In a week where the new Management Game managers were selected, and the off-season explosion of activity continued in the ManGame forums, what else has been happening on PCM.daily?

Story of the Month - February 2014

Voting is now open for the February Story of the Month contest, with 5 stories up for each of the two awards. The main award includes former winner, as well as the most recent new story of the month winner. Check out the thread for full details on nominations, and how to vote. If you don't follow the stories, the thread alone is a great way to get an overview of the popular stories currently happening on the forum!

Tour of the Chosen concludes

Over the past year The Rider has ran five 'Tour of the Chosen's in the Story Games forum, and this week the 5th and final edition came to an end. Members picked a team, went through a transfers process to get their riders, and then followed proceedings across a 28 stage race which featured all the terrains that PCM can offer.

Hot topics section

Last week the new 'hot threads' twitter update was mentioned, and not long after the Weekly News went live, Aab-ern also added a Hot topics section to the website, available on the panel at the top of the home page. It offers a quick way to see which threads have been most active over the last 12 hours. The Other Races thread has dominated this weekend, with plenty of chat about Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Bruxelles-Kuurne.

ManGame: Application status, off-season activities

The opportunity to try to become a manager has been open for a week now, and that part of the off-season is starting to approach the end. Starting tomorrow, the reporters will start discussing who goes in and who'll have to try again. If you haven't submitted your application yet - make sure to send it in as soon as possible!

Meanwhile, those of you who can't get enough of the off-season should have a look at CountArach's blog and TheManxMissile's magazine, The Sound. Whether it's pre-transfer talk, race history or an interview with SN you're looking for - you'll find it in the two well-written initiatives.

Active threads now automatically mentioned via Twitter

It's technically not something 'new', since it has been around for almost two weeks - but still worth mentioning in case anyone had overlooked it! Thanks to AaB-ern, the PCM.daily Twitter account now automatically sends out a tweet every 12 hours, linking to the most active thread in that period.

The most frequently appearing thread so far is the Sochi Olympics discussion. Go have a look right now!

EPIC's Paris-Roubaix decided

Paris-Roubaix - real or in a game - never disappoints. That includes the edition that was raced in the EPIC story game yesterday. January's New Story of the Month winner Shonak was responsible for reporting from the race, and certainly did the race justice with both an excellent preview and a stunning report!

If you want to find out who won - click the link above to read for yourself!

In case you missed it, applications are now open to join the Management Game for the next season. There are still spaces available, so if you are interested, make sure you don't miss out. Full information is available on the application thread.

The first version of PCM.daily's 2014 DB has now been released.

The package is released as an upgrade to the existing Expansion Pack and thus includes all the features from the previous work. Needless to say, you will also find plenty of new 2014-exclusive stuff in the latest release.

The database comes with 92 teams, all with fully updated rosters. 61 of them will be riding in their new, shiny 2014 shirts - and you might as well take them around the new Giro d'Italia route of 2014 which is one of 18 updated races.

You will also find some new equipment and rider statistics of 2013.

We have also been working quite a lot on the rider stats of Continental riders, updating a lot of them to match their recent performances. In addition to this, we've revamped the free agents, deleting the retired riders and adding in new talents and great riders who were not already in the DB.

Lastly, it's also worth mentioning that we've been improving the generation of young riders. It's still in its early phase, but it should definitely make for some even more realistic career gaming now.

Convinced? Well, go straight to the download here.

As always, a huge thank you to the community for providing shirts, equipment and stages - and a special shout out to Jesleyh (stats, testing, a lot of database work), lluuiiggii (database work, graphics), Alakagom (palmares, stats), Maddrengen (graphics), Zecha (graphics) and Ruben (XMLs).

-----

The PCM.daily DB team will now move on to the V2 which will include more of the same: more teams, more shirts, more equipment, more stages - and probably a few bug corrections. We aim to release this in March.

PCM.daily's 2014 DB just days away from release

(Written by CrueTrue)

Update (17/02): Just to be more specific, the 2014 DB will be released Tuesday.

We know we have been a little too quiet regarding the next PCM.daily release this time around - logic being that we'd rather not say anything than say something that we'd perhaps have to retract later on.

But now I'm glad to finally announce something: We have pretty much finished the 1st version of PCM.daily's 2014 DB! It went into final testing Friday evening and would have been released this weekend had it not been for a short holiday getaway on my (CT) part.

Click 'Read More' to find out about some of the features!

Curtains officially down for 2013 ManGame season

After 13 months and 169 races, the season ended earlier today with the last couple of classics - Giro di Lombardia and Japan Cup. As briefly mentioned in last week's news, it was a fight all the way to the end for some teams - so the results caused both delight and disappointment among the managers.

Division winning teams Wikipedia, Tinkoff and Gazelle will certainly be among those celebrating tonight, but they can't go too far - many riders still have the national championships to come in the next few days!

Applications for 2014 have opened!

The season ending also means another big thing happening - something I know many of you have been eagerly awaiting for a long time. Time to start putting together an application explaining why you want to become a manager next year, in case you haven't already prepared one.

Look over here for information and questions. Other than that, good luck!