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Fantasy 'team' competition for 2014
I realised that I'd had this idea last year then totally forgotten about it.
Teams of teams - another possible feature, 9 players band together into one team of players, their scores are combined in some way (straight sum of scores, average of all 9 or maybe lose the highest and lowest and sum/average what's left) and they compete against other teams for a prize (Grand tours only maybe?). Should be fun and unpredictable, also, good for getting people to get involved on the forum
So, I figured I'd see if anyone was interested in giving this a go?
Plan is to try and put together 5-10 teams of 10-12 players ahead of the start of next year, each team has a 'league' set up so its easier for me to work out scores and then for each major race or group of races (Giro, Tour, Vuelta, Worlds, Cobbled Classics, Ardennes Classics) each team manager picks a team of 8 players and those scores are used for the competition. That means you can rotate and drop players on holiday and also so that I can drop myself for the classics 
Anyway, at this point in time I'm just curious to see how many people would be interested (we need probably 50-100 to make it worthwhile) and what kind of score system we should use (averages, total of all players, total of all excluding the best/worst etc).
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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27 comments
What happened to this?
Sounds like a great idea. I'm in.
Doing the major races that drheaton named, with a warm-up race sounds good. I could see doing it with any number of squads from 3 to about 10 or so I guess.
I like the sound of this, but why do I get the feeling that I'll be like the fat kid that nobody wants when picking footie teams.
I certainly wouldn't be aggrieved to have you as a team mate Phil.
I am in and will bring my three daughters as well!
Stevemarks
n4talia
c4rolina
happylemon
I think we would need to be in the same team though!
Sounds great. I am in.
Just had a quick look at this years calendar and I think the plan is now to open the game for entries during the TDU, try and drum up support during the Tours of Oman, Qatar and Algarve in February then run a trial event during Paris-Nice at the start of March.
Official calendar (depending on what gets included in the fantasy game) would look something like:
Classics (mid March to mid April):
Milan-Sanremo
Gent-Wevelgem
E3 Harelbeke
Ronde van Vlaanderen
Paris-Roubaix
Amstel Gold Race
La Flèche Wallonne
Liège - Bastogne - Liège
Giro d'Italia (May)
Tour de France (July)
Vuelta a Espana (September)
Classics wise we'll just include whatever ends up in the game so stuff like E3 may/may not be in there but we'll see.
Another option may be to include any women's races in the game as a separate event that runs all year long?
Count me in and I'd say combined top 3 scores as per team standings in the real races?
I'd say pick non-premium races but only ever one on at a time so no overlapping as it were?
Oh Yeah.....Baggsy I'm on Wig_Billy's team
Good idea, will probably look to set it up around the time of the TDU when people are coming back to the game and have a trial run before the classics.
The 'real races' use the top riders on each stage. We could do that but it'd be significantly more work to administer as we'd have to check each teams score for each stage rather than just doing a total. I can see the point of just taking the top scores from the team but then it means that half the team don't contribute anything, that'd be good in a way as it'd remove the posibility of someone 'letting the side down' but it'd also mean a team could be easily carried by a couple of players.
In theory I would love to run it in such a way that you could tactically stack some teams for the sprints whilst others aim for the mountains but in the end it'd just get in the way of people playing the game.
Either way, I'm open to suggestions, there's probably 4+ months yet before we actually finalise anything and get the game underway.
Agree sticking to bigger races, but maybe use a race thats early like the TDU or P-N as a trial run?
Seems to be a little bit of interest so I might push ahead and try and formalise some simple rules.
Out of interest, what races would everyone like to use?
I'm basically thinking:
- Classics (as a whole, so MSR through Paris-Roubaix all the way to L-B-L etc) as one competition so you'd fix your 'squad' of players for this entire competition
- Giro d'Italia
- Tour de France
- Vuelta a Espana
- World Championships (road race, individual time trial and team time trial)
What do you think? Want to keep it simple, stick to the bigger races, and make sure that it doesn't become too onerous for the captains to pick teams. Anything else that stands out for you as a 'must have' race?
Plan is that each 'team' would set up a private league just for team members to join, that'd allow the captains to easily see race scores etc and mean that individual team members would have pretty much zero additional work (other than to let captain/teammates know when they want to be excluded from the racing).
Depending on take up a race squad will be made up of 5-9 players with a couple spare to allow rotation. Ideally I'd like to have a minimum of 5 separate teams so if we get 40 players it'll probably be 5 teams of 8 players and a race squad would be 6 players per race.
More players would result in either bigger teams or more teams.
Make sense?
I'd considered either a draft style comp among the captains, random pick or some kind of 'salary capped' system where your team can recruit anyone but there's a limit to how many players you could have over a certain overall score. Either way there needs to be some system in place to stop all of the top players just ending up on one team.
The easiest method may be a random pick but with a seeding system. Based on overall or grand tour performance we'd seed the fantasy players and put them into groups so that each team can only have one from the top seed group, one from the second seeding group etc to spread out the 'best' players across each team.
I had also considered a post Tour transfer window where you can drop non-active players and pick up others not attached to a team but I think that would depend on whether it was needed at the time.
Would the 'teams' be picked for us, or randomly selected?
What happens if one or more of your team players stops playing fantasy cycling?
Things to consider...
I'm down for anything dude, love all the extra side comps, 3 spaniards etc, just adds another bit of spice to it.
Think 5 players is a nice amount per team.
Spose that would mean another new badge as well, Winning Team Comp
Well as I can't get away to watch the tdf next year......I'm in although not sure who would pick me so perhaps make it a lottery type affair to pick the teams with say top 5 in fs league as next years captains to mix it up?
Im up for this
Oh, and based on Ghedebrav's terminology I'd possibly suggest two rules on selection:
1. Every player in a team must feature in the squad for at least one race
2. Every player must be left out of the squad for at least one race
That means that everyone gets to be in the squad for at least one race and nobody can be included throughout meaning you have to tactically choose when to pick/drop your players.
OK, before I explain why I'm confused, I'm going to bust out some terminology for this comment:
PLAYER = an individual such as myself who plays the fine game of road.cc fantasy cycling
SQUAD = the nine cyclists a player picks for a race/stage
TEAM = a group of 10-12 players whose squad points are averaged out and then ranked against other teams.
So we're saying then that a nominated captain will pick eight players from his/her team of 10-12, based presumably on (a) whether they're on hols and (b) how good they are at the game, and these teams will compete against each other in the major event competitions over the season.
So as an individual player who is part of a team, I still play exactly the same way as I do now, except that the points that I score will affect the points of the team of which I'm a member (presuming I've been picked)? And I'll assume also that this is a 'standard' comp rather than a purist one.
If I've understood that correctly, then yeah, I'll get involved to ruin some poor team's chances of winning anything
That's the idea, yeah.
I'm happy to look at team size and anything else once we get an idea of how many are interested. Five per team is good but fairly small, 9 or up to 12 my be hard to do if we can't get the numbers.
I like the idea of team tactics but largely its just a case of playing as normal. By having the option to pick/drop players then we can go on our holidays as normal without letting down our teams too. It also means that you can have a classics 'specialist' in your team just for the classics.
Nice idea. Maybe you could make the teams a bit smaller, say 5 players each, and keep score of best 3 ( like team comp in WT events?). That way you feel ou contribute more to the team- in a team of 12 your contribution is likely to be minor so might feel less involved.Also, is there any possibility of team specific forum threads? Ie only available to the players in the same team? That way tactics could be employed- say on a stage like today ( vuelta no 3) some players might go for gc riders, others for punchy sprinters to cover all bases. So team play comes into the picture.... Although that means sacrificing your individual chances
Maybe give participating players a 3rd team specific to team comp
Whichever way you decide to go, I'm happy to participate! Nice idea sir.
Top idea Dr H. count me in
Yeah, I got in a bit of a mix using the terms 'players' and 'teams' so its not the clearest explanation.
Other than having a handful of players to 'run' the teams there shouldn't be a great deal of extra work needed, you just join a league for your team and then I do a bit of maths after each race.
The team 'owners' or 'captains' would be the only ones with any responsibilities, they would have to 'pick' their team ahead of each race.
On the other hand, we could just have 9 players per team and each one competes in each race. Whatever people are happiest with.
As for scoring, if the the leagues all have the same number of teams then add all the scores in a league and divide by the number of teams.
Maybe we could test out a "captain" rider who, like fantasy footie, gets double points but you have to nominate him prior to a race ?
Aye, i understood it after a couple of read throughs, spent the day picking fruit at a local farm and i think i got to much sun on my head
Yeah, it'd only run on free to play races to try and open it up to more people. Grand tours and free entry classics.
If it wasn't clear then try this as an example using three men teams as an example:
Team 1, drheaton, Gkam, Dave Atkinson
Team 2, wig_billy, TERatcliffe, Stumps
Team 3, Enrique, livestrongnick, JAndrewHill
We'd use some combination of each players scores over the race to determine which 'team' wins the race so either sum of each players total score, sum of of the middle scores (excludes the best and worst to avoid one player carrying a team etc) or something along those lines, scoring is open to debate.
It took me a few times reading this before i got what you were on about.
Now that i know then count me in, it sounds really good but are you going to include non premium players as they would not normally be included in some of the races ?