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PCM.daily's Management Game
PCMdaily's successful Management Game has just ended it's 4th season. Mrlol's La Gazzetta dello Sport team won the ProTour rankings, after a close battle with dave92's Wikipedia (who are in only their 2nd ProTour season), with SotD's Festina in 3rd. Meanwhile, mattiasgt's Sony Ericsson and alexkr00's Jack Wolfskin (in their first season in the game) were the leading continental teams to win promotion.
As usual, the end of a season brings about an opening for new managers to join the game. There is no set amount of spots, we will select those users who submit a convincing application, and we believe will able to manage with the game and make the most out of it.
But what is the Management Game? Those who join the game will most likely get a brand new continental team. No riders to start with, but armed with a budget, you will enter the transfer season with all the existing teams, and look to build a squad of 20-30 riders, within a salary cap. You then also get to choose which races your team enters, and which of your riders will participate in each race. The races are then played by a team of reporters, who control a Control Team, watching and reporting on the events of each race. There is plenty of choice over how you target your team, you can go for whichever path you will enjoy the most.
The game can take a fair amount of effort and dedication to manage your team, but if you are interested, take a look at this topic - you can ask any questions you have there, or alternatively as a comment to this article.
It's been some time since we last saw the first screenshots of PCM10. In a new press release, Cyanide say that they've now improved the new graphic engine even more, mentioning the stages' realism level, high resolution textures, more diverse and realistic environment - and a lot more details:
"Many improvements reinforce the race stages' realism. The game features very high resolution textures and a new handling of the flora which is now luxuriant, more diverse and environmentally accurate to where the race is taking place. The lighting ambiance of each one of the hundreds of stages has been reworked according to various weather conditions in order to offer more believable and vivid sets. Finally, many advanced visual effects complete the ultimate rendering of the game: the "bloom" effect simulates image exposure to light, more depth of field enhances the focus of the TV cameras that follow cyclists during each race, while "motion blur" simulates speed."
Its time for the first scores update for the Fantasy game - for all 98 teams who entered the game in January. Predictably, the Tour Down Under was the key race. 16 teams entered after the TDU (and therefore also San Luis and Bongo) and they are in the bottom 17 postions - but the season is long, so plenty of time to catch up.
Andre Greipel was the key rider, scoring 497 points. Hendersen was the next best on 208, Luis Leon Sanchez scored 195, before the Bongo winner Charteau on 182, and San Luis winner Nibali on 167. Such was Greipel's dominance, the 19 teams who picked him all made the Top 23 (Scotty's Spitfires, Bonnet de Douchebag, Musteline Warriors and Lucca Tuscana being the teams up there who did not pick him). Two articles have now been posted, one showing Rider Rankings and the other showing Rider Value Rankings,
LDF - Velingnews.com are the leading team for January, with 24 scoring riders, including the likes of Greipel, Henderson, Dumoulin and Roberts. Tinkoff Revival trail by 369 points with Cyclopaths in 3rd - the highest placed team to have missed the early National Championships. The current Top 10 is below, full standings can be found by reading the extended news article.
As we said when releasing the Public Beta, it's now time to get started with the 2010 careers in PCM. As always, the interest is picking up with the cycling season having started again, and for the same reason, it's a pleasure to announce the final version of PCM.daily's 2010 DB.
Many of you have tried out the Public Beta, and naturally, there's not much new in the final version compared to the Public Beta - except for the bug fixes, that is. We did add a few things, though. Since the release a week ago, several new shirts, frames and helmets have been released, and we've included as much of that as possible. In the meantime, OlegTinkov has been helpful with making the 2010 version of the World Championship (both RR and TT). These two profiles have also been added along with Jaap90's versions of Grand Prix La Marseillaise and Trofeo Laigueglia. We also found some room for a couple of new teams: Adageo Cycling Team, Bahati Foundation and Team Raleigh. As you all know, our main focus is Britain/USA, and these teams fit that perfectly. Lastly, and to some the most important of all, we also managed to make it possible to sign riders from the 1st of January.
Other than that, you do of course get the features from the previous DBs. Updated teams according to UCI and CQRanking, the 2010 race profiles for Tour de France, Giro d'Italia, Tour Down Under, Tour de Suisse and the two new Canadian Pro Tour races - and the features from the 2009 DB, e.g. the new scouting zones, several new variants, including some for National Championships, doping banned riders who return when their suspension ends, etc.
Update, 21:22: The DB is currently being compressed to an exe file. This is a process which takes quite (at 84 % now) a while which means that we'll either end up with a quite late release today or a release early next morning - we'll see :)
Update, 20:02: Success - finally! :)
Update, 19:47: Unfortunately, no progress has been made so far. I'd like to get in contact with one who played the World Championship in the 2010 Public Beta - if you did, please contact me at MSN / CrueTrue@hotmail.com.
Update, 15:38: Testing has now ended, and we did find one problem that we're still trying to fix. It's not fatal / game stopping, but it's annoying enough to keep me from releasing it. Will update you once a solution has been found.
As mentioned Saturday, PCM.daily's 2010 DB is set to be released today - and that's definitely still the plan. We're running through the last couple of tests and have corrected a few minor things throughout the day.
One of the things that we have finally managed to 'fix' is the possibility to sign riders from the 1st of January. We had problems with this in our 2009 DB for PCM08 too (and eventually fixed it), and luckily, we found the setting in PCM09 too.
Anyway, if everything goes well, the released is expected in a few hours from now.
