Nibali better finds a teamcar soon. - Spilak23 (on Sunday, 16:54 CET)

Last update for the PCMDaily Expansion Pack

The PCMDaily Expansion Pack v1.6 is now available. This should fix some reported bugs like a crashing calendar, riders' photos not showing and the DB not showing under 'Options'. Since a lot of the DB team members are busy with either other projects or their real life, this probably is the final update for the Expansion Pack. (haasje33)

It's strongly recommended to follow the correct installation guide, that will prevent you from 'corupt' installations. There's also a small bugfix for a problem with accessoires for Bretagne, which can be found here: fixed files for Bretagne.

How to write a succesful Story

The Tips & Tricks section saw a notable addition this week: Mre's Checklist for a succesful Story. You certainly know Mresuperstar as one of the well known storywriters on the site, so there's definitely a few reasons to read his guide. His list comes in four 'stages' and makes for an interesting and helpful read. If you're into stories, get yourself a cup of coffee and take a few minutes to listen to Mre:

Hello there, are you planning to start a story on PCM.Daily? - Well, look no further, you've come to the right place. This is my lengthy article to those thinking about adventuring into the realm of story writing of the forum. This checklist is meant for the newbies who have never wrote a story before, but perhaps some of these tips and tricks can even enlighten some of the more experienced writers as well.

Fantasy & Real Races for PCM15

Always nice to see an active 'scene' of stagemakers: SN came up with a new thread this week. His Project Olympics aims to make several Olympic Road courses available for download. With Bejing and London already converted to the newest edition, we've now the timetrial course for Rio as well. SN also managed to get the heightmaps work in the Stage Editor and he plans to write a guide soon.

Two small fantasy stage races may be worth a mention as well: coolrex finished his Giro di Liguria - featuring eight stages and some of those pretty awesome ZTCS-files, which Grebiere brought up a couple of years (?) ago. If you love detailed landscapes (without automatic cities), go and try this.. trekbmc took a break from his GT project and came up with a Tour of Hellas. Four stages, all hilly.

Weekly Vuelta

Nibali won't win.

Finally they give him a ride. - Spilak23 (on Sunday, 17:06 CET) 

Thread of the Week

Cargate makes it a pretty obvious choice: La Vuelta a España 2015 - Week 1 will probably become the most crowded thread anyway, but the discussion about stage one (that stage, that wasn't neutralised) was a nice kick-off. Including an interesting conspiracy theory, why Nibali got DQd on Spanish ground.

Category: Forum/Community

Every year the Transfer Season thread is a popular resource for discussing riders changing teams or renewing contracts. On 5th August 2011, Aquarius informed us that the French sprinter Jimmy Casper was set to leave his Saur-Sojasun team. 5 days later, we found out that he had signed for Ag2r.

Such was the importance of this transfer, that this one post was not enough recognition for the move. Fortunately, thanks to Eden95 the next day, and DJP19 the day after, we all became aware of Ag2r's latest signing. Casper went on to achieve a number of Top 10s for Ag2r before retiring at the end of the 2012 season, but his transfer is always worth remembering - particularly on other occasions where somebody posts about a transfer that we already know about!

*Idea and words from SN

It doesn't make sense, but I wasn't ready to let go - CrueTrue (Apparantely now married to his old Cycling Manager collection)

All things Vuelta

The Vuelta a Espana is now less than a week away with plenty of discussion on the pre-race thread in anticipation of a race with an increasingly strong looking field. As mentioned this morning, our Velogames fantasy game league is now up and running, with the passcode 17094554.

As the real Vuelta approaches, over in the ManGame the Vuelta is drawing to an end after a route with a lot of time trial kilometres, but plenty of climbs as well. And while the time trials do see gaps, the mountains have been where the race is more easily lost - two race leaders (Taylor Phinney and former champion Justo Tenorio) lost their top position by failing to follow the moves of their rivals. Taking control in their place was Aleksandr Pluchkin of Metinvest, who is now so close to a first GT victory after coming so close on numerous occasions. Just two stages remains: a summit finish up the Angliru, and a final long time trial.

Everyone wants to Be a Pro

The Pro Cyclist mode was a new addition to PCM this year, and it is proving to be a popular area of discussion, with the General thread now closing in on 50 pages in length. One recent area of discussion is about how it is possible to create a balanced statistic, and in case you missed it, tazzy4u2's post from a couple of weeks ago provides a very useful guide to the stat limits that the game tends to give you. You'll need to use the PCM Fast Editor if you want to get around that!

Also catching the eye this week has been the Be a Pro Stories thread with some great 'wall of text' posts from Shonak and moldef, documenting the careers of Igor Vizcaya and Steffen Moldef respectively. They are certainly worth the read, and it would be great to see more games being regularly documented there! The largest PCM15 Story is also in the Be a Pro format, as zuff is now into the 4th season with Franck Signori using his 1980s DB, with a distinctive image reporting style. To neatly tie our themes together, Signori has been competing in the Vuelta this week, and performed very well!

Console game patch

The largest thread in our Tour de France 2015 console forum asks if anybody is buying a game. Well, if anyone did, then Cyanide have within the last half an hour released a patch for the game. This includes an updated database, bug fixes, and a reduced difficulty for mountain stages.

Bad week for Garmin - Cannondale

Talansky might get on a GT podium if his form is good (Tafiolmo)

Yeah maybe if he's given a 30 minutes headstart. (Spilak23)

Dan Martin at Etixx?I don't like him and don't want him at Etixx. (The Schleck Fan)

Now I don't like the whole Etixx squad anymore :/ (Paul23)

I hope he crashes just as much as he did with Garmin (baseballlover312)

Thread of the Week

Transfer Season 15/16. As quoted above, this thread gave a fascinating insight into the inner workings of a cycling fanboy.

And one to watch: Team Aegon. User-rider stories don't have the greatest record of longevity, but Selwink is back with a new attempt for PCM15, after the success of his Projob-Odfjell story in PCM13.

The Velogames Fantasy League for the Vuelta a Espana has opened. PCM.Daily has again created a Fantasy League, which everyone can join with following code: 17094554.

Feel free to join and discuss the action of the Vuelta in the daily Vuelta stage threads as also in the Velogames Vuelta a Espana thread here.

Enjoy a nice Vuelta and may the best win!

Category: Story (Discovery Channel by squire, PCM09)

After being disbanded in 2007, the Discovery Channel team came back just two years later - to enter the 2009 campaign with almost the same roster and no less than Lance Armtrong leading the squad. One of the first highlights in the comeback season would be the Tour of California (held in February): with Levi Leipheimer (35) and Jaroslav Popovych (29) as the team's captains. And how they delivered: Popovych stormed to an impressive victory in stage three, where he attacked a small group of favorites to take yellow. In another key stage - an ITT on day seven - Discovery Channel held all cards in their hands, as also Levi Leipheimer took a narrow stage-win (beating Fabian Cancellara by one second) to move up to 2nd in the GC.

The duo did well to then defend this 1-2 in the GC and turn their team's comeback into a huge success: "Team Discovery Channel is back in style!" (Squire)... Popovych would then go on to podium Paris - Nice as 3rd in the GC (grabbing another stage-win). And speaking of success: this award winning story (Team story of the year 2010) would just become one big hit on PCMDaily - being continued until the end of the Tour de France 2011 with a total of 60 pages.