#6 Story of the Month awards winners

The wave of success continues for Shonak and his Euskaltel team. After being crowned best new story a month ago, Gora Euskadi now also claims the main award with 33 points - becoming the first story ever to win both titles! A. Louveille (30), The Comeback (27) and Karl Hammarling (25) were the closest competitors.

That isn't even the only record broken by Shonak, however! In a top 3 separated by only two points, it is his new second story, aCross the Road, that is elected best new story - making him the first to ever win an award twice! Double awards and a second consecutive New Story of the Month - impressive!

Cycling section getting up to speed

Last weekend's Omloop Het Nieuwsblad was the real start of the season for most of us, and the cycling subforum has woken up the winter hiatus. With plenty of bigger races coming up, make sure to take part in the race discussions here on the forum.

And while we're at it - feel free to make a thread for Paris-Nice if you'd like to.

ManGame: next stop - transfer season!

Most of those involved are probably more than well aware of what's coming! With renewals out of the way for all but a few teams, the start of this hectic period is almost upon us - so clear your calendars and finalise your plans and tactics!

In a week where the new Management Game managers were selected, and the off-season explosion of activity continued in the ManGame forums, what else has been happening on PCM.daily?

Story of the Month - February 2014

Voting is now open for the February Story of the Month contest, with 5 stories up for each of the two awards. The main award includes former winner, as well as the most recent new story of the month winner. Check out the thread for full details on nominations, and how to vote. If you don't follow the stories, the thread alone is a great way to get an overview of the popular stories currently happening on the forum!

Tour of the Chosen concludes

Over the past year The Rider has ran five 'Tour of the Chosen's in the Story Games forum, and this week the 5th and final edition came to an end. Members picked a team, went through a transfers process to get their riders, and then followed proceedings across a 28 stage race which featured all the terrains that PCM can offer.

Hot topics section

Last week the new 'hot threads' twitter update was mentioned, and not long after the Weekly News went live, Aab-ern also added a Hot topics section to the website, available on the panel at the top of the home page. It offers a quick way to see which threads have been most active over the last 12 hours. The Other Races thread has dominated this weekend, with plenty of chat about Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Bruxelles-Kuurne.

ManGame: Application status, off-season activities

The opportunity to try to become a manager has been open for a week now, and that part of the off-season is starting to approach the end. Starting tomorrow, the reporters will start discussing who goes in and who'll have to try again. If you haven't submitted your application yet - make sure to send it in as soon as possible!

Meanwhile, those of you who can't get enough of the off-season should have a look at CountArach's blog and TheManxMissile's magazine, The Sound. Whether it's pre-transfer talk, race history or an interview with SN you're looking for - you'll find it in the two well-written initiatives.

Active threads now automatically mentioned via Twitter

It's technically not something 'new', since it has been around for almost two weeks - but still worth mentioning in case anyone had overlooked it! Thanks to AaB-ern, the PCM.daily Twitter account now automatically sends out a tweet every 12 hours, linking to the most active thread in that period.

The most frequently appearing thread so far is the Sochi Olympics discussion. Go have a look right now!

EPIC's Paris-Roubaix decided

Paris-Roubaix - real or in a game - never disappoints. That includes the edition that was raced in the EPIC story game yesterday. January's New Story of the Month winner Shonak was responsible for reporting from the race, and certainly did the race justice with both an excellent preview and a stunning report!

If you want to find out who won - click the link above to read for yourself!

In case you missed it, applications are now open to join the Management Game for the next season. There are still spaces available, so if you are interested, make sure you don't miss out. Full information is available on the application thread.

The first version of PCM.daily's 2014 DB has now been released.

The package is released as an upgrade to the existing Expansion Pack and thus includes all the features from the previous work. Needless to say, you will also find plenty of new 2014-exclusive stuff in the latest release.

The database comes with 92 teams, all with fully updated rosters. 61 of them will be riding in their new, shiny 2014 shirts - and you might as well take them around the new Giro d'Italia route of 2014 which is one of 18 updated races.

You will also find some new equipment and rider statistics of 2013.

We have also been working quite a lot on the rider stats of Continental riders, updating a lot of them to match their recent performances. In addition to this, we've revamped the free agents, deleting the retired riders and adding in new talents and great riders who were not already in the DB.

Lastly, it's also worth mentioning that we've been improving the generation of young riders. It's still in its early phase, but it should definitely make for some even more realistic career gaming now.

Convinced? Well, go straight to the download here.

As always, a huge thank you to the community for providing shirts, equipment and stages - and a special shout out to Jesleyh (stats, testing, a lot of database work), lluuiiggii (database work, graphics), Alakagom (palmares, stats), Maddrengen (graphics), Zecha (graphics) and Ruben (XMLs).

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The PCM.daily DB team will now move on to the V2 which will include more of the same: more teams, more shirts, more equipment, more stages - and probably a few bug corrections. We aim to release this in March.