Pre Season - Season 8
 

With a lot of new managers starting off their first pre-season and due to the large break between the end of last and start of this season. I thought I put together a thread outlining the procedure for this pre-season.

Pre-Draft Trading

The pre season will start of with a pre-draft trading which will last for two weeks. This trade period will start as soon as we finish updating all the stats for new season. I’m estimating it will be finished roughly by this time next week, give or take periods of laziness.

The main propose of this trading period is to allow managers to trade out any players that fit into their top 15 players that will be kept. Prior to the draft every club releases 10 players from their 25 man squads.

Player Released

As mentioned before each club releases 10 players prior to the start of the draft. Each club will have 10 days to choice which players they want to release. This 10 day period will be start at the 2nd week of pre-draft trading and finish 3 days after the end of that trading period.

The board felt that keeping 15 players was a good number, as it allowed all the top sides to keep pretty much their best players. But it also allows the new managers to put their mark on the squads by adding 10 new players. The number of players to be released is still being discussed so if you have any thoughts on this feel free to post them.

Draft

This season draft is likely to contain 10 rounds, which is two rounds longer then usually. But this is due to larger squads then in the past. The first two rounds draft order will be based on last season’s league positions. So basically the teams from Division 3 will be near the top. The next two rounds the draft order will be reserved to allow the top teams to get higher draft picks. The final six rounds will have random draft orders. The gap between each round will be 2 to 3 days so it is very important to stay active around this time. Most of the later rounds will be doubled up to speed up proceeding.

Post Draft Trading

After the draft there will be another short trading period for week. This is just to try and finalise your squads before the start of the season. Usually you find there is some very big trades during this period, as a lot of managers just wait and test the market first, or get lazy and leave all their trading to the last minute.

Rookies

We are having a bit of an issue with this, as Greg has a copy of the rookie generator which we haven’t been able to get hold of. So we are looking at other options. One option is to get a list of stats from real life Under 19 players and put them into a NBA style draft, but there are issues getting stats from some Under 19 National Championships. We’ll keep you posted on this front. But it’s likely all sides will only get two rookies this season, but we will be looking at spreading the talent a bit more.

Team Settings

Prior to the start of the season every team has to submit Pitch Conditions, Bowling Orders and Club Captains. With the sim that we are using VC4 the two main areas you can work tactics into is Pitch Conditions and Bowling Orders. Each team will have two weeks to submit these settings from the start of the post draft trading. Its likely during the season each team will be able to change their pitch conditions by one point during the season, but this is yet to be confirmed.

Club Captains will be similar to last seasons Contracted players. But after having a look last season stats, most teams just gave contracts to FC or OD specialist rather then the top players from their clubs. So basically this season each club will give contracts to two club captains, basically a captain and vice captain. Basically these two players can only play 1st XI. The reason for this is that sim only allows for squads of 25 max, so when we add 2 rookies, that makes it 27 players.

Pre Season Friendlies

After the Post Draft Trading period, there will be a series of pre season friendlies. Basically each team will be divided into 6 groups of 4. The main purpose of this is for the managers to see how their players will perform, to get an idea about who might be their best performers. Also allows all the simmers to get used to the sim. This season we are spreading the simming responsibilities four ways:
- 1st XI FC (Tharmi)
- 1st XI OD (Rob)
- 2nd XI FC (Mat)
- 2nd XI OD (Manju)

Will be looking forward to this TBH.

Interesting to see how the trading and draft goes, will be hoping to secure some good players.

yes trading will be interesting!

Excellent stuff Tharmi.

why just tharmi mate!

I think Clutey just said it cause Tharmi did all the formal announcement, that's all.

brilliant work guys.
just wondering if we could get a stats list, like the past, for all the teams?

Once all the team stats are updated from last season, i will be making a file with all the teams stats in there.

cheers for the heads up - quite helpful

Indeed

Cheers mate

I got asked by Zac this on MSN about when we will be starting. He went offline before i replied but i think most managers would probably like to know when we are going to start. I was planning on starting pre draft trading tomorrow, but due to various things that have come up for the board members; work, uni, having babies etc. We still have about eight sides to finish off updating, so we wont we starting trading until the middle of next week.

Cheers Tharmi, if you need any help updating some of these remaining teams don't hesitate to ask mate.

Instead of calling the two players that have to play in both forms the captain and vice captain, can't they be called Marquee players or something. I know it is really not that important, but we should try and get as much realism into the game as possible and for that reason not all clubs would have their captains playing both forms (they might have a captain for each form).