Welcome to join season ten of Shareholders!
Backpack
The concept of bundling together backmarkers like some previous years has been scrapped.
Previous Seasons' champions:
2008: an1res
2009: swiniodzik
2010: Grayson
2011: Grayson
2012: Grayson
2013: Costaz
2014: brunopascal
2015: Grayson
2016: Grayson
Yeah, Grayson is good.
Rules are the same as last year:
How to play the game
The players will be owning shares (100 each) of the drivers participating in the F1 WDC! When a driver scores points in an F1 race, each share owned in that driver will score points to the shareholders in question. The more shares there are owned in a driver, the lesser the return will be for each share. This means that it can be more profitable to own shares in a midfielder who scores just a few points but has proportionally few shares held on him than a frontrunner finishing on the podium.
Drivers are valued according to how much shares are invested in them:
-Frontrunning drivers get many shares and are expected to score often and highly, providing a steady points source but with little potential for real jackpots.
-Backmarkers get proportionally fewer shares and give a return less frequently, but when they do it they may be very rewarding as the dividends are shared by fewer shares.
Good "value for money" is investing in drivers that are undervalued, ie have disproportionally few shares invested in them compared to their actual points scoring potential.
Your entry will carry over from one race to the next, unless you decide to move a limited amount of the shares to a different driver. While this makes the game easy to play even for the laziest humanoids, it also makes it useful to know what shares you have at any given moment. If you don't pay attention, a previously good investment in a driver may become a bad deal if too many shares are added on him or if his form plummets.
Submitting an initial entry
The first time you play this game, you shall submit an entry where you place 100 shares among the drivers, fulfilling these conditions:
* You may only hold 100 shares (or less, which doesn't help you) in total at a time.
* You can not own fractions of a share, just integer shares.
* You can place no more than 40 shares on any one driver.
* You must own shares in at least three drivers.
* You may not own shares in more than ten drivers.
* You may edit your first entry as much as you like until the edit deadline (first free practice) for the coming race.
Note that there is no limit to the number of shares available for each driver.
Also note that your initial entry is the basis for the following rounds too! You'll be allowed to change no more than 20 shares before each race, so make sure your initial entry looks at least 80% respectable...
Since nobody initially knows what the playing field looks like before the first race, I will give several updates on what the total share distribution looks like among the entries submitted so far.
Entry Example A from 1975:
E Fittipaldi 37
Reutemann 22
Depailler 16
Peterson 12
Ickx 10
Donohue 3
Editing your entry after the first round it takes part in
* After the first race your entry took part in, you may only change 20 of your shares at a time (for the next race).
* You do not have to edit your entry at all! If you so wish, you can leave your entry as it is from race one and not make a single change throughout the season. This is however a lazy option that won't make you ultimately competitive.
* If a driver is replaced -temporarily or permanently- during the season, the shares placed on him will automatically be transferred to the replacing driver. So you could say that the shares actually are attached to the car number.
* You may edit your changes as much as you like until the edit deadline for the coming race.
* Edit deadline for changes is the beginning of first free practice for each race.
Example B:
After the first race, the shareholder who submitted the entry in Example A from 1975 realizes that the Lotus is a dud, and submits an edit to her entry as follows:
She decides to Sell:
Peterson -10
Ickx -10
She decides to Buy:
Pace +10
Reutemann +5
Depailler +5
Her new "portfolio" will after the entry look like this:
E Fittipaldi 37
Reutemann 27
Depailler 21
Pace 10
Donohue 3
Peterson 2
The above change of shares can perhaps best be written like this:
E Fittipaldi 37
Reutemann 27 (+5)
Depailler 21 (+5)
Pace 10 (+10)
Donohue 3
Peterson 2 (-10)
Ickx 0 (-10)
An edit doesn't have to look just like above, any way is fine as long as it's easy to understand which driver shares are to be sold and which to be bought.
NOTE: I will only sporadically be posting updates on what each player's portfolio looks like, so remember to keep track of what you own!
The reason you're only allowed to change just 20 shares each round is that it adds some stability to the whole system: I hopefully won't get a nervous breakdown before every round, and the values for each driver won't move around all over the place from one round to the other. It will also force the players to think more long term with their investments.
Keep in mind that when there are shares removed from a driver, the potential return from the shares that remain will increase and vice versa. Holding many shares in a backmarker is an inefficient investment, as for each extra share you get your ownership percentage won't increase by much.
Points Scoring
*The score a player receives from a driver is calculated like this:
[DScore] = 9.92*[TShares]*[DRace]*[PDShares]/[DShares]
where
[TShares] = The total number of shares in the entire game at the moment
[DRace] = The number of points the driver in question scored in the race
[PDShares] = The number of shares the player owns in the driver
[DShares] = The total number of shares owned in the driver in question by ALL players.
In order to only mess around with integer scores, the 9.92*[TShares]/[DShares] factor will be rounded off DOWN to the nearest integer. This factor equals the amount of game points one share will give per WDC point scored by the driver in question.
*The player's total score of the round is simply the sum of the [DScore] values from all drivers.
Thanks to the 9.92 factor, and the [TShares] factor scaling scores up with the amount of players, an average total score for a round will always be around 100,000 points or 1000 points per share, regardless of the number of players. At least if there are shares owned in all points scoring drivers.
Example C:
Emerson Fittipaldi finishes 2nd in a race;
there are 30 players in the game all with 100 shares each;
400 of all shares are placed on Emmo.
The entry in example B will then score approximately
9.92*3000*18*37/400 points,
which with the rounding off will amount to exactly 49284 points.
A good result from 37 shares. 400/3000 shares would mean a driver is valued at 13.4666... points per race, and second place obviously is better than that.
The 1975 drivers magically score points according to the current F1 points system which makes perfect sense because this is just a hypothetical example and why didn't the player invest in Lauda anyway? Probably because he was overvalued, that's why!
