Your point is totally valid too and i fully understand. I just didn't really notice that Bilbao was a 79 in the 1.5 update as i was still playing with the previous one. Still think he is no more than a 78 though.
What about Dennis? What do you think about his mountain stats?
And this year they had only 12! rest days between Giro and TdF. For example, last year it was 33 days. Bilbao had to ride 42 stages in GTs in 58 days. It is clear then that his form is no longer there and that he is exhausted.
I fullly agree with not giving GIRO guys beyond 78 in MO (perhaps some case could be made for 79 for TAO , Hindlay or Bilbao but I do not think so; this is exactly how we end up with so many guys with high MO- we have almost twice as many 78+ MO guys then we used to have couple of years ago!). As for why? Once again>>> comparision. TAO and Hindlay compete against and are significantly better that guys like Konrad, Masnada, Pernsteiner... so 75-76 riders. As for the rest of the guys:
* I guess we rather agree Almeida gets a boost to 77 (although I believe this is a tad on generous side)
* Fuglsang works better as 78/81, not 79/80 guy (I think we can even consider lowering his REC further, he finishes too high in GTs in my tests; I tested with 79/80 though)
* Nibali- I am gonna contradict myself (this is exactly how we end up with so many guys with high MO) but I would not like to jump to conslusions after corona-riddled season and suddenly "destroy legends". He is already not that great with 80/76 so perhaps 79/76 but damn....this is Nibali, not some random guy who had a few good races. Is he done? Probably but given his palmares I recon we need definitive proof before we lower him significantly. As far as I am concerned I would not be shocked if he finished on podium at TdF next year...
* Majka- he is sick and it can justify his performance (I am Pole so I would be biased here but I think he has not looked better than 78 in any race for a couple of years now)
All that being said, I am not quite sure why we have so many guys with high MO.
MO in general looks to me overinflated by 1 point across the board (except for the best climbers, they stay at 82) and I am not sure if we all understand what sth like 78 means. It used to mean being 20th-30th best climber, now it means being 30th-50th>>> great difference! When I say Tao, Hindley are 78 I mean they are 4 points down from Roglic/Pogacar, not that I can easily nam 30 better guys then them.
Is there any plan to perhaps revise MO stat? Especially for 81/80/79/78 guys? I believe we have too many of them.
On seperate note, is there any way for me to access the "current" version of the database? DB file, DYN-cyclist table or Excel spreadsheet....I don't know how we store these. I would like to look at the changes we made between 1.5 release and now. Thanks.
FLAT and SPRINT stats: From the discusion I understand that we screwed up these stats to try to fix the sprint "bug" (main sprinters going off too early and dying before the finish line). Personally- I hate to see almost half of the peloton having all stats in "green", jeez- we even have pure climbers with SPR in 68-70. I understand that we boosted these stats across the board for leadout men to be "better"= does the "fix" work though? Did we notice significant improvements? I did tests with TDF (all stages in 3D, user-controlled team just maintain position the whole way and I only observe AI behaviour) and i came up with some interesting observations: the sprint "bug" seems to have sth to do with stages/stage profiles. In test 1 I used 2012 route and ALL sprints were just perfect (no bug whatsoever, main guys did very well). In test 2 I used 2020 route and like 60% of flat stages had this bug- sprinters going off too early and guys like Luka Mezgec winning. Coincidence? I don't think so as 2012 stages just felt different- e.g. I used exactly same startlists for both tests and in 2012 McEwen used De Buyst all the time as the last leadout>>> worked great for McEwen, he was competing for "green". However, in 2020 De Buyst was used like only 2 times and McEwen was a total crap- no chance to beat monsters in sprint like aforementioned Luca....I have no clue what could be the reason for this strange AI behaviour and differences between 2012 vs 2020 flat stages but the points is: do we want to have stats accurately representing riders skills or modified stats in order to fix the bug which does not seem to be fixable without changing the game's code (although, I am not sure what happens if we make FLAT and SPR more spread out effectively making leadouts worse).
Mathieu Van der Poel and Wout Van Aert: I understand that rating them is like rating Sagan back in the day (although, I never really got the sentiment; if the guy is a beast just make him a beast! but agreed, he would be winning too much if rated too highly but it was in previous games, now, with this daily form impact, things has changed a lot) but we have them way, way, way TOO LOW. Before the Flanders, the race had too strong favourites (BEFORE) and after the race I assume we all agree that they seem to be even better than we had thought they were. Now, if Roubaix was to be ridden today, is there anyone who would not consider them favourites? With 1.5v stats here are the results:
(3D game, user-controlled team withdraws at the start of a race, same startlist used for every test- best COB riders selected)
FLANDERS (ridden 3 times, different routes)
RANK NAME SUM
1 Oliver Naesen 160
2 Philippe Gilbert 126
3 Zdenek Štybar 115
4 Wout Van Aert 82
5 Greg Van Avermaet 80
6 Alexander Kristoff 75
7 Tiesj Benoot 66
8 Sep Vanmarcke 63
9 Niki Terpstra 61
10 Mathieu Van der Poel 49
11 Peter Sagan 45
12 Yves Lampaert 24
13 Nils Politt 23
14 Jasper Stuyven 14
15 Owain Doull 14
16 Dylan Van Baarle 13
17 Florian Sénéchal 11
18 Mike Teunissen 8
19 Luke Durbridge 7
20 Alejandro Valverde 6
21 Silvan Dillier 5
22 Edvald Boasson Hagen 4
23 Michael Valgren 2
ROUBAIX (ridden 6 times, different routes)
RANK NAME SUM
1 Alexander Kristoff 331
2 Peter Sagan 264
3 Greg Van Avermaet 211
4 Philippe Gilbert 189
5 Zdenek Štybar 180
6 Oliver Naesen 121
7 Niki Terpstra 117
8 Mike Teunissen 93
9 Sep Vanmarcke 91
10 Mads Pedersen 89
11 Yves Lampaert 79
12 Tiesj Benoot 47
13 Wout Van Aert 44
14 Nils Politt 44
15 Heinrich Haussler 43
16 Mathieu Van der Poel 36
17 Jasper Stuyven 27
18 Edward Theuns 25
19 Ian Stannard 20
20 Stefan Küng 16
21 Gianni Vermeersch 14
22 Tiesj Benoot 8
23 Arnaud Démare 4
24 Alberto Bettiol 3
25 Søren Kragh Andersen 3
26 Michael Matthews 3
27 Silvan Dillier 2
28 Gijs Van Hoecke 2
* I assigned points for first 15 riders at the line, here's the matrix I used:
** I set all riders to HATE every temperature and every weather to lower daily form impact
So 9 races and only once one of them finished in top 3 (Mat at Flanders, 3rd).
I understand that they will be upgraded in the next release but my point is >>>> make them even better. With 2020 version of them game I do not see any reason not to give some guys good stats in almost every category. Damn, I believe we have Allaphilipe too low as even with him having 82 in HILL (all the other guys top at 80) I still cannot replicate his real life results. I recon we need to increase his backup attributes even further (and COB of course, where we are going with this- 76? just a reminder we have Valverde at 75 so 76 seems like a bare minimum; I would not go futher there though- not enough evidence to back up more than 76).
P.S. I get the logic behind VDP having 75 in sprint but it does not seem to do the trick. Not only the stat itself looks stupid but the goal of him not winning too many bunch srints is not reached >>>> now he does not win anything. I rode like 70+ stages of tours and I think he ended up winning one stage which is a couple of times less than....Magnus Cort (I don't know why but he seems to benefit the most from stupid AI behaviour in flatty/hilly finishes at stage races)
Bolko: Plenty of good comments and thanks for taking the time and for lack of time will just comment on the first part of your posts. Yes there has been a bunching of riders especially on 78 mtn and in order to reduce this we have decided to stretch out the mtn stat to 83 meaning that there is an upward shift of some of these riders to 79 and a corresponding rise in other riders as well. Yes Tao and Hindley can work at 79 if other riders like Porte FE are maintaining about a 3 point mtn stat advantage and are increased to 82. The reason for the mtn stat stretch is that in our own tests where a couple of us did playthroughs of several Tour de France's and found that Roglic and Pogacar as should be so were dominating but other riders like Pinot, Lopez and Porte were some way off (yes that's normal for Pinot) but it was happening way too often and they would be huge amounts of time behind and it could possibly have something to do with team averages. For example in the average stat calculation that the game AI makes would see Lopez being behind that of Fuglsang and Lutsenko meaning that the game AI possibly focuses too much on other members of the team instead of their leader in Lopez and to a similar degree the same can occur with Porte/Pedersen and Pinot/Kung if these riders are in the same startlist, In effect these riders quickly stopped being GT contenders and rather stage hunters BUT likewise I never had the same problem with Buchmann/Sagan with Buchmann finishing high and competing for the podium. So something of a mystery here. The same was also true of Bardet and Naesen but as Bardet is not really a GT contender at the moment this is not a problem.
To address this and to try and make more interesting gameplay stretching out the stats not just mtn but also other stats such as hill and cobble etc is to try and stop bunching with too many riders on the same stats, to try an increase the ability of the elite riders and to also increase where possible the averages of riders like Lopez and Porte where they have some strong classics riders in their teams.
As for increasing other Mtn riders i actually think this is a good idea because these riders still have to have the ability to win mtn stages and spring surprises but we are careful in doing so. For example Colombian climbers we tend to give high mtn stats to them with good acc as well but low back-up stats especially in RES unless they are atypical like Martinez. In fact you mentioned Majka and in many ways he is statted like Quintana and I think he is worth 79 mtn because if you look at the rest of his stats they are pretty low, he has low flat, low rec, low res etc, he's a lightweight climber and a weak 79 and has some ok recent results, whereas somebody like Sivakov is a much stronger 79. I also think that if Tao and Hindley are worth 79 mtn then Nibali based on his history and last years Giro is probably still worth 80/76 because as you say with that low hill stat he's not going to be doing that well but if he has a +4 or 5 day then he can.
As for the sprints I totally agree and it's a huge mystery and in fact with exactly the same sprint type stats the best sprinters were winning most of the sprint stages in previous versions of the game but now I have found more riders like Bauhaus, Consonni and Coquard beating riders like Bennett and Ewan more than they should, as this is even when I increased them even higher, for the next update we have now increased the flat and sprint stats of the leadout men and their trains to see if this can be improved.
As for beasts the next update sees VDP and WVA even stronger than before. I'll look at the second part of your post later.
Edited by Tafiolmo on 25-10-2020 13:58
Hey Tafiolmo, thanks a mil! Let me address couple of points here but before I'd say that please disregard my comments about having too many riders at 78-81 MO - I have not played a game for a couple of years plus I have not watched a lot of cycling for a while so when I noticed how many guys we have at 78+ in MO, I was shocked. I have to admit- I talked nonsense. This is how cycling is these days (a lot of good climbers, not much difference between them) and this should be reflected in stats.
To the points:
1. Nooo, don't go into 83s. I agree we need to stretch out these stats but don't go up, go down. Reasons being:
* historically, we had 83 reserved in every stat for monsters (I personally had 83 in last 10+ years only for Cav when he was winning every sprint, Contador in MO when he was destroying everybody and Martin in TT, not even Froome or Cancellara in their best days)
* We would screw up MO to HI ratio/proportions. Look at Roglic, he would be 83/78 now? This would be very odd...
* We would screw up MO stat allocation in comparison to other main stat. Who is more dominant? Roglic in MO or Allaphilipe in HI? I assume Alla stays 76/82. So Alla 82 in HILL but we have 3 guys with 83 in MO?
* What about max. stat after daily form boost? Isn't this boost somehow capped so if we have 78 with +5 he will get a full boost but 83 guys with +5 will not as his boost will be capped? (guessing here, I don't know, just saw somebody mentioning this)
* Everybody will still be "green" in almost every stat. This one gets on my nerves as I always used it as a highlighter of a "good" attribute, now almost everybody has every stat in green.
If I may, I would suggest achieving greater spread by lowering stats, not increasing them (and we do need greater spread, this daily form impact is too great to have everybody bunched together>>>> too many random results).
How? Go into 58 or even 55. If memory serves, we went to min. 60 to fix the problem of sprinters not reaching time limits. This is not longer a problem and sprinters with 58 (or even 55 but this one Iam not sure about) would have no trouble reaching the limits.
If we really want to go into 83s for MO, I would like to see at least HI stat allocation and MO vs HI ratio being adjusted accordingly.
2. In my TdF tests I used the same startlist every single time so I don’t know how all the guys play but there is definitely something wrong with some of them. Roglic and Pogacar are fine, Buchmann too but Bardet never competes (he is the worst I think, he really likes to be like 50th in the first mountain stage at TdF destroying his chances), Pinot is...Pinot (okay but he is Pinot even on first MO stage, he just never seems to compete for yellow), Quintana does not feel like 81 (okay, weak 81), Porte is weak, damn even Bernal does not feel like 82. On the other hand, most of these guys seem to compete in mountains with likes of Jungels, Allaphilpe and….Fugslang (okay, REC stat not impactful enough), I think we need to stretch it out even more). Anyway, I confirm your observations, there is something wrong with “some guys” in terms of competing in mountains in Tours. Although, most of my tests I did with 1.5.0 version of the game, it seems to be a bit better on .1.6.2. As to why…?
3. Great minds think alike! Yes, averages! We tried to fix the sprint bug so we increased FLAT + some backup stats and now what? In 1.5 release McEwen and Bennett have the highest average. Generally, sprinters and classics guys have too high averages (I am talking about value_f_current_evaluation of course): Roglic has the same AVR as Kung! (sic!). Of course the formula has been broken here since…ever… but I believe we need to decrease AVR for sprinters and classics guys for climbers to stand out more (of increase climbers but you know how I feel about giving out 70+ stats to everybody. How? MO down to 58 or 55 could help a bit but the main issues I believe is with… HILL. Every Tom, Dick and Harry in the peleton seems to be 70+ in HI. For me it makes little sense, especially seems the game looks to be more forgiving in this regard (I had Bennett the other day finishing like 5th in a hilly stage of Paris Nice; he managed to keep up with a group of like 30 riders competing for overall win>>> it should not have happened, period. I would decrease HI stat and spread it out more across the board. It should also help out with problems with GT contenders not contending- in my tests they LOVE to lose time on random hilly stages. Perhaps if there wasn’t so many decent hilly riders in the peloton this could be somehow limited.
To sum up, go below 60 for everything, esp. MO, HILL, SPR (this should help with averages too), spread out stats even more, lower MO for sprinters/classics guys, try lowering HI wherever possible.
Just a thought at the end…if we lower MO in general, perhaps more random guys would be dropped in MO stages in tours making likes of Porte, Bardet, Pinot being better positioned when real “action” happens. Constantly I see random 72-76 in MO dudes being in the main group. This “last climb group” is too big and when big guns attack, it looks like some 80-81 climbers just give up when they are in a group of 50. Could be if they were in a group of 20-30, they would keep fighting? Of course this game mechanic is broken so there is not much we can do. Anyway, just my random thoughts.
Bolko: The 83's that have been given out are only for a couple of riders like Pogacar, Alaphilippe and Ganna etc in some stats but there are very few 83's and I don't think Roglic should be one of them. Yes there are a lot of 78's and I've now managed to decrease this to 20 riders moving some up and down The DB for a number of years now has actually had some wide variations between mtn and hill climbers for some riders and I find a three gap difference works well, it becomes more of a problem when it's wider like Nibali 80/76 but that can create some strange performances but with Buchmann at 81/77 it works very well, when it's in reverse it doesn't affect riders like Alaphilippe with 76/83. As you can now probably see there will only be one 83 rider in mtn and in hill and these have just been mentioned above. The reason that you see so many greens, is that it's actually harder to downgrade a lot of riders given the size of the DB but we try to do this when we can becuase these riders can go unnoticed as it's easier to notice those that are doing well. In fact we have recently widened the rec stat as well with a rider like Pogacar at 83 and Fuglsang at 66 to try and get a greater benefit in this stat and in general sprinters and TT riders normally have good rec so they can perform in the final week.
The lowering of stats back to 50's is something that could be done and it doesn't really affect bad climbing sprinters because they're high acc gets them through mtn stages, in fact one of the things I hate about the game is how some sprinters because of their high res (which they need but more testing needs to be done to see if they really need it) sometimes can pace their teamleaders up at least a mtn which is something I hate to see and very unrealistic. I dpn't mind seeing Kristoff pacing say Poagacar on flat terrain but on a mtn, that's bad game AI.
The lack of some riders not performing well in mtns is something I mentioned earlier and I'm hoping that with some changes in averages that may help a bit. The problem is that when you have a rider like Van Aert even who's s going to have higher averages than both Roglic and Dumoulin because he actually has no weaknesses to lower his average stat. With Van Der Poel this is not a problem as there is no GT leader in that team. Riders like Jungals have been downgraded a bit because these are the kind of riders that can really climb well with their high stats across the board especially RES but as soon as we downgrade one another replaces him as we can now see that both Dennis can climb really well with power and Ganna not too far behind. As you say to decrease the averages of the sprinters and classic's men this can only really come from a lowering of climbing stats which I'm in favor of and with the next update coming out after the Vuelta and these new stat stretches in place, that will be the time to assess things again.
The reason why there are so many 70 type hill stat riders is that so many riders constantly get good results on small hills and we kind of want the sprinters to get over these small hills to then sprint unless they are terrible like Kittel used to be, a perfect example of a 50's climbing rider.
Edited by Tafiolmo on 25-10-2020 22:37
Agree with 83 for these guys. I had thought we want to upgrade all 82s to 83s but if this is only Poga>>>>FINE!
I played some more on 1.6.2 version and it feels a bit different than 1.5.0 (better!) so I might need to revise/reconsider some of my previous points (not sure yet though).
I agree that three gap difference between MO vs HI works best but on rare occasions I set four point gap over years it always worked fine so I think it is acceptable for guys like Nibali.
As for lowering averages:
* lower MO across the board,
* lower HI in some cases - I feel we have too many good HI stats for guys who should rely on RES and ACC to get through uphills: Vanmarcke, Terpstra, Lampaert to name a few classic’s guys or SPRINTERS- all top sprinters except for Groenewegen and Gaviria are at least 69, this feels too high to me. I believe they would keep surviving if we lowered this by let’s say 1 point on average. This would allow us to somewhat reduce number of these 72-76 in HI guys and perhaps reduce GT contenders losing time in hilly stages because they get stuck in 2nd group when peloton splits
* lower SPR across the board- almost everybody seems to be a decent sprinter. When I sort the DB by COB, 20+ guys are at least 70 in SPR. What happened to bad sprinters? This would also help a bit with decent sprinters standing out more in hilly races/stages. I remember times when Valverde/Gilbert/Kwiato were killing it in game because we gave them 72 in SPR (but the rest of good HI riders were like 69 tops). Now they are old and not that fast but we have them at 73 – showing clearly how little differentiation we have in SPR stat.
* we can lower DH in some cases
* we can lower REC for classics guys
I am not sure if BAR counts against AVR (guess not, don’t remember) but I feel we are too generous there plus there is not much differentiation either.
On separate note, is there a way to somehow edit daily form impact?
By far the worst stat we have is…. PRL.
Not only game mechanic seems to be very broken here but also daily form impact is the greatest for this stat. Just played a few times a prologue to Beloise Belgium Tour (2016 route) with startlist consisting of best COB riders and some great results….One time I had these results: Greipel was 2nd (73 in PRL), Sieberg 3rd (68 in PRL!!!!!) and Burghardt 5th (70 in PRL). Kung (81, the only guy over 80) was regularly 15th-25th). This is the worst ever! PRL has been regularly broken in PCM over years but at least for the edition with broken prologues there was a workaround>>>> simulation. Now, the simulation is broken too! When I simed, the results seemed random too and I had guys like Moscon (74) winning and Kung still sucking.
As for some riders not performing well in mtns, I do not think it is down to simply not being a leader. For Jumbo I had Gronewegen as a leader and Roglic was still killing it (also, VVA already has higher AVR than Roglic, doesn’t he?). Also, I am pretty sure if I used the same startlist but replaced some of the best climbers making Bardet the best MO guy in the pack, the presence of Naesen would not bother him and he would not be constantly dropped by 70-72 MO guys. I don’t know what it is but some guys totally don’t compete when they are not like top 5 favorites in a race. In one of my tests Alaphilippe lost like 5 minutes at the beginning of the race but still finished ahead of Bardet regularly making up 1-2 minutes on him on every MO stage.
As for RES for sprinters… yeah, we need to get rid of sprinters pacing a peloton and lowering RES seems to be the a viable option (I did not test how it impacts SPR performance, sorry, but VVA is at RES 80 and I do not see him outsprinting Groenewegen or McEwen who are 76 (except for going off too early bug of course) so I guess lowering RES by 2 points for “pure sprinters” seems quite safe (helps with AVR too!). But… -2 in RES, -X in MO and -1/2 in HI…..This combo should do the trick.
One last point, let’s be careful with boosting leadout sprinters! Just played some sprints in Beloise Belgium Tour (2016 route) with these pairs (Kristoff for Gaviria, Sarreau for Demare, Laporte for Viviani) and they literally annihilated everybody. Anybody else was lucky to barely finish ahead of these leadout guys. For me these sprints are simply broken and sometimes leadouts feel like hitting a wall or sth and are simply too slow making main guys to go off too early. But sometimes leadouts don’t hit this wall and sprints are realistic. If we make leadouts too strong, they probably still hit this wall sometimes but when they don’t, there might be no way for other guys to win (or compete even).
By the way, is there any way for me to see current state of the DB?
Tafiolmo: I did some further testing regarding sprints and I must conclude there is nothing we can do to fix sprinting bug. I would lean towards reflecting riders’ stats accurately, not trying to boost them here and there just to fix the broken game mechanic (regarding sprints at least).
Boosting leadouts does not make much sense as if sprint is “normal” De Buyst is a perfectly capable leadout for McEwen. However, if weird things start to happen, Kristoff is absolutely not enough for Gaviria not to finish 15th. Not much you can do if your top sprinter decides to suddenly go off 1,2 km to the line…
Also, I looked into RES for sprinters and it does not seem to be relevant or at least impactful enough to make a difference. Perhaps let’s not go crazy there but we can safely lower RES by a couple of points for pure sprinters if this seems warranted – I imagine this would help with both averages and “pacing the peloton” problem.
Bolko: Yes sprints are pretty broken and often occur as you have said where the leadout train of the favourites takes up the sprint too early and the main sprinter runs out of energy before he reaches the line and only to be overtaken by a lesser sprinter. If you simulate the stage though quite often the main sprinters win, so it is broken in 3D. The RES for sprinters can be lowered but for riders like Degenkolb, Kristoff etc need high res because these are also classics riders as well and not natural sprinters and yes we can look at the climbing for classics riders. The idea for increasing a bit the stats for leadout men is that they could last longer in their leadout before the main sprinter starts his strength and hopefully win. For averages this is more guesswork and I'm sure that the game AI can recognize for example that Porte should be the team leader for a GT and not Pedersen despite the fact that Pedersen's average is much higher and it's almost impossible to change this. Also Prologue is pretty bad but nowhere as serious as the sprint problem but I've yet to try an older sprint stage to see how this compares to the newer sprint stages that you mentioned on your last post. There used to be a link to the DB stats but for some reason that I'm not sure of it was taken down.
Edited by Tafiolmo on 26-10-2020 21:38
After the debates for the climbing stats at the Giro for riders like Tao, Hindley and Almeida etc I'd be interested in knowing what kind of stats (yes it's still very early days yet) that members think riders like Carthy, Grosschartner, Chaves and a back on form D.Martin should have, as these riders are performing well in a better quality field than the Giro?
I looked through all the posts regarding the SPR stats for Sprinters and lead-out men.
I did some testing myself, and FLA and RES give a sprinter a little longer sprint, but it's actually less than 0.5sec so nearly nothing.
What bothers me the most about the lead-out men is that they as already stated start too early, but half of the time, they are also just sitting at the back of the pack, doing nothing all day, and then you have f.e. Alaphilippe as a lead-out for Bennett instead of Morkov,...
What also happens a lot to me is that the correct lead-out men just relays at the front of the peloton, then drops back, comes back to the front at around 4k to go, and drops back again...
I think it's so hard to give a lead-out man the right stats, I would definitely say high FLA, high SPR (top 70's), slightly lower ACC (because sprinters are just getting killed by their own lead-out men, but even with lower acc, it still happens), and a good RES.
But even after all of this, it's really hard to know how to stat these riders without a good explanation from Cyanide or Nacon how they exactly programmed the game to behave.
jarneke1404 wrote:
But even after all of this, it's really hard to know how to stat these riders without a good explanation from Cyanide or Nacon how they exactly programmed the game to behave.
You're quite optimistic thinking they know that themselves!
In my experience, the optimal lead-out man in the fastest races has something like 75/70 SPR/ACC which sounds silly at first. But following this guy leads to a slow build-up in speed, as a real lead-out is, not tiring the main sprinter very much, but putting him at the perfect speed to start his own sprint and last until the end. Of course these stats for the lead-out men would make the team dynamics weird in-game, and probably assign the wrong lead-out men to the sprinters at first.
Perhaps a fix would be to stretch the SPR stat more, putting the fastest of the CG men (Roglic, Pogacar, Dumoulin, Bernal, Thomas etc) at around 65-67 SPR, the fastest pure puncheurs (Alaphilippe, Kwiatkowski, Gilbert etc) at about 69-70 SPR but with high ACC ofc, the best lead-out men (Mørkøv, Richeze, Selig, Kluge etc) at about 74-75 SPR with low acc, the second tier sprinters (Trentin, Laporte, Sarreau, Matthews etc) at 75-77 SPR with about equal ACC and the very best sprinters up to 83 SPR and ACC.
Maybe this would allow for the best sprinters to compete with each other more consistently and not make them tire out before the line after a lead-out. This i just a guess though, as I haven't tested anything. I'm just getting this vibe after playing the game a lot.
jarneke1404: it would confirm my observations that artificially boosting sprinter’s FLA and RES is not really necessary. Let’s stat pure sprinters accurately then instead of boosting FLA and RES just to give them irrelevant advantage at sprints. My hope here is it would help with bringing averages down and with sprinters pacing peloton problem.
purepasd: Yeeees! We have GC and hilly guys too high I believe- if I sort the DB by “hill”, all top guys are 70+ in SPR. I also tested some lead-out scenarios and apart from very weird situations (which sadly happen half of the time) it seems like there is a big problem with “too good” lead-outs. If lead-out guy is too good he can drop the main sprinter or tire him out (it seems) so I would agree that 74-77 SPR and low ACC but high REC is the best combination.
All that being said….just played a stage where everybody “forgot” to start the sprint, nothing was happening until 0.3 km where suddenly everybody just started sprinting. Of course random guys who just happened to be at the front of the peloton won- results were completely random.
As such, I really think there is nothing we can do to fix this thing and the best option is just to stat all guys accurately. If A is faster than B, just give A a better stat, not considering possible impact on broken game mechanic or analysing if A or B is a lead-out for C and we definitely need to stat him in certain way. If he is high ACC, let’s give him high ACC. I would consider we all agree that most lead-outs are decent in SPR, lower in ACC and higher in RES so it all should make sense and work as well as it possibly can given the game code we are working with him.
Also, sprints aside, we cannot go crazy with FLA and RES if this is not warranted as boosting some guys there would impact other aspects of the game. If we add a few points too much here and there for lead-outs, same guys will ride in classics and probably start bringing escapees back into the peloton. I generally feel we have FLA, HIL, REC, STA, ACC too high and it is hard for anybody to stand out, especially far-away attacks do not really work as peloton is full of guys who can dictate a high pace and destroy breakaways.
Seeing a lot of comments regarding riders that have too high hill in the early 70s and also a lot of comments about too high sprinting stats for some lesser riders in the early 70s as well. When you do stat updates on a regular basis and you are checking the positioning of these riders and the profile of the stage, there are a lot of different riders that do well and much more than I expected. So unless you study every race and stage you'd be shocked at how many different riders can do well in so many races which is why there are so many riders with these stats. The best way to counter this imo is not to downgrade them but rather downgrade riders who haven't put these performances in for a couple of seasons now, which is a separate stat check and can take time as this DB has more than 4000 riders!!!
Purepasd ideas could be a quick fix but we need to remember that riders like Alaphilippe and Kwiat in the past can beat better spirnters (which is why they need high acc) but agree that some of these type of riders can be reduced. Also the idea of deciding about leadouts being higher vs being lower is an important one and also the decrease of second tier sprinters as well BUT it's worth remembering that some of the biggest problems I had when I playtested several Tour de France's is that Ewan was getting the best leadouts from Degenkolb who is more or less a 78 sprinter anyway and can't really be reduced too much neither his backups as he is a classics rider, whereas somebody like Selig or Richeze that are leadouts and nothing else can.
We still haven't had the time to sort out 'rider types' but will certainly get this done for next season but possibly changing this for some riders may well help with both sprinters and averages. For example this question was first brought up several months ago where I think Remco is down as a "roleur" whereas he really needs to down for " GC rider" so he performs like so.
Roglic and Pogacar must have the same in mountain. Difference was on time trial, where Roglic had a bad day and Pogacar had very super good day +5.
Roglic and Pogacar must also have the same in hills. We saw in the tour and in Liège–Bastogne–Liège. Roglic also won Vuelta last year and favorite to win the Vuelta again this year.
Not one are better than Roglic, not even Pogacar.
Edited by Arberg on 29-10-2020 12:46
The DB for a number of years now has actually had some wide variations between mtn and hill climbers for some riders and I find a three gap difference works well, it becomes more of a problem when it's wider like Nibali 80/76 but that can create some strange performances but with Buchmann at 81/77 it works very well, when it's in reverse it doesn't affect riders like Alaphilippe with 76/83. As you can now probably see there will only be one 83 rider in mtn and in hill and these have just been mentioned above. The reason that you see so many greens, is that it's actually harder to downgrade a lot of riders given the size of the DB but we try to do this when we can becuase these riders can go unnoticed as it's easier to notice those that are doing well. In fact we have recently widened the rec stat as well with a rider like Pogacar at 83 and Fuglsang at 66 to try and get a greater benefit in this stat and in general sprinters and TT riders normally have good rec so they can perform in the final week. 
