Season 6 Suggestions

[whistler]

Season 6 Suggestions
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Thanks to IP & Nikeboy the game has seen a lot of improvements since Season 1. We as players suggest changes, and would like them ASAP, but when changes happen at short notice it is hard to plan your team's strategy: almost inevitably changes favour some teams more than others so ideally perhaps there could be a roadmap of suggestions/changes that will go live for season 6, season 7 etc... so that managers can plan their longer-term strategy a season in advance.

In that spirit here's a suggestion for Season 6:

Youth Scouts
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Overhaul the youth scout system. As things stand, due to the costs involved, I would guess that very few teams run a youth scout compared to Season 1, but for extra interest and for the good of the game it would be desirable if all teams had a youth scout.

Why not make the wage of the youth scout a flat fee of $5,000 per week.

Reasoning:
New teams joining the game should have the chance to work their way up to Div 1 in future seasons. The best current teams will have to replace ageing riders in their training pools when their progress slows enough not to be worth the investment, but if the best young riders are only available to teams able to afford the best youth scouts then new teams will be very unlikely to ever close the gap to the top teams.
A flat rate gives new teams (and poor teams) a chance to catch up with older richer teams by being lucky enough to find good riders for the future and therefore more reason to stick with the game - conversely the current system of wage = scout skill widens the gap between new poor teams and richer older teams.

To compensate any teams that currently have a youth scout give them a one-off payment equal to the purchase price of their current youth scout.

Make all youth pulls 18 years old?

Allow teams to balance how their scout works:
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Scout Skills:
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Current Ability: 1-20
Max Steering/Balance: 1-20
Perception (chance to find a rider each week up to 100% at 20 score): 1-20

Give each team 40 points to spread across these 3 youth scout skills, so you could have:

Cur Ability: 20
Max Steering/Balance: 19
Perception: 1

to get a chance of 1 really good young rider every 20 weeks on average (might suit existing well-established teams)

or:

Cur Ability: 10
Max Steering/Balance: 10
Perception: 20

to get a guaranteed 15 young riders of lowish quality per season (might suit a new team, or just a team that likes playing the transfer market)

...or any combination totalling 40 in between...

The game could default to this 2nd example setting to make things easier/more interesting for new teams.

Everyone having youth scouts would mean a lot more riders coming onto the transfer market every week (albeit with low skills):
There would be more going on in the game. This would be good for those managers who like playing the TM, but also give more reason for everyone to visit the website more often checking & bidding on auctions etc. and searching for what's on sale.

The average & maximum current ability of these young riders might need tuning compared to existing untrained riders to keep the economy stable.

[NikeBoy]

Great proposal, we were already longer thinking of making the youthscout available for all teams.

[Genomico]

Be sure to compensate the teams already having one and invested huge amount of money on it.

[chakra]

Changing the youth skills will be possible afterwards? Once a season?

[Quatannens]

Another suggestion: Give a link to a place where we can check out the calender from next season. It doesn't has to be 100% correct, but if there will be big changes, I would like to know. This season there are 4 TT's, last season 12 (just an example). If next season will be again with more TT's, I would be pleased to know earlier than 1 week before the season actually starts (I guess other managers also like to know if there is going to be a lot of hill, mountain, flat or downhill...)

[xmike]

I come back with this, I think is very important: the terrain difference, I see some races this season that gives me huge headaches on making the difference between terrain types on attack points (in fact its impossible on some of the races)

[Genomico]

Yes xmike, the race of tomorrow is a good example for that.

[Ab Normaal]

I agree.

For the divisions: I think the choice have been made that there will be divisions of 12 teams. 1 division 1 and 2 divisions 2.
Which means only 4 teams will promote to first division.
I think it is fair when the four second division winners will promote to first division, since there are no weak teams and divisions any more in 2nd.

Then there will be 24 spots for 2nd division.
Perhaps for numbers 2 until 6 per division (=20 teams) + the four highest ranked in the international calendar? All others to third division
And then for third division. All other teams from second division, plus promotes team from current third division. At the moment there are too many (32 from third and about 24 from second) for the 48 places but I unfortunately there will be teams quitting.

And if still only a few too many, then for one year perhaps 13 or 14 teams per 3rd division.