Cycling Season is Here Again

The Tour Down Under kicks off tomorrow to signal the start of the World Tour season again! Of course there's been Track cycling and Cyclo-cross over the winter, and the domestic Oceanic season, and the Nationals from Australia and New Zealand... ok perhaps the Cycling season never really ended.

The Tour Down Under thread is the place to get all your World Tour updates. San Luis will be covered in the Other Races 2015 thread. If you are looking a bit further ahead check out the GC-Contenders Schedule 2015 thread for a breakdown of who's targeting what. Finally look through the Womens Cycling 2015 thread for yet more Elite level racing.

And of course we will be trying hard to bring you various bets on the upcoming races.

One Last Hurrah

I don't often cover Graphics here but when something special comes past it can get a mention. Cavendish-Fan finally dropped the promised ultimate Red Bull-Huawei pack containing 110 shirts, accessoires, 2 mini shirts, logo, banners for a story and a png mini that can be used in a story. It's just a massive pack of incredibly high quality work. Check it out in his thread here.

More importantly it is the last piece of work Cavendish-Fan will do. A fantastic graphics designer and jersey creator there are a number of Man-Games team who owe him thanks as well as numerous DB's that used his jerseys.

Man-Game Madness

First off if you are not currently part of the game you might want to check out the ManGame - Joining Interest thread. If you are currently part of the game don't forget New Riders for ManGame - Suggestions thread or the ongoing ideas discussion in the [CT] Questions thread.

To the ProTour where the Vuelta Colombia takes center stage. 8 Stage down and Jose Alarcon, yes him of Vuelta Espana glory, wins to grow his GC lead for Simply Red Bull. Tiago Machado, of Prio-Porto, is in second and Andrei Amador, of Swisscom, is in third.

To the PCT and CT where the Volta a Portugal takes center stage. The Queen Stage 9 was won by Rigoberto Uran, of Bacardi. And prepare for some great action as Dario Cataldo, of Magna, leads Uran by just 1"! Both Popovych and Bibby lie in wait less than a minute down ready to pounce as well. More for the CT teams the Tour d'Azerbaijan has kicked off as well.

Finally in the Man-Game world there's been a rush of sponsor announcements. I won't go through them all but the [Man-Game] Teams HQ section is worth flicking through to keep up to date.

Story Games Summary

EPIC concluded it's transfer period in the week. Lots of changes have taken place so check out the various Team HQ's to get a full idea of where the stars have move to. Expect various season previews to be released once the DB is finalised late on this week. At the same time season planning is under way with race applications currently taking place. The 2014 season is poised to being!

The ICL won't be outdone however and is also close to beginning having concluded most of it's off-season activities. Calendar selections and race planning are next up there as well so it will be a busy time for managers.

Mre has popped up with a new game, the H2H League. Cyclists battle it out 1v1 in a system similar to that followed by most US sports. It's a unqiue concept which was almost instantly filled up. But don't worry it's speed will open up new opportunities to join in a couple of months.

Lastly Ian Butlers CycloCross game is still running strongly. Slight slowing of the pace but it proves incredibly popular and active nonetheless. Most recently the Rio Beach Cross event, a race hosted on Copacabana beach, saw Shay Gormley win.

Thread of the Week

Having covered most active parts of the forum already above i struggled a little bit here. So i've picked out another game that harks back to the old days of Daily. Who's That? is my Thread of the Week. The shameless Guess the Cyclist spin-off proves very popular as members try to figure out who's that? Get it!

Voting has ended and it is now time to reveal the winners of the PCM.daily Awards for 2014. With 34 categories this year there are more winners than ever before. This does of course mean more disappointments as well!

Some categories were very close indeed - we have joint winners of some awards! For many their success here is for the first time - and not just in the New Member category - but there are some returning winners as well. Who? Well, click 'Read More' to find out.

News a bit earlier than normal this week to avoid conflict with Awards results

Fantasy Betting Is Back

You may have noticed this already but a new year of Fantasy Betting has arrived! Already we've had bets on both the Australian and New Zealand Time Trial Nationals and in the next couple of weeks we will bring you bets for the Tour Down Under and [hopefully] San Luis. Also currently available are bets on who will be leading the CQ rankings at various points in the year.

Fantasy Betting will run right across the cycling season and if you have any suggestions of bets please don't hesitate to message one of the Admins because we can never have too many bets! Also check out the Road Race Betting 2015 thread.

Stories of the Month

Bumped from last week here's a quick round up of various happenings inside the Story sub-forums. The last few weeks have seen a rush of new PCM14 stories like A New Beginning by Croatia14, US Postal Service 2.0 by jihardy and the interesting track based On the Boards by both EwanWilson and Scattershot Will. zuff's The 1980's has been the most consistent PCM14 story and had a slower but still high quality December and is still an excellent read.

PCM13 is a lot more active in terms of stories. Jakstar22 is taking Nairo Quintana to win everything and Marsupilami is trying out The Superleague. Beyond that there is a long list of established stories all continuing well and vying for various Award accolades.

Hopefully we'll see some more great stories start up this year and that PCM15 get's more people writing come summer time!

ManGame Madness

The Tour of Norway highlighted the ProTour this week. The 8 day race in Norway provided tons of action and a great close GC battle. Franck Schleck of Vesuvio came away victorious, just ahead of Stefan Schumacher (Swisscom) and Tejay Van Garderen (Wikipedia). The PT capped the week with the GP Moscow sprinters classic won by Luke Rowe of Good Energy ahead of PCT Mark Cavendish (Belarusbank) and Daniele Bennati (Lotto).

The PCT and CT teams have also been busy busy. The Osterreich Tour is currently unerway but we've also had the Nelspruit Classic won by Cesare di Maggio of Venchi, and the San Sebastian Classic won by Cesare di Maggio of Venchi. The CT teams get some action to themselves in the Vuelta a Burgos currently taking place as well.

Story Games Summary

The ICL has almost completed its offseason with all rosters having been finalised. The Calendar is still to be finalised but expect that to be done soon. Just looking at the range of teams it's going to be an intriguing season and don't expect the same teams to be challenging for the title.

EPIC is also deep in its offseason. Transfers are continuing with a fair amount of chop and change. The battles to sign Marcel Kittel and Bradley Wiggins from the Free Agency have been fierce and rage onwards! Highlights have been watching Euskaltel go right back to Basque roots and trying to guess which PCT team will lead the promotion charge.

Thread of the Week

With the cycling season starting to warm up with team presentations and new UCI announcements i thought i would go with a nice Cycling forum thread. Thanks to those Down Under we've already got some great action to enjoy in the form of Nationals. So my Thread of the Week this week is the beginning of the 2015 National Championships thread, and yes i have already mentioned womens cycling in there.

It is unfortunate to say that we have had to wipe clean the voting so far for the PCM.daily Awards and restart voting. We noticed that one of the nominees, Stylus, had been creating a lot of new accounts in order to vote in the awards. These accounts were then used to vote in almost all categories, thus sabotaging the voting. Needless to say that he has now been banned from the website, and measures have been taken to prevent anybody else being able to cheat the awards in this way in future.

If you have already voted in the Awards, please return to the threads to vote again.

Happy 2015! Hope you all had a good New Year and that 2015 is a great one

PCMdaily Expansion Pack V2.0 Released!

The DB Team have been putting in the hours behind the scenes and have delivered on the long promised 2014 V2. Huge amounts of new equipment, jerseys, photos and sponsorkits make this possible the most complete graphical db we've ever done. With over 3000 riders it's an amazing piece of work.

Added to that the improved stats to better represent what the 2014 season was really like and some adjusmtents to improve gameplay it's a great DB. You can download it here or here. The only thing you need is the V1 DB already installed.

PCM.daily Awards: Voting Open

Nominations closed on Wednesday and SN did a great job getting the polls up nice and quickly. It's certainly my favorite time of year and every vote can matter.

There are 33 categories to vote in, including Member awards, Site awards, Management Game awards and Cycling awards, and all voting threads can be found in the Awards subforum. The winners will be revealed next weekend, on January 10th, so you have until then to vote.

Congratulations and good luck to all of the nominees! - written by SN

New Stat Range?

matt17br and Jesleyh got seriously bored this week and found something rather interesting. Apparently, in single race mode, stats are not limited to 85 but in fact work right up to 99. They've done some nice testing of the effects and continue to do so. It's certainly the most interesting piece of PCM news for a long time. Just remember that stats over 86 will not function properly in Career mode. For full details and discussion simply check out the thread here.

Story Game Summary

Skipping the Man-Game this week, which rumbles onwards as usual with an end of July Rankings update, the best action has been EPIC. Over the Holiday period the game has dealt with renewals, progressions and declines, a draft and is now into the transfer period.

The draft was a chance for all teams to pick up a rider for free, with most targeting a youngster of talent. The PCT teams get a second rider later in the week. The transfer season has been long anticipated and is in full swing for roughly the next week and a half.

Thread of the Week

There have been a number of interesting and popular threads this week, but most of them were realted to the above topics. So my first Thread of the Week for 2015 is slightly preemptive. In the Year 2015 is this years thread to make predictions for the coming cycling season. Always popular and always great discussion!