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Fantasy Cycling 2015 - game changes (and report issues)
There'll be a news announcement on the site too, but for you lot here's a more in-depth rundown of what's new and changed for 2015.
The back end of the game (which very few of you ever see of course) has been completely overhauled, and the game engine has had some fairly fundamental changes too. The most fundamental is that a tour is now a separate thing from a competition, so one tour can have more than one competition running at the same time. Tour Down under has three: standard, purist and an Aussies only one (we'll be doing those for the grand tours and the Tour of Britain too. Not Aussies, mind). Before it was a user that had multiple teams, and it was a bit of a hack to be honest. This is a much more elegant and versatile way of doing things.
It gives us a load more flexibility to offer different competitions, and we can now select in the back end what leagues different competitions count towards. so just-for-fun comps like the Tour de San Luis purist and the Aussies-only comp won't count towards your overall season score. That also means that down the line we should be able to offer some user-run competitions alongside the ones we're doing in-house.
So each user only has one team now. Premium is different, then, in that it simply allows you to enter as many competitions as you like. If you're a standard player, you can only enter eight in a season. Realistically that means standard users will be entering the competitions they were allowed to last year, so it shouldn't work out that different.
Also pretty fundamental is the change to the way transfers are handled. This season you'll get a set number of transfers for a standard race, and you can use them in whatever way you see fit. We tried this out with the Skoda game last year and found it a much more interesting way to play because there's more strategies available, and it opens the possibility of bigger changes at the end of a competition if different users have employed different transfer strategies, or just run out...
We now have the ability to select the team size for any competition too, as well as the budget. Generally, races will be teams of eight, with nine riders for the Grand Tours and fewer for things like the country-specific fun competitions; we've gone with five for the Aussies only one.
The roster changes thread has been replaced by an email system that will automatically send you updates of any changes affecting your team - check the checkbox in your account page if you want them. There's also the option to automatically receive stage updates, and the game will email you each time a new competition is opened if you have general updates enabled.
The overall leagues have changed. There's a standard season league for all standard comps, and a purist season league for the purist comps. As well as that there's a road.cc monuments competition which is just the big stuff: Spring Classics and the Grand Tours, presently. We may add a couple more to it but it won't be more than eight competitions so you'll be able to play it as a standard user. There aren't any specific non-premium leagues as there aren't any specific non-premium competitions any more.
Rider stats we've simplified a bit to make it easier to understand for new users, and we've also added stats to the transfers page so you can get an overall idea of the strengths and weaknesses of your team.
There will be plenty of prizes on offer this year, but we haven't teamed up with anyone to offer prizes for every stage. We're still working through some missing ones from last year, and it's better if we handle the prizes in house. There will be prizes for the Tour Down Under, news on that soon.
There's a bunch of stuff on the to-do list and there's some things that will no doubt need fixing. If you have any issues with the site functionality, comment on here and we'll have a look at them.
If you're new please join in and if you have questions pop them below and the forum regulars will answer as best we can.
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210 comments
it shouldn't. i'll check. it'll be removed on the next update
i'll check it out. sounds like a bug.
sounds like you should have a winner's badge, i'll check.
in the TDU you'd have three scores from one stage so no, you can't click on the overall to see the latest stage score.
clicking on a user should bring up their stage scores though, i'll check that
Same here , badges are broken , it's not a biggie but it is annoying
I asked Dave about this, there may be something in the pipeline to do with mini leagues being able to be judged on what those in the mini league want it to be judged on, but its taken a back seat whilst the other issues are ironed out
Someone else suggested this earlier, it seems like a good idea to me, if it's not too much work of course.
I've been seeing this bug (competition scores all being zero and my "Total score" on the dashboard being zero) since the start. It really is time this one was squished!
It varies from race to race, as the race themselves sets the criteria, with maximum age being at the TdF where they can be as old as 25 depending on when there birthday is
these should have stopped now, i've amended the script that generates them
scores have been amended
me too ,scored over 500 no badge
So that's the problem. The "just of fun" extra comps that I'm not interested in playing have stuffed the mini-leagues because the "just for fun" scores are added to the main scores. So clearly the players who play all the comps will have a huge advantage towards winning any mini league prizes that individual groups or clubs want to set up. Not being able to click on other players in mini leagues and see their team and score is also a big loss.
I've never heard of any other fantasy sports game adding scores from different comps together before.
Yep, you have to look at the race rules on the official websites.
overall leagues are problematic because different people want them to do different things.
i'm working on an admin page for them. currently the options will be
- include / exclude standard races
- include / exclude purist races
- include / exclude bonus races
plus an option to only include races that the league admin has joined
anything else?
I'd like a new bike please Dave
Sounds good, thanks very much. Any idea on timeframe?
If a league is setup to only play standard, will we be able to click on scores again and see each others scores/teams?
yeah, it's not straightforward because different competitions use different criteria. might be worth us putting a note in the scoring notes to say what the criteria are for any given comp?
I really like the new layout and the whole thing seems like an upgrade on last year so well done.
My only slight annoyance is that the price slider for choosing riders which is a good idea can be a bit tricky on my iPhone and is difficult to get an accurate price with my fat fingers. Also once I had accidentally set it to a minimum price of 3.5 it wouldn't move back left when I tried to take it down to 3.0. Maybe it's just me showing an alarming lack of dexterity.
The separate competitions for stuff is great and the more novelty ones like the Aussies only should be fun. Really looking forward to it all starting now
I know this has been asked already, but I can't see that it has been answered - is there a list of what competitions are available to play this year? When I click on competitions, all it shows is the TDU & San Luis. As a previous poster has said, if you're playing the standard game, it would be nice to be able to plan out which competitions you want to enter.
http://road.cc/content/forum/140463-2015-season-can-we-know-total-number...
I've entered for purist down under but don't want to play this tour now. How do I come out of this tour?
When you click on a rider and you get his previous 12 results, are we able to have what type of stage those results were on, like it used to say, rather than a date?
Cheers,
i thought we'd made it simpler. turns out not
yes, you can play any eight comps you like for free. yes, standard *and* purist is two comps. it'll tell you how many you have left when you join them.
Any chance we can have Ruta del Sol this year please Dave? Looks like a few big guns are riding it
Is there a list of all the year's competitions somewhere? If I'm only entering 8 I would like to know how the classics are grouped and whether there are women's races.
Hi, all. I'm kind of confused with this 8 competittion thing for standard users. So, could I join any 8 competitions I choose? There are no competitions restricted to just Premium users? So, for example, as a standard player, could I play 8 competitions I choose and not play the Tour, the Vuelta or the Giro, but still play another 8 races of my choosing? Another dumb question, can standard players play Purist? Another one, if I play the Tour Purist competition and the Tour standard competition and the local rider game, is that three competitions I'm playing or just one? I'm new at this and it's a little bewildering compared to previous seasons. Thanks.
Cool, good to have it underway for 2015. Not long to get ready for TDU.
A couple of questions ...
1) Last year only premium players got access to the bigger stats views and had more options for sorting riders when picking teams. Is that the same this year? From reading the 'how to play' guide it looks like the only 'extra' this year for premium players is they get access to more competitions.
2) I ran a private league last year, but this year it all has to be started again - with a new league number. Is there any method to invite all the players in my league in 2014 to re-join the new league for 2015? (I don't have their emails etc. or I wouldn't be asking).
Also a comment ... I really liked the penalty point trade option that used to be in this game and have suggested it to other fantasy games. So I am disappointed it is gone (and I don't recall anyone requesting it to be deleted in the forum feedback). So if you are taking feedback I would like it to be reinstated.
On a positive note .. I really like the price slider in the team picker so I can sort on price range and a riding strength at the same time. So kudos to whoever thought of that and implemented it.
So once you've used up all your transfers for a competition is that it? You don't have the option of using extra and taking penalty points? What if at end of a grand tour you have a load of injuries or withdrawals - do you have to hold transfers back in case of that scenario? That sounds as though it will make it more of a lottery rather than skill as you will be at the mercy of injuries! At least in the past if you had withdrawals you could take the penalty points but still have a chance to compete.
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