Hill and TT. While you can do it somewhat by combining the different training paths it is something that would've been very interesting to play around with
Will need to look into it more in the near future, but a few initial impressions.
- Was inspired seeing Stage Race get a slight nerf to hill, but then very disappointed to see TT and Climber v1 get nerfed even more, such that Stage Race is still very overpowered. Not sure why stage race has gotten this kind of treatment when the only actual area of growing inflation in the DB over the past half decade has been of 76-78 stage racers.
Agree with others that TT was already underpowered compared to stage race and now is even worse. It seems obvious to me that the proliferation of TT scorers in past years (which I also agree has been mostly handled via calendar and OVL updates anyway) most favored guys who were passable climbers and therefore already was more due to stage race being overpowered than TT being overpowered. Even the top TT guys only have a reason to choose TT in their Lvl. 3 year. Most people are not taking some flat over significantly more climbing ability for those kinds of stage races.
Meanwhile, I have no idea what was done with Climberv1. It's basically a worse version of the old Climberv2 now? I have absolutely no idea what this could possibly be useful for now since it doesn't even give Medium Mountain. No TT like the SR option, no MM and energy stats like Climber V2, and just overall worse than climber MM, where you get basically as much mtn. Just absolutely a gutted path when previously it's combination of Mtn/Hill was the only thing making you even think twice about going auto-stage race. I just have no idea who Climberv1 is for anymore.
- Relatedly, I think too much was done here trying to add the two different MM options. One would be fine to split the baby and maybe replace the old Climberv1 path, but I think they're unnecessary and especially the climbing version is overpowered. Their end up replacing their older counterparts rather than supplementing them, imo.
- Don't really like what happened with cobbles and classics. People have complained about classics being underpowered for years, so I guess the solution was to just nerf cobbles a lot in comparison? The classics and Fabian sprint gains leave few reasons to go cobble. The meta seems very flipped now to go classics (or Fabian) for most levels and potentials and get better main stat ability for very modest resistance loss. I'd rather keep cobbles as is and just give classics the acceleration bump we've been asking for for over a decade.
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy
Sorry about the relative quietness here the past few days, work has been crazy!
All suggestions made so far have been considered and we're working towards an updated version of the file, and it will hopefully come some time over the next week or so. While it is not possible to include every possible suggestion made, we are trying our best to balance and normalize the gains, especially among seemingly related paths.
All the comments and suggestions made so far were considered (but all could not be incorporated of course), while trying to balance related paths as much as possible.
Changes in this version
1. Updates for Stage Race, Climber v2, TT, Cobbles, Classics and Fabian paths.
2. Climbing MM replaces the old Climberv1 with some more modifications.
3. Punchy MM is the new Hills v2.
