Written by JonhatanHernandez of
  TeamQuetzal
  
  Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Last Late Show with Johnathan Hernandez!
  
  Monologue
  
  When I first came into the game I was shocked by how amazing it was, being so small and simple. I play loads of online games but I quit them after two or three months. I´ve been here for two years, and it has been amazing. However, my free time is increasingly decreasing (oh, the irony, the quasi pleonasm) and I have seen myself with little free time in the past few months. Now this little free time is about to become nothing, as next months will be absolute hell to my relaxation period, as the latter will have disappeared. So, this is why I will be leaving soon enough and I want to thank you all for letting me be part of this amazing game. I want to thank Yuri for letting me keep complete creative control and to You, reader. And that´s why I have asked managers to describe the game in a phrase. This is what they said:
  David popescu (familytour): “Scouting-money waste. Deception and off days...”
  Alex (TeamChili): "I only play so I can read the Late Show" (hehe I liked that one)
  Jonas (JonasProCycling): ""Not quite what I expected"
  Thomas Runge (Indurain Team): “a good manegerial game...”
  Donald (Andeby): “Beneficial” (haha we see you Donald)
  Delion (DrapeauNoir): "The game of 1001 challenges: choose what you want to achieve and go!"
  Finz (NightmareChaos): “The best cycling management game on the Internet when you have patience, a bad video card, a lack in social skills and an interest in the obscure”
  As you can see there is optimistic people, and the other guys ;) But, let´s jump straight to the interview with the one, the only Nick Lissner!
  
  Interview
  
  JHDZ: To start it off, how are you?
  NICK: Good, thank you! Busy as ever/always!
  JHDZ: I know you´ve told us many times, but can you tell us how the game started?
  NICK: Back in high school, some of my friends were playing soccer manager games. They knew I was into cycling and programming and saw it as the most natural thing for me to create a cycling manager game. I was hesitant at first, but I soon got hooked on the idea. It only took a few days for the first early version to run, and the rest, as they say, is history.
  JHDZ: What other projects do you have besides OCM?
  NICK: My life right now is busier than ever, so I wouldn’t say I have any projects as such. I’m currently working full time(+) as an assistant attorney at a law firm in Aalborg, Denmark, specializing in intellectual property law while studying a master in European intellectual property law in Stockholm, Sweden.
  JHDZ: Wow. I would have never thought you´d be a lawyer. Will you ever attempt a comeback with your team?
  NICK: I’m quite sure I will at some point. Every now and then, I want to rebuild the team. Currently, I’m waiting for the right talent to build my team around. But the talent feature keeps throwing me garbage! Who made this feature anyways? Oh wait...
  JHDZ: Hahaha!! Yeah…About the talent feature… ;) Anyways, what is your favorite race in real life cycling?
  NICK: That is a difficult question. There are so many great races. If I have to pick one, I would go with Ronde van Vlaanderen.

  JHDZ: Who is your favorite OCM rider and OCM manager?
  NICK: My favorite OCM rider is probably Äme Anderberg. Simply because he was my own, because of his amazing talent and because of the unusual way I discovered him. Being a Swedish non-trained rider, I found it quite interesting that he placed second in Stockholm Tour riding for Monsters Inc. I imagined it as a “talent race” and decided to scout him only to be completely blown away by his potential. The episode actually inspired me to make a special type of races, “talent races”, but I never went through with it. Instead I went with the U23 races. I’m though quite sure that “talent races” will be a thing in the future.
  JHDZ: Do you ride a bike IRL?
  NICK: Yes. I used to ride at a competitive level – at a fairly decent level. Nowadays, I only do it to exercise and to keep my mind fresh. And unfortunately, I do not go out on the bike as much as I would want to.
  JHDZ: Will we ever see another entry in the developer blog?
  NICK: I never really sensed that there was any interest in it. I created it as a project in my programming classes in high school and decided to launch it. I wrote a few blog posts, but I switched to keep everything in announcements instead. The developer blog does though provide for a communication channel in which I can more easily elaborate on the thoughts behind features, etc. So who knows? Maybe one day.
  JHDZ: Do you have any approximate date for the next 10 year anniversary event? (if there is any)
  NICK: At this point we are about to reach even the 11th year, so it is more likely that the next event will be for that instead.
  JHDZ: What would you add to the game if you only had to clap your hands for this feature to be added?
  NICK: Wages and sponsors. It should not change the economics of the game much. In general, what I want to do is to make sure that top teams pay wages while lower division teams don't. There would be some distinction between professional and amateur teams. Obviously, it will be more difficult to manage a professional team and to stay on top. My goal with such a feature would be 1) to make it more difficult to stay at the top, while 2) to keep the easy economical setup in the beginning for new teams.
  The difficulty in this regard is that it takes a fully developed and functioning system. It is extremely difficult to release in small bits. Therefore it is not something I have focused much on yet.
  JHDZ: What is your favorite part of your game?
  NICK: When everything comes alive. Press releases. News articles. Rider profiles. Race descriptions. Wiki. Whenever imagination is used to put soul into the game; that is when I enjoy the game the most.
  JHDZ: Is the site going as you planned it was going to? Better? Worse?
  NICK: That is a difficult question. In some ways it is much better than I expected. In other ways, I wish I would have had the time to make more of it.
  JHDZ: When did you start coding sites?
  NICK: I started out with the early beginnings when I was around 13 years old. In the beginning I mostly focused on developing content management systems and features for websites. 4 years later, I started working on Cycling Simulator.
  JHDZ: Just a littleee sneak on your next planned feature?
  NICK: My most recent focus has been on optimizing the engine to generate better results – something I am still focused on.
  One of the features that I have wanted to do for quite a while is the “sprint train”.

Basically, this feature would include a chance that the sprinting captain gets a performance boost if his sprinting train succeeds. The bonus would only trigger if the team used one of each lead out roles (LO1, LO2 and LO Sprinter). However, any sprinter who does not have a full sprinting train will have a chance (yet smaller) to get the same bonus by following the sprinting train of another team (like Robbie McEwan used to do).
  JHDZ: What does Zyte mean?
  NICK: Zyte was a name I came up with long before I started developing Cycling Simulator. I was looking for a “playground” for my various programming projects and I wanted to host these projects on subdomains. I therefore wanted a short name to make for easy URL’s. The problem was, already at that time, all 3-character domains on .com, .net and .org were all occupied. I went through a long process of even finding available 4-character domain names. I found a few options and simply went with Zyte because I liked the aural reference to “site”, which I found would match my purpose. The original URL for Cycling Simulator was actually ocm.zyte.net (“ocm” meaning “online cycling manager”, which was the name for the few months).
  Since then I have used Zyte as the name for all my projects – commercial or not. At the time I started Cycling Simulator, I ran a low key spare-time business with creating websites for people. Naturally, when I registered my team name, I wanted “Zyte” to be the sponsor – thus came Team Zyte.
  JHDZ: Is Nick Lissner your real name?
  NICK: Yes.
  JHZ: Are you really Danish? What is your favorite part of your country?
  NICK: Yes. Yet another difficult question. I guess I would have to go with how society tries to make it possible for everyone to achieve their goals and pursue their dreams.
  JHDZ: Who is the greatest cyclist of all time in your opinion?
  NICK: Peter Sagan.
  JHDZ: And in OCM?
  NICK: Sandro Montelbano. His win streak of 8 times the general classification in Essex Tour in a row followed by a second place and then another win is to me the greatest accomplishment in the game. This even happened at a time with high level competition! I don’t think we will ever see anything like that again.
  JHDZ: Any words you would like to say to the managers reading this show?
  NICK: Thank you. Thank you for playing the game. Thank you for supporting the game. Thank you for building a community around the game. Without you, the game would be nothing. And finally, I would like to say that I am sorry that I do not have more time and energy to develop the game. I wish I had! I will though do my best to push out features whenever I can, and I really hope the game and the community keeps running for many years to come!
  JHDZ: You are welcome. Just kidding hehe, thank YOU Nick for creating this game and for accepting my invitation. And thank YOU reader again, for letting me be part of the community of this game. I will leave you with the next host of the late Show starting for next season, and it is with this words that I say goodbye. Thank you.
  BUCIU: Hello, everyone! Thank you for the introduction, Jonathan! I really appreciate you thinking of me as the successor for the show and I am really sorry to see you go! I have to tell you that the game wouldn’t have been as much fun without your show and I hope that I can at least make it as good as you did! A big round of applause for Jonathan everybody! Come on!
  
  
  Farewell everyone, and HE (Buciu) will see ya, on the next one!