[English] - Suggestions

[horace_vr]

I still believe the best addition would be to add age days to riders

I agree. This would be an excellent improvement.

Almost sure, this cannot be added without restarting the game...

I think that's a technical detail on which only osca can know the answer. In my mind, it would be easy to just implement it in Day 1 of a season: for every existing rider, set days to "1" (or a random number between say "1" and "15"), and for the new youth pulls - start from "1".

I think the purpose of the topic is to discuss ideas, and let osca decide what is feasible from the technical point of view (if the ideas are ok, of course)

[ophiuko]

The cyclist IDs are in order according to when they were promoted. I think it wouldn't be difficult to know the exact date (or season-stage) of every cyclist promotion.

[Franky]

Of course that technically can be done, I meant if doing it now, with thousands of riders already in the game, that didn't have this benefit could be a problem. Probably for old riders not a big deal, but for those that would be from 20 to 25 and didn't started the first days of the season, is a notorious disadvantage, 10, 20 or 30 days less of training...

[wacco]

Tactical winners obviously. Variable talent makes you to be checking the talent of your riders season after season to adjust the training to the best possible way. Not once on the first week of training and then plan the training ahead for the rest of the riders life.

What I don't get is why would you like to remove talent altogether. Wouldn't that make the game more simple and maybe boring?

So what is the reason for variable talent now? Some say it is to make the game less predictable, but how many riders are really trained so that they end up like they are "predicted". This is already hard enough for most managers with fixed talents, so why add another layer of difficulty?

In my opinion, the biggest advantage is to reduce the gap between experienced mánagers and new ones. The usual pull of Young riders, where we sell the low talented to non experienced managers will be less dramátic for them.

In my opinion is quite the opposite.

Anyone that wants to learn how to compute the talent can learn in 30 minutes. Is VERY basic maths. So, computing the talent is not the problem if you are really interested (I speak for myself, I did some tools the very first weeks I found the game interesting).

However, building a squad that shares the trainning through different years is something that is really difficult for beginners. It is not easy to know what a rider needs to train in every category and, furthermore, it is impossible to know what level do they need to achieve to win in first division.

Therefore, the difficulty now is not gonna be to know the talent of your rider, it is gonna be to be able to modify EVERY SEASON the global training of the team so that you can maximize the global benefit.

This is gonna be very difficult for the beginners, and for sure, and edge for the manager that pay more atention.

However, I see a big problem here. To handle a full squad during 5 seasons with variable talent will be very time demanding and difficult. My guess is that a big part of the managers will focus, even more, in a small amount of riders and sell (again, even more than nowadays) most of the others.

In my opinion, something that would really benefit the gane would be to include something like LOYALTY.

I would need to thing about the numbers, but something straithforward that comes to my mind is to add 0,2 to each ability for every season that a rider is in your team. However, without days in age the implementation seems impossible.

Fun thought about the loyalty.

About the variable training. Will it have that much influence on the training schedule? When a rider is 19 you determine the talent. If it is low, we will still fire them or sell them. If it is high there might be a chance the talent will decline but it will still be a good rider and your schedule will stay the same in general. The biggest value of the variable talent is a wider amount of top riders. At this moment there is a 30% training difference between talent 0 and 5, which is huge and those riders always ended up in the teams with the big money. Hopefully now less with the spiderweb gone. Without the spider you can buy a very good rider but with talent 0. With a variable talent schedule he might get better.
So the variable talent will change you opinion on firing riders or which one to buy. More riders will have te benefit of the doubt. But influence on your training schedule I can not imagine it will be that important. In my opinion

[horace_vr]

Of course that technically can be done, I meant if doing it now, with thousands of riders already in the game, that didn't have this benefit could be a problem. Probably for old riders not a big deal, but for those that would be from 20 to 25 and didn't started the first days of the season, is a notorious disadvantage, 10, 20 or 30 days less of training...

That's why I suggested to set the day for those as a random number between 1 and 15; or 1 and 10; the disadvantage would be reduced that way

[Davilo07]

Variable talent, if any time comes into reality, I would try to change my schedule to make the most of it. But it is not only that, as it been said with tools and spreadsheets you can do a very accurate forecast of how the riders are going to be. variable talent brings a little bit of uncertainty, what would be good, in my opinion, to the game.

[Aurora Australis]

Here's a simple question on the variable age decline proposal.  The current decline rate is because it’s seen as against the game’s interests to have competitive cyclists into their 40s.  The game even lists a 35 & 37 yo getting 1st Div points as significant achievements, with no further achievements beyond this.  As such, it’s always been the game’s design to have cyclists retire in their early 30s so players have to keep evolving with new cyclists.  Is this no longer the desired life cycle rate?

If it’s desired to have cyclists lasting to later &/or having a more steady peak period, then there’s a fairer way to do it.  Simply alter the decay rate.  Changing the decline ages 27-30 to 0.0075 puts a little pressure to curb an improvement, or stop it for zero talent, then 31 at 0.01, 32 at 0.0125, 33 at 0.015, 34 at 0.0175, 35 at 0.2 means that those on low talent or mismanaged will drop quickly, yet those who properly manage their cyclist can keep going.  And this would be an absolutely fairer way than some blind luck screw somebody over through no mismanagement in favour of somebody who’s abused their cyclists but is lucky on a blind stat.  And this is particularly cruel for anybody who’d trained their talent/s from age 19 to be done over for somebody who just buys at older ages and doesn’t bother managing their cyclists wellbeing.
____

And with the variable season to season talent.  A manager training cyclists from age 19 has to sit through at least 5 seasons, and as many as 6 or 7 before their cyclists are able to be competitive.  This is around a year in RL time.  Can anybody tell me how it’s reasonable that somebody can do everything right, get the right cyclists, take the time to train properly, only to have the cyclists collapse to worthless through mere season to season random?  A cyclist with talent 5 or 4 can be, and quite possibly be put into 2-0 talent worthless status within 2-3 seasons, yet alone 5-7 seasons, with the manager who does everything right possibly finding on average (or even more) 2/3rds of their cyclists junked this way, in addition to those naturally junked on initial low talent.  What boundaries are in place to prevent this?
Maybe go through 5-7 seasons to end up with nothing through no fault of their own.  Why would somebody train cyclists from 19 years in such a situation? 

In my opinion is quite the opposite.
Anyone that wants to learn how to compute the talent can learn in 30 minutes. Is VERY basic maths. So, computing the talent is not the problem if you are really interested

Absolutely.  And if these people claim to want it easier on new managers, then how about their per stage excel data & formula calculations, which is a vastly more complex area where the true difference between new & experienced managers lie.

[horace_vr]

And with the variable season to season talent.  A manager training cyclists from age 19 has to sit through at least 5 seasons, and as many as 6 or 7 before their cyclists are able to be competitive.  This is around a year in RL time.  Can anybody tell me how it’s reasonable that somebody can do everything right, get the right cyclists, take the time to train properly, only to have the cyclists collapse to worthless through mere season to season random?  A cyclist with talent 5 or 4 can be, and quite possibly be put into 2-0 talent worthless status within 2-3 seasons, yet alone 5-7 seasons, with the manager who does everything right possibly finding on average (or even more) 2/3rds of their cyclists junked this way, in addition to those naturally junked on initial low talent.  What boundaries are in place to prevent this?
Maybe go through 5-7 seasons to end up with nothing through no fault of their own.  Why would somebody train cyclists from 19 years in such a situation? 

I agree with AA on this: CFF does not have millions of riders, so any extreme statistics cancel each other out long term. If you do get into a bad luck scenario, when your 19 yo talent 5 pull (which is already quite rare goes to talent 2 or 1 by the time he is 23, then you've lost 4-5 seasons of training. And that will cause frustration for the manager. Too much bad luck. And it's not like you can replace that in the market, because the market is quite dead. We have 100-200 riders on the market (except around end of season, when there are 400-500); but for the most part of the seaosn, there are no options on the market out there.

Yes, there might be examples of low talent pulls who will go to talent 5, but seeing that at other managers, will only increase frustration if you are the un-lucky one.
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Too much luck-based variability with variable talent - in my opinion. Too much shift from long-term planning to just luck in the strategic game. With simply not alternatives being offered, other that restart the team.

[Aurora Australis]

Suggestion to help new teams:

Let's be honest, the team new players start with is throwaway material, and doubly so if they don't begin at the start of the season.  So my selection is to replace three of the 19-year-olds with 7-star 25-year-olds.  Seven stars won't trouble any proper teams, they won't affect the NTs, even if they end up at 8 stars before 30 years of age.  But importantly, it gives new players something to actually race with.  I know you're saying "free transfer list," but most make poor selections there simply because anything's better than 19-year-old nothing.

I'd propose these 7-star cyclists be a random three from the major disciplines of:
Pure Climber
Climb-Hiller
Sprinter
Sprint-Hiller
Hiller
Cobbler
Hill-Cobbler
Flat TTer

[ophiuko]

And with the variable season to season talent.  A manager training cyclists from age 19 has to sit through at least 5 seasons, and as many as 6 or 7 before their cyclists are able to be competitive.  This is around a year in RL time.  Can anybody tell me how it’s reasonable that somebody can do everything right, get the right cyclists, take the time to train properly, only to have the cyclists collapse to worthless through mere season to season random?  A cyclist with talent 5 or 4 can be, and quite possibly be put into 2-0 talent worthless status within 2-3 seasons, yet alone 5-7 seasons, with the manager who does everything right possibly finding on average (or even more) 2/3rds of their cyclists junked this way, in addition to those naturally junked on initial low talent.  What boundaries are in place to prevent this?
Maybe go through 5-7 seasons to end up with nothing through no fault of their own.  Why would somebody train cyclists from 19 years in such a situation? 

According to the percentages given by Oska, the probability of a given talent 5 at 19yo to be at talent 2 after three seasons is 1.5625%.
The probability of a given talent 4 at 19yo to be at talent 2 after three seasons is 3.125%

Still if a talent 5 drops to talent 2 in 3 seasons, if you are a expert manager that makes no faults, I guess you would have calculated the talent every season, and could still sell him for good money (early training at high talents makes riders very good-looking) before it becomes worse. And then buy good riders with that money.

Moreover, the same way a talent 5 will drop to talent 4, a talent 4 of yours will increase to talent 5, with the same probability.

I think you should stop considering only your team at evaluating these changes, Aurora. Because you are practically the only manager that does not sell/buy riders, you just keep going with your high-talent TTers, always train for them, and rarely sell them. Which I don't criticize, everyone enjoys this game the way they want, but you have to admit that it's only you the one who does that. Most of manager make a generation, and then sell most of them to buy riders in all the other terrains. CFF has less and less users everyday. Changes are needed for sure.

Again, I would like to stress out the changes which I think are needed the most right now:

-There is no competition at all in 3rd div and many managers are using it as a way to make huge amounts of money meanwhile training new generations (some of them even until 26yo of their riders). I think this is not good for the game, relegation should be a punishment, not a reward. It could be solved by reducing the number of groups in 3rd division, so it is harder to promote again and prizes will be lower due to the bigger competition. I know this change it's not easy, probably not possible, so another option would be reducing considerably the prizes in 3rd div.

-I think we all know that the game interface is quite obsolete now and that an improvement in these terms (interface renewal of the website - real mobile app) would increase a lot the number of users in the game. I know this is practically impossible to achieve, but I wanted to mention just to be considered. Another thing that could increase substantially the number of users would be the activity in social media. Right now it's almost 0, and I know there are people in the chat willing to take over the social media accounts to try to bring new users. Maybe you could give a chance on this, Oska.

Let's be honest, the team new players start with is throwaway material, and doubly so if they don't begin at the start of the season.  So my selection is to replace three of the 19-year-olds with 7-star 25-year-olds.  Seven stars won't trouble any proper teams, they won't affect the NTs, even if they end up at 8 stars before 30 years of age.  But importantly, it gives new players something to actually race with.  I know you're saying "free transfer list," but most make poor selections there simply because anything's better than 19-year-old nothing.

I agree this would be also great to attract newcomers. Maybe these experienced riders could come from riders that have been for a while on the free riders market and no one picked them up, before they are deleted from the game. I would say that these new teams could even start just with 10 riders from the free riders market, if they want 19yo riders, they just have to promote them. I think these have been proposed earlier, and I don't think it would be hard to make it work.

[Rico]

But is the variable talent anything more than an annoyance then?

Like pipinata said before, the difficulty of this game is not to find one talented cyclist, but to train a whole team at the same time. That is difficult enough already for most teams, why create another layer of difficulty, just for the sake of making the game more random?

[Davilo07]

I have read the whole post again, I think the only one saying variable talent would be good for new managers is peachey. And he says that because a newbie buying a low talented rider would still have the opportunity of that talent to improve.

And for more experimented managers, I think it would add another layer of difficulty to the training. A new challenge.

I don't see it as an annoyance. But for me is different I guess I don't like to have everything under control, and for a game, I like to have that little uncertainty that is going to give me that 25% chance of decreasing or growing my talent every year.

[Franky]

Oh, seems that Oska made a few changes more? At least, I cannot see now the efforts helper when putting tactics 

[Rico]

Are you sure your Supoorter did not expire? I noticed that the message that it ended was taken away, so it now comes as a bit of a surprise.

[Vos]

On my tactics page nothing changed ; the total EP used is visable.
Rico his question is a very good one and most likely the case, because I see your team does not have a shirt anymore (also a supporter feature).