Yes. A post-LBL update is definitely scheduled. Might be a bit delayed because of a possible V2.0, but we'll see, I haven't decided about that.
Meanwhile, Alak and I spent hours, editing the cobbles stats of the riders. I wanted to share them with you, both to generate discussion and to hear the opinions.
It was definitely difficult this year and I'm sure there'll be some you don't agree with. We're able to defend the top stats though, believe me, we've got reasons for them
Note that there are a couple more on 76, this isn't all
If there's enough demand for it, I might release this .cdb as a stat update post-Roubaix.
(Oh btw, Greg got an ITT upgrade after this screen, but that's not what you should be looking at )
Edited by Jesleyh on 12-04-2015 19:20
Jesleyh wrote:
Yes. A post-LBL update is definitely scheduled. Might be a bit delayed because of a possible V2.0, but we'll see, I haven't decided about that.
Meanwhile, Alak and I spent hours, editing the cobbles stats of the riders. I wanted to share them with you, both to generate discussion and to hear the opinions.
It was definitely difficult this year and I'm sure there'll be some you don't agree with. We're able to defend the top stats though, believe me, we've got reasons for them
Note that there are a couple more on 76, this isn't all
If there's enough demand for it, I might release this .cdb as a stat update post-Roubaix.
I don't mean to nag or anything but hurry up, after LBL it's only a month and a half until the next PCM comes out. Btw i got an out of topic question, is the even planned for a daily expansion before the next game is out? I can't remember seeing much activity anywhere.
About the cobble stats i would say i agree with pretty much everyone, but i just find it weird seeing so many +80 riders there, but again i can't disagree with anyone Edited by Naxela on 12-04-2015 19:31
Does Laurens de Vreese really merit 77? Not entirely convinced about Rowe and De Backer either but I would be more lenient in those cases. A few of the riders there have struggled this season aswell, so a bit harder to judge. I know Langeveld has been troubled by his E3 crash for instance, but does anyone know why Chavanel has underperformed?
Who are the rest of the 76s? Marcato?
marble wrote:
Does Laurens de Vreese really merit 77? Not entirely convinced about Rowe and De Backer either but I would be more lenient in those cases. A few of the riders there have struggled this season aswell, so a bit harder to judge. I know Langeveld has been troubled by his E3 crash for instance, but does anyone know why Chavanel has underperformed?
Who are the rest of the 76s? Marcato?
Vreese should be 76, Jesley didn't understand me too good on that
Rowe was a great domestique, can be argued between 77 and 76 but I think it's fair, De Backer same, but he's easier as his backup stats like flat or stamina are way lower than the other 77 contenders.
Jes can probably posts the screen of rest of 76 but yes Marcato and Benoot iirc for sure. Chavanel, I think age caught up with him, he's been on very high level for many years, he's slowly declining.
( just wait till he does Elmiger in next years then )
Edited by Alakagom on 12-04-2015 20:05
De Vreese was a misunderstanding between Alak and I, in fact.
He will be 76COB.
Rowe was very strong today, and both him and De Backer have relatively weak backup stat to make up for it.
De Backer's 12th place doesn't exactly reflect his quality(although it's still good), De Backer was very strong today.
Benoot, Breschel, Burghardt, Wynants, Marcato are on 76 as well, I believe.
Edited by Jesleyh on 12-04-2015 20:06
It's arguable, but I don't really think so myself.
But Stybar certainly is one of the standouts this cobbles season. Very strong today, and also was very strong in RvV(remember he was the only one that could comfortably follow Thomas' attack there).
In RvV it was just a bad idea to chase and get for a better result, obviously because Terpstra was up the road
Also, keep in mind riders like Terpstra, Vanmarcke and Kristoff have a bit better backup stats than him, so there should not be much difference between them in game and it could probably go either way.
Jesleyh wrote:
De Vreese was a misunderstanding between Alak and I, in fact.
He will be 76COB.
Rowe was very strong today, and both him and De Backer have relatively weak backup stat to make up for it.
De Backer's 12th place doesn't exactly reflect his quality(although it's still good), De Backer was very strong today.
Benoot, Breschel, Burghardt, Wynants, Marcato are on 76 as well, I believe.
Sounds fair. Rowe did some pulling in the RvV too, so his result there isn't 100% fair to judge, but I wouldn't give him 77 based on his 8th today alone (it was only a couple seconds from a 15th for instance). I would want to see a bit more from him first, so I would've probably hesitated with giving him 77 personally. Obviously I would give him potential to develop in game as he will probably get there sooner rather than later though.
De Backer does only seem to do well in P-R though. He was good there last year aswell. Not so visible in the other cobbled races, but I suppose his lower hill stat works to prevent that to some degree. If it does in an acceptable manner I would agree with the 77 for sure.
Not completely sold on Wynants being a 76 either. Has he really showed that level the past couple of seasons?
Eisel is in a bit of the same situation as Chavanel aswell I'd say, maybe even more so than Chavanel actually. You can argue that they should be 76 for sure, but I'm not certain they really are at that level right now.
Benoot is also incredibly hard to rate. It's hard to really argue against 76 after that 5th place though. After a season or two in PCM he will probably already be 80+ and I'm not sure I'm convinced he will take another massive leap by then. But that's more of a stat development flaw than anything else.
Out of curiousity what have you rated riders like say Senechal, Greipel, Oliveira, Bauer, Devenyns, Jerome, van Baarle, Offredo, Gatto and Lutsenko?
Also, keep in mind, Rowe and De Backer's stats make sure they are basically 76,5 COB in game, compared to the others.
De Backer's HI is relatively low, so that he will have trouble in RvV yes.
Wynants and Eisel are mainly very good domestiques, both of them proved that today. They sacrifice everything for the team and therefore don't get individual results.
Benoot was difficult for us as well.
Well, Benoot won't necessarily be 80+ in two seasons(there's still a random factor in development), but yes it is likely.
Benoot is a big talent both in real life and in the DB, I don't think there's much problems with him turning out good in the DB. Sadly enough we can't make him develop in more of a puncher than a cobbler, but so be it.
I can announce that I'm back in assisting with this db, I will look into if we can add some features for v2, suggestions are always welcome, but don't ask me to make jersey's though
Looking at the stats I would put minus 1 point with most, but doesn't reflect Amy big flaws
Gatto 76, really? Definitely not sold on that
Bauer impressed me in E3, but disappointed after. Maybe it's his stamina, not sure. I don't see Oliveira quite at 74 yet, he may have had a good day during RvV but no other results in any of the other races to really be certain. Lutsenko the same, and the minor difference from RvV doesn't justify him being 3 lower than Oliveira imo.
Jesleyh wrote:
Wynants and Eisel are mainly very good domestiques, both of them proved that today. They sacrifice everything for the team and therefore don't get individual results.
Obviously. But you need something to base the stat off of still. You could say the same about de Backer. He was riding for Degenkolb, but still got a decent placing. Look at Greipel aswell, 15th RvV and 28th P-R and he attacked and pulled alot for his team aswell, yet he is still 75 (and rightfully so for now). I think Wynants was one of the LottoNL guys pulling to get Vanmarcke back up after his puncture, so I guess he could be excused, but neither of the two have been up there in any of the top groups in the cobbled races this year. You'd suppose it would be prefered for the team to have their best domestiques with them as close to the finish as possible. But I suppose Sky has so many good cobble riders they can maybe afford using someone like Eisel earlier. I'm inclined to accept them as 76 but I'm starting to feel the difference between the 77s and 76s is bigger than say the 80s and 79s as a result.
I think as it is now from Cancellara and down through the 77s are the riders that have been getting top placings. But in reality it's so close I'm not even sure if there should be such a massive gap (or maybe the headwind today is fooling me). But it feels like the results is so varying, so I'm currently thinking of something along the lines of:
But it would require some testing to see what kind of results this would generate. An alternative could be to merge 78 with 77 and call it 77, and have Roelandts, Vandenbergh and Elmiger be 78 or something (though in that scenario I'd be inclined to promote Oss to the 78 group.
Hmm, I will try to answer a bit better tomorrow, I don't have enough time atm.
But what seems to me is that you focus on the results too much, and also too much on the COB results rather than the total stats. Flat, Stamina, Resistance and in some cases Sprint and Hills do have lots of influence as well!
For instance you judged on Oliviera and Lutsenko on the difference of their RvV result.
What you forgot there is that Oliviera was an incredibly helper during the race.
As said I will come back to this later, more in detail. But I definitely appreciate any feedback and the time you put into that post Edited by Jesleyh on 12-04-2015 22:22
Alright, I always appreciate a good constructive discussion. At least in my opinion it's always hard to compare someone's actual results to someone's domestique efforts. It's not untill someone gets to ride for their own chances we definitely get to see what their capabilities are and I suppose as a result it's easier to give those riders accurate stats. It's maybe more a matter of whether you think it's worse to overestimate or underestimate a rider, I prefer the latter, but maybe that's me oversimplifying the problem.
Though just to be clear on the Oliveira/Lutsenko case I just feel like it's a bit hard to judge based on that one race. Lutsenko also did use quite some energy on attacks so Oliveira isn't alone in that. Though I will admit I may have misjudged how much effort Oliveira used to help his team. I only ended up rewatching the last 40k and saw his couple of attacks, so whatever he did before that has slipped from my memory.
Also on the note that I don't take other stats into account, that may be true. It would've been easier if the correlation between them and how much those stat differences play a part in different races was obvious. A thing with Stybar that I have noticed is that PCM would think he would be better suited for RvV (I would assume as he has a pretty good hill stat), but it seems he likes P-R more. For Kristoff it's the opposite, he would probably have better flat capabilities than hills normally, but he prefers RvV.
So the question then comes. Do you set up all the other stats first that would give realistic results in normal races and then try to find the cobble stats, or do you try to find a balance that would maybe sacrifice a bit of realism on both sides. I'd like to hear a convincing argument cause I'm honestly not sure at all.
If I were to test stats for realism, what do you reckon is the optimal way to do it? Single race, replaying the race in career or simulating a whole career up to the race every time you run it?
If you're doing a 2.0, I can provide you with a more complete palmares section. The dyn_palmares_cyclist needs some tiny, tiny adjustments, and I can add a 2014 team line for more riders. Just tell me when you need it. I could also make a more proper dyn_palmares_team, which I hardly touched the first time around.
Something else you can keep in mind: The DB has the old auto-NC problem. F.ex. the British Championship. The winner of the race itself has his jersey for about three days, when the game automatically resolves the new British NC. Same for a few other countries. I remember the solution in earlier versions was to put the actual NC race after the date where the game made up the champions. I guess you still can't solve the root of the problem, which would be making the game not inventing NCs for those countries.
Also, the Tour of Turkey only has a handful of teams showing up in career mode. I didn't ride it in the first season, but in the second one, it was me and five other teams. And the top 15 riders in the results from the first season are only representing a few teams, so I think it was the same then.
A small point of irritation which I presume you won't fix, and which very few DB makers have the capacity to do something about: The jerseys for new sponsors are not only just converted from low-res old jerseys, and therefore low quality, but generally they're all absolutely crap regardless (I haven't had any ingame yet though, but I've looked through some of the folders). I just have to live with it, I guess, or just edit back the name and jersey of the old team whenever a major team gets a new sponsor.
Apart from such tiny things, I must say the DB is well suited to playing a long career! Good stuff!
Another non-DB related question, since I know there are lots of knowledgable people in this thread: In my second season, in the TDF, the sprinters and their teams didn't seem to care about the flat stages. Yes, often they'd chase the breakaway until it just had a lead of a few seconds with 5-10km remaining. Then they'd take it easy. They didn't make lead-out trains, and I had to drag the peloton to the 1km mark, where the sprinters would start to sprint, and the results would then end up being quite realistic (Cavendish won 5 out of 6 sprints though, because he was the best when everyone started from low speed with no teamwork). If I didn't act, the breakaway would win. I do know about the peloton slow-down bug, but it doesn't seem too prevalent in PCM14, and in the previous season's TdF, the sprinters acted like they should. So my question is: Is the thing I'm experiencing a result of the maker of the TdF variant not putting finish_flatstage, and rather the generic finish? Or has it got something to do with the fact that most of the sprinter's teams also has a GC contender, which would make it a game flaw?
I don't think Boonen should be 2 points beneath Cancellara.
Everyone was anticipating a battle of the giants between these two. Two crashes decided otherwise yet again, but only Boonen has to pay the prize statwise?
Don't forget he's still considered the undisputed team leader for the cobbled races by his team, both directors and colleagues. I think this should be taken into consideration as well.
MartijnVDD wrote:
I don't think Boonen should be 2 points beneath Cancellara.
Everyone was anticipating a battle of the giants between these two. Two crashes decided otherwise yet again, but only Boonen has to pay the prize statwise?
Don't forget he's still considered the undisputed team leader for the cobbled races by his team, both directors and colleagues. I think this should be taken into consideration as well.
To be fair this has been part of the Etixx problem. Boonen holding onto past glories, Terpstra and Stybar the leaders of today and Vandenbergh another card for Etixx to play with, has led to a team that is too convoluted for its own good. Even Sky to a degree suffer from the same problem, but as Wiggins is now finished that should improve Sky's problem with too many leaders.
Whereas teams like Trek, Gaint, Katusha and BMC largely work for one man in these races.
