Suggestions/requests for the 2014 season

orli wrote:

I would like to propose a couple of scoring changes. One would be to lower the points offered at the finish line during the Spring and Autumn Classics the 50 points on offer to 1st place down to 40 points or so. I think they are given too many points as stand alone races.

Part of me agrees but the classics are major races in the calendar, Paris-Roubaix and Milan-San Remo are arguably bigger and more important than many of the mid-tier stage races in the fantasy calendar. Classics also have no GC, KoM or PC points on offer meaning in some cases finish line points are the only ones awarded.

The thinking behind 50 points for the winner of a classic is that it is the usual 35 points for the stage win plus 10 for the theoretical GC and 5 for the 'points competition'. That puts the points on offer for winning a classics in line with those on offer for winning the first stage of a Tour.

Perhaps one solution may be to 'weight' each race so that Paris-Roubaix is worth more points than, say, Kuurne-Bruxels-Kuurne. I'd argue though that this is something that might be useful across the board because there's no good reason for the Tour of the Med to be scored as highly as the Criterium Dauphine.

orli wrote:

I'd also like to see the points on offer for a breakaway at mid-race to be wloered to 5 points. The other suggestion, which has been discussed previously, is to award the KOM points at the end of a stage when the stage ends on a categorized climb. I just think it's appropriate that if the KOM points are earned by a rider on a breakaway on categorized climbs along the way, the KOM points at the end of a stage should be awarded too.

I see the logic in this but points scored in a stage race are already heavily skewed towards the days in the mountains and this would push that even further. Also, if you were to award KoM points at the finish line why are we not awarding additional sprint competition points at the finish line of flat stages too? There is an argument that the 35 points on offer last year for winning a stage are representative of both the stage win and any points awarded at the finish line and that it should be kept at 35 pointed on ALL stages for the sake of consistency across races and stages.

enrique wrote:

Ok, how about this? Next year you can only pick 'unique' teams at the start of a competition. Meaning the first one to pick a certain team has 'rights' to it if they 'register' it first... This would only hold for the first day of a competition, of course! If you assemble a team that's already been picked, you could get a message that says "This team has already been picked, please change a rider in your team". Yeah, it's a pretty ridiculous idea, but it'd be kind of cool to have everyone start off with a different team I know... It's kind of crazy, but it might be fun! Please don't take it too seriously.... Just trying to have some fun while the competition opens

If we did that, then maybe it could be like a draft concept, where the competition winner from last year get the first choice, etc... So obutterwick would get first crack at the first Tour de Romandie team...

Of course, this would be a nightmare to program... You'd also have to wait for people to pick their teams if you did it in draft order... And you'd probably have to have stats that show you how many teams already have that rider, so, forget it! But I still think it'd be fun some day!

That, enrique, is the worst idea I've ever heard

There's far too few riders in any given race to support unique teams unless you're running some kind of small draft competition within leagues. Think about it, there are between 180 and 220 riders in a race, that gives between 20 and 25 teams (ignoring budget issues) to go between 5000+ players...

That's not something the game supports (league specific rules or competitions) and it's a big departure from what the game already does.

A single race or year long draft game has been suggested before and I can see it's merits but it's not what the road.cc game is and I don't think enabling that would add a huge amount for the players who already play the game.

I know that a forum topic has popped up a while ago from someone running something similar on a separate forum and I think that's maybe what you're looking at needing to do if you want to play that.

orli wrote:

I'd be ok with the points dropping down from 50 points to 45 or 40 points, just to not complicate it too much and have to weigh each race differently. I just equate the 50 with wearing or "earning" the jerseys, so it seems like a little too much to have as many points as a guy who goes up to the podium of a stage race three times in one day. How many Classics are there? 6? 8? 12? And how many first days of stage races do we have? I don't know, I haven't counted, really, I just think these races are given way too many points. Thanks for responding.

Each of the major classics is up there with the very biggest races a rider can win, think the likes of Paris-Roubaix, Amstel Gold or Liege-Bastogne-Liege, all major races which mean more to a rider and to sponsors than winning the GC in many small tours. The UCI also, for the purposes of the World Tour rankings, rate classics higher than some other wins.

If you want a breakdown of last year's calendar take a look at this

http://road.cc/content/forum/77002-fantasy-cycling-calendar

orli wrote:

You might think I'm nuts but, I think the more points the merrier for the lucky players who actually pick the correct riders on these stages! Just a thought.... Thanks again for your comments. You sound pretty much "in the know" about how the game is run, are you part of the game committee, do you work for Road.cc? Just wondering...

More points is fine but a balance needs to be found between finish line and breakaway points, between flat and mountain stages and between GC standings points and stage points.

You could argue that a stage win is worth more than a few KoM points but you can also argue that GC is most important so with not give 100 points to the GC standings and fewer for stage wins? There always needs to be a balance between the different sorts of points on offer and I think that largely, last year, this balance was just about right.

Oh, and I don't work for road.cc I help with some scoring and setting up races but thats about it.