Back to school 2017 – Release notes

(08:00 03-09-2017)
As announced, we are releasing a number of changes on the first day of season 61. Below is a detailed description of the changes. Please do not hesitate to post your comments and questions in the national and international federations.
Before we give you the details we want to note that while we did a lot of testing, it is very hard to find all issues before going live with thousands of users. So it won’t be a big surprise if there are a few teething problems during the first season with the new features. If there are any found, rest assured that the team is working on them and please be patient.
As the last but not least item of this introduction, we would like introduce a new member to our team. Claire_Grube accepted our invitation to help with the analysis and specifications of new features and has now joined the development team as analyst.

Relay enhancements
1. It will now be possible to enrol relay teams in the individual Regional, National and or International championships, similar to individual enrolment:

a. Similar to the enrolling of athletes in the individuals you will be allowed to enrol a maximum of two relay teams per club per discipline

b. Invitations for national and international championships will work in the same way as for the individual athletes

c. Prize money will be the same as for individual disciplines. This means that the total prize money will go up by almost 10% from (44 to 48 disciplines)
 
2. We added categories to the relay teams to be used for records and ranking: 

a. The category of an age group is calculated on the athletes that effectively run (number 1 to 4) excluding the reserve athlete

b. The category and age group of the team will be updated when the team is built, an athlete is changed, the order of the athletes is changed or at the season start when the age of the athletes changes

c. Following rules will define the category/age group of the team:


age categories for relay teams
(i) All athletes are juniors (14 - 17 years old) ---> Junior relay

(ii) All athletes are U21 (14 - 21 years old) ---> U21 relay

(iii) All athletes are masters (35 years and older) ----> Master relay
- Youngest athlete is 35-39 = Team in age group 35-39
- Youngest athlete is 40-44 = Team in age group 40-44
- Youngest athlete is 45 or older = Team in age group 45-99 age group

(iv) Everything else ---> Senior relay
Some examples:
- Relay contains at least one senior athlete (22 - 34 years old)
- Relay contains both U21 and master athletes
- Relay contains U21, senior and master athletes
- ...

 
3. It will now be possible to view the club, regional, national, continental and world records for relays (Records). And yes, there will be money to win when beating the world record. Regarding the nationality of the relay team: this will be the nationality of the club and is not based on nationalities of the athletes.
 
4. In the rankings for relays the results can be displayed per age category (Rankings)
 
5. The relay team page:

a. When selecting athletes to make a relay team the user will see the age, experience and skills of the individual athletes to help selecting the most suitable athlete. Age will help putting together a relay team to fit a certain age group (For example: I plan to put together a junior team, so it will help seeing the ages of the available athletes).

b. It will also be visible to which event the team is enrolled next.

c. Behind the name of the relay team will be the ID code of the team ([ SID = ])

d. The category of the team is now visible below the Club name and Form.

e.  Similar to the individual athlete’s page, Maxi-trainers will now see the grid with Personal ranking positions of the team on the relay team page.

6. In the text editor in the federations and messages a new tag is added to allow linking to a relay team page. The name of the relay team will display in the message and when clicking on it, you will open the relay team page. Example: [ SID=158728 ] without the spaces with show Corredores de Apolo Relay 4x100 Male A

Athletes’ wages
We have now changed the calculation of the wages and are no longer taking the number of fans into account. This will reduce the salaries by 5 to 25% depending on the number of fans and the Maxid. This will improve the balance between athletes' salaries and sponsor income. We hope that this will give the active teams some breathing space, but we recommend not to start spending it all as we are working on plans to reform the economy further. We plan to reduce the passive incomes, for example the sponsor incomes. As a compensation we want to increase the income from activity, for example participation in the National League meetings. This way we want to reward active teams.

Promotion of the game
To stimulate the promotion of Maxithlon, we included a points system for voting in browser game pages. For more information, click on the link at the bottom of the screen: Help us and read the section ‘Vote for Maxithlon’

U21 awards on club page
On the ‘Awards’ page of a club are now also the number of medals on the U21 championships visible. For an example click on this link to the page of this club

Additional skills
The name of the skill will be displayed too when the additional skills (Skill 1 and Skill 2) change. So where it used to say ‘Skill 1’ for a sprinter it will now say ‘Skill 1 – Acceleration’. This will be the case on these pages:
1. Athlete’s development from the Athlete individual  page
2. Training results from the Athletes page

Number of “Unread” threads in a federations
The "Unread" indicator in the list of federations, as introduced in the Easter release, is now further enhanced and shows the number of threads with unread posts per federation.

And finally, as usual there are a number of new words and sentences to translate, so if you spot anything in Italian or English, please be patient until the translator for your language finishes his work. If you think the translation was completed and there is still something missing, please do not hesitate to send a message to the translator. 

The development team
Ned, Apolo, Ivanovik, Claire_Grube & Guyvandamme