Interview met de eigenaar van Apex Athletics

(15:00 16-08-2015)
Hallo allemaal. Iets nieuws; een interview met Apex0, de eigenaar van Apex Athletics. Een manager met ervaring, gezien de 6 Golden League titels.

|Het originele interview in het Engels staat hieronder. Geef een seintje aan de vertaler als zaken onduidelijk zijn|

Frozy: So my first question is about yourself. Who are you, Mr. Apex0?
Apex0: I'm 39 year old, male, I currently work on a project at my university, writing math books for upper secondary level education and I used to be a semi-professional poker player. I live in Turku, Finland.

F: How did you get into the Maxithlon?
A: One guy on a Swedish poker forum invited people to join the game.

F: And when did it happen? Do you remember the season?
A: Season 20 was my first.

F: What was different in that period? I don't know details of the "old" Maxithlon.
A: Well, the biggest difference was that every country had their own league, but I like the current system better, because the International league is much more competitive.
Also, I remember that you could make huge amounts of money from the unofficial meetings, but I never got to take advantage of that because my stadium was so small back then. You could get up to 25 000 spectators if enough athletes participated in your meeting. This must have had a big impact on how the bigger clubs were run.

F: That's interesting.
A: Then of course the coaches were only mono-skilled, which I liked as I had figured out almost exactly how to use my coaches to get good multi-skilled athletes. I had figured out precisely when to switch an athlete from one coach to another and when to hire a new coach with a different skill. Optimizing your coaching used to be hard, but now that you can have coaches for everything you need at the same time, anyone can do it.

F: Did you like the idea of this game from the very beginning?
A: Mostly, yes. But I did find the idea of an athletics league a bit unnatural. Also, I was very annoyed with the unrealistic results, a high jumper jumping 47 cm didn't sit well with me. And if I hadn't figured out why my athletes got injured all the time, I probably would have quit.

F: I think most of us faced the same game reaction at the beginning of our careers :)
Let's talk about your career. What long-term strategy did you use to get where you are now?
A: Initially, I did not have that much of a strategy, I just tried to identify my weakest athletes and replace them with better ones. This gave me a bunch of fairly evenly matched athletes but no really good ones, so much so that at one point, I had won more club championships than individual championships. Then I realized that if I wanted to reach the top, I needed my athletes to reach their peak at roughly the same time, so I pretty much rebuilt my team from scratch. Before you try to build a great team you need to make sure that you have the economic resources to support one, or in other words: build seats in your stadium first. That gives you a steady supply of money from the league meetings every season.

F: And how many seasons did it take to gather needed resources?
A: I think it took me something like 10 or 12 seasons until I had the stadium size and money I needed for a serious challenge. Then it took another few seasons to build the team. Of course I could have done this a bit faster with a better strategy. The fastest road to the top is probably to initially spend almost all your money on the stadium (seats in particular), but that is very boring of course.
I built my stadium gradually, and after 14 seasons I had reached 30 000 seats, which I think is enough, unless you want to host international championships. I could have reached this goal much sooner if I hadn’t also expanded the gym to maximum size at the same time. Also, I added 3000 seats later, but I have never had more than 30 000 spectators. I think I built my stadium in six or seven steps.

F: What game benefits give you the biggest pleasure?
A: What do you mean by game benefits?

F: I mean different in-game achievements that make you happy
A: Winning the INL, Olympic gold medals and the recent world record by one of my athletes are probably the achievements I value the most. Also, earlier when I won the Finnish club championship and NL I was happy, but those achievements feel less important now.

F: What motivates you to keep playing Maxithlon despite it's not updating for a long time?
A: I can still try to build an even better team and perhaps I could win the Champions Cup. And then my athletes could perhaps beat some records. I'm still trying to improve my game.
And it would be shame to abandon my club after all the work I've done.

F: That sounds cool. Thanks a lot for the interview. And I wish you good luck with these goals :)
A: You’re welcome :)