Concept of the game
The players will be owning "shares" of the drivers participating in the F1 WDC!
A player will score points when a driver he/she holds an interest in scores points in a race.
Key to winning the game is finding best "value for money" (although no real money is involved) by investing in drivers that give good "value for money" at the moment. The "value" of each driver is decided by the collective investments of the players. This could mean that a backmarker that manages to score even just the odd point can make a rather big difference in this game.
Some pros for the game:
+ Easy entry format.
+ Editing entry for each round is optional, as the old entry carries over as it is otherwise.
+ Exciting scoring system making even backmarkers interesting for the game.
Some cons for the game:
- You initially won't know what value a driver will provide; I will however continually provide updates before Melbourne with the values for the drivers as entries (hopefully) roll in.
- Player needs to keep track of own share portfolio. Writing down for yourself what your current portfolio looks like is recommended, so you know what you've got.
I will provide data after each round that will help you analyze which drivers are worth investing in.
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 50 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:
Massa 37
Hamilton 22
Kovalainen 16
Webber 12
Coulthard 10
Button 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.
* 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 realizes that Red Bull stink infinitely, and submits an edit to her entry as follows:
Sell:
Webber -10
Coulthard -10
Buy:
Alonso +10
Hamilton +5
Kovalainen +5
Her new "portfolio" will after the entry look like this:
Massa 37
Hamilton 27
Kovalainen 21
Alonso 10
Button 3
Webber 2
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 won't automatically 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.
Points Scoring, barely intelligible
*The score a player receives from a driver is calculated like this:
[DScore] = 25.7*[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 a 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 25.7*[TShares]/[DShares] factor will be rounded off down to the nearest integer. This factor equals the amount of points a share will give per point scored by the driver in question.
*The total player score of the round is simply the sum of the [DScore] values from all drivers.
Thanks to the 25.7 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 scoring drivers.
Example C:
Felipe Massa finishes 2nd in a race; there are 30 players in the game all with 100 shares each; 400 of all shares are placed on Massa. The entry in example B will then score approxrimately
25.7*3000*8*37/400 points, which with the rounding off will amount to exactly 56832 points. A good result from 37 shares. 400/3000 shares would mean a driver is valued at 5.2 points per race, and second place obviously is better than that.
Random incoherent strategy thoughts
The typical F1 season in this era sees most of the points in a season scored by just a handful of the drivers, driving the very best cars. It is therefore logical and strategically sound to have plenty of shares among these drivers, but due to the scoring system of this game it is likely that owning the odd share in the right backmarker driver can make a very big difference to the final outcome. Top team drivers could thus be considered safe bets, whereas shares in someone like Sato would be considered high risk ventures...
The total distribution of shares among the drivers is interesting; proportion wise it should end up somewhere along the lines of a PTPC entry, with 1/7th of all shares in the game representing approximately 100 points in the WDC.
But the scoring in a GP never will look like the average score per race over a full season!
As an example, the 2007 season:
[b] Dri Pts [/b] Räik 110 Alon 109 Hami 109 Mass 94 Heid 61 Kubi 39 Kova 30 Fisi 21 Rosb 20 Coul 14 Wurz 13 Webb 10 Trul 8 Butt 6 Vett 6 Schu 5 Sato 4 Liuz 3 Suti 1 Albe 0 Barr 0 Davi 0 Spee 0The top three drivers scored 328 out of the total 663 points last season: almost 50%! At an average, the three drivers scored almost 6.5 points each per race, about 1/6th of the points available in a race. If there had been shares distributed among the drivers in such proportions, it would then have taken a win or a second place for the shares to have given an above average return. Then again, they would usually at least finish in the points and give something to their investors, which would be more unusual for backmarker drivers like Sutil... You could imagine the jackpot it would have been from the precious few hypothetical shares held in Sato at the Canadian GP, where he scored three points. You could also imagine what a waste of effort those shares would have felt like for most of the rest of the season.
As a driver can only score a maximum of 10/39 = 25.64% of the points in a race, it is rather silly if more than 25.64% of the total shares (for all players) were placed on any one driver; there would be better value per share elsewhere. But as an individual player, placing 50 shares at one driver might still be a smart thing to do.
Particularly for backmarker drivers, there is a chance that there's only one player interested in owning shares in the driver. In this case, it's rather pointless for the player to have more than one single share placed on the driver, as more shares won't give a higher score anyway ([PDShares]/[DShares] = 2/2 = 1/1 = 100% of the shares in the driver). The probability for such a driver to score a point would logically be very low, but if he would do so, that single share would be extremely valuable! I will report how many shareholders there are for each driver, so a player having a monopoly gets to know it. Removing shares from the driver will however make him a more interesting investment object for other players.
