A valet was seen to descend the staircase, followed by thirty damoiseaux “de gente faucon.” Not one of them boasted a beard; but what a refined appearance, and what good clothes they wore! Their young chief wore an ermine cloak upon his shoulders, he wore heuses—African boots—and (although he was not yet a knight) golden spurs.
He was well made, upright, and had the head and features of a true baron. We can only compare his gaze to that of a leopard or a lion (Jaguar?). With determined steps he ascended the staircase of the palace and came into the presence of the emperor.
“I salute you,” he said to Charlemagne.
And the king replied immediately—
“I salute you. Who are you, and whence do you come? What is your name?”
“Sire,” replied the valet, “they call me Roland.”
Charles listened to him, raised his head, and took the “infant” by the sleeve of his fur cloak, and, kissing him four times on the mouth and chin, replied:
Our next guest doesn’t even own a smartphone so obviously he’s terrible at GPRO. Wait, what??
Roland Postle Career start: S31 Elite since: S41 Championships: 9 (S44-46, 50, 61, 64, 71, 74-75); Runner-up S43, 49, 51-52, 76 Current standing: 3rd
Jaguar Racing Established: S12 Championships*: 14 (S44-49, 51-53, 55, 61, 63, 65, 75) Cup titles: 12 (S43-47, 49, 51-53, 55, 61, 75) Current standing: 3rd
*Officially listed atop the standings in S50 but championship awarded to Blue Supernova.
You are the most famous and decorated GPRO manager in history, fit with his own mythology. With nine championships to your name surely you must be bored by now. What keeps you coming back, not just to play the game but to do so at such a high level?
Honestly it's a surprise to me more than anyone that I'm still playing after 8 years. Having awesome teammates to chat and dissect the game with is a big part of it, and then somehow after each championship run I keep finding a new challenge for the next push, a different type of driver, different preparation strategy, etc, and that's enough. The major game changes we've had over the years help hugely with that. I do always worry where the motivation for the next plan will come from, and one day it will surely run out but not just yet.
One of your many admirable traits is your acceptance of innovation in the game. Rather than complain about changes to a familiar system you seem to welcome the challenge of adapting to new mechanics. How important are these changes in keeping your interest up and what would you say has the most important (or interesting) change since you started Elite in S41?
They're really important. It's partly about having a new mechanic to collect data on and investigate - especially in a veteran team a new project is great for keeping up collaboration - but also the game's different parts are so woven together that changing one mechanic can have knock-on effects elsewhere. Predicting how gameplay will evolve and trying to get ahead of the curve is a lot of fun. It's also quite fun when you get left behind like I was when energy was introduced. That gave me a new challenge of just surviving in Elite which I'd never really had before. So energy was personally the most interesting, and I think it was the most important for the Elite game because it completely changed the focus from car & finance to driver for a while and coincided with other changes which destroyed the incumbent advantage being in the top 10 used to bring.
One of these recent game changes applies specifically to the Elite group: the inability to avoid paying championship bonuses by dumping drivers and technical directors before the end of the season. How much did this influence your current choice of driver signed in S72?
So, S72 I signed Jochen who was my first project driver in quite a while. The champ bonus change was implemented S70. Before then I actually only avoided paying one driver champ bonus, but the change did have a small impact on my bids.
It'd been my plan since as far back as S62 to sign an in-Elite project that I could do multiple champ pushes with, and that meant a low bonus even under the old mechanic because he had to be retained if I won the first push(es). Despite that the market (and my frequently retiring teammate Paulo) kept offering ready-made trophy winners I couldn't really refuse. After the rule change, I started making a more conscious effort to pass on drivers I couldn't get with low champ bonus, partly in the hopes I could get back to the project plan. Eventually in the first S72 pre-season market I failed to get several big hitters to challenge Jan with, and ended up signing Jochen in the second market.
Overall though I think the change had a much bigger effect on the TD market because there's greater competition there, and with most TDs signed late in the season the bonus used to be something you didn't need to care about until you were a few races from a trophy.
Small changes to tyre attributes in recent seasons have had an influence on brand choices in Elite and beyond, reaching a crescendo of sorts in S73 when only five Elite managers selected premium tyres. You played your part that season making it the first in which you did not roll on a premium brand since S57. From a game design point of view, what should be the goal (or should there be a goal?) for the tyre brand distribution in the three supplier leagues?
As long as there's a use for at least 3 or 4 brands per division I think that's enough to make things interesting. We have 9 total and some people want them all to be useful for something but they tend to displace each other, and I think that's because it's the other game mechanics that really create the different niches the tyres fit into. Not the tyres themselves. I do also like to see regular small changes because it keeps us thinking and causes these tipping points where a new brand suddenly fills a niche better than the old one. A game in flux is more fun.
GPRO lore has it that Roland Postle never failed a championship attempt though you mentioned publicly it was your intention to win the S55 title but were unable to cope with the demands of the then brand-new energy rule. Which season was more frustrating as a manager, S55 or S76?
Hah, I see my PR team moved on from Chuck Norris jokes to slightly subtler super-human claims. I did lose a planned push in S49 too, and opportunistic half-attempts in S43 and S54. It's most frustrating when it's over at the first race and you don't get to fight. S49 I talked myself into picking weaker Michi tyres after I was convinced Christos picked them and wanted to eliminate weather randomness. Only he wasn't. I couldn't compete and just had to kick myself all season for a stupid decision. S55 my push was over less than halfway through the first race when my 'perfectly prepared' driver's energy ran out. That was fairly frustrating but at least I couldn't blame myself that time and enjoyed struggling to understand energy so the championship got quickly forgotten.
What was more harmful to your title hopes in S76, the random in R2 or the loss of energy in R8?
The R2 crash cost only 5 or 6 points. R8 I was down 7 points from what I'd expected to be an easy win. Since there were only 4 points in the title at the end, I guess we can say both equally? :)
Race 8 harmed my ego more. However unlucky I was I must have misjudged the energy a bit too, and I didn't need or intend to take so much risk with energy usage that race.
The crash cost much more financially, roughly $20mil to that season's cash alone, but it was just affordable without affecting my plan. A second crash would have been a big problem though. The other important factor was I got an extra training session done and a slightly more fired up driver afterwards. That helped close some deficit my driver had to Jasper's and may have helped gain more points later. It's just possible the crash even had a net positive effect on my points haul considering it happened so early in the season. Bert made me laugh after the race because he made a topic saying we should get +10 aggro for each random, and I was thinking.. hey, I kinda did. He was probably the more unlucky one despite salvaging a point.
Did the random significantly alter your season plan or were you always going to be dominant on the handling tracks?
I wasn't able to alter my part plan basically at all after the crash. Just had to replace very lightly worn parts and move on. I got locked into a strategy of performing at Handling tracks early on because I finished S75 with low Acceleration - not wanting to jeopardise the trophy that season by focusing on S76 too early. Gonzalo, Bert and to a lesser extent Jasper all had decent A and I was firmly in 4th place for those A tracks at the beginning. At that point I decided doubling down on the H advantage was the best move, to ensure decent points from wins in those races.
Despite the situation of S55 you stated that managing with the complexity of driver energy was important in increasing your motivation for the game. Has Jukka Sireni’scar-to-track suitability advancement had a similar effect for you?
Absolutely, yes. I think I've gotten the hang of most of it quicker than was the case with energy, but it's not been easy and required some good teamwork. It's certainly provided a new dimension in championship battles and made me want to experience that. One interesting aspect of it is that your optimal car matching approach depends on what other managers are doing with their cars, so I expect strategies to continue to evolve long after many of us have understood the actual game mechanic.
How much of your long-term planning is based on the situation of your account versus the condition of other managers? Do you deliberately avoid a championship push when you perceive another manager to be strong or do you look in the mirror, remind yourself you are Roland Postle, and attack Elite in a manner and time of your choosing?
Apart from teammates I don't think I'd ever avoid pushing against someone else unless I knew for sure I was beat. If anything, the opposite. I did try to get a driver and push in S72 because I knew Jan would be strong, wanted to battle him and really just needed a driver, but it didn't work out. Usually it's quite difficult to predict when others are making good pushes though so I pretty much go when I'm ready and hope I'm not the only one, otherwise it's much less fun.
Jaguar has gone through some roster changes in recent seasons. Can you comment on the recruitment process for a team with such history? Do you think Jaguar is still the premiere destination for up-and-coming managers?
Absolutely it's the premier destination for up-and-coming managers who want to be part of Jaguar :) If you want to be part of a different team then it's a less satisfactory destination. We have our own culture, low drama, long-term focus, independence to play your own game with no real rules yet we all help each other out and share lots of experience on good and less good ways of doing things. I think our recruitment process is quite unique in that we really invest a stupid amount of time and effort to find the right managers who'll fit into that and make Jaguar their home as long as they play GPRO, and we seem to have succeeded at that for a long time now. We do have a lot of veteran players and that brings some challenge in terms of activity and motivation, as you'd expect and which most high ranking teams face, but we're very conscious of that and stay on top of it at least well enough to keep winning trophies while adapting to game changes. Of course I have no first-hand experience of other teams so there are probably tons of others just as awesome as Jaguar but I couldn't name any!
I should mention we're going through another roster change right now, so check out our recruitment thread or PM one of us if you're interested.
Most of us have boring head-to-head statistics but yours is obscenely victorious despite reading like a who’s who of GPRO Elite. Of the five managers who have handed you the most losses in your career, who do you rank as the best and why?
Ah, this is difficult. I think the best managers are those who don't make mistakes and manage to adapt to changing conditions. Most of the managers on my top5 loss list are there because they've been around a long time but they've also lost motivation or time to play at their full potential so it feels unfair to judge them thoroughly. Ioannis especially I always enjoyed doing battle with and rate him highly but he's not playing well at the moment (his words). I hope that can change sometime. Not on my head-to-head but of all managers I've raced I still think Toygun was the best. Even though I only overlapped the end of his career in Elite he was still playing flawlessly. I don't think I saw him make a single tiny mistake, always picking the right tyres, always pitting on the optimal laps and so on. Maybe his only mistake was retiring, or was that optimally timed too? I don't know.
Last we heard from you in an interview you were the proud carrier of a Nokia 3330 cell phone. Have you since joined humanity and upgraded to a smartphone?
Definitely not. My 2001-vintage 3330 is still in it's prime! Actually, just between you and me, a few years ago I had to replace the innards using a slightly newer pre-loved donor phone, and it's been through half a dozen SIM cards and even more batteries than that. So it is a bit of a Trigger’s broom* at this point. Ironically the changeable cover is the only original part now. I've not yet found a compelling reason to own a smartphone but I suppose there must be one, what with them being so popular lately.
It's just an acronym with unique capacity for winding people up :) More seriously, I think a few players in the past have preached it a bit too literally - as if you should truly investigate every facet of the game on your own, learning it all from scratch in order to 'make your bones' - and that's where bad vibes have come from. However, if you interpret is a bit more loosely it's still good advice to new players. Wherever you pick up game knowledge, whether from teammates, Google, some tool you're toying with or clues left in a GPRO forum post (all sources I've used extensively), you should be willing to scrutinise and question the information. To figure out for yourself how much you can trust it, how you could confirm it, how it fits in with potentially conflicting information from elsewhere, and whether you can improve it.
So it just means thinking for yourself and treating GPRO like a scientific endeavour. If you treat the game as if there's some gospel truth out there a few players are jealously guarding, and if you could only learn what it was you could begin to play the game properly and win, then you're going to fail because most of the knowledge you learn and blindly trust will mislead you to some greater or lesser degree.
Lemme tell ya folks: one does not simply interview a Jaguar. Thank you, Sir Roland, for your participation!
For Elite Press, I’m Brad Marshall, hoping you someday conquer this land of GPRO.
Quote ( Brad Marshall @ August 28th 2020,14:53:41 )
Race 8 harmed my ego more.
Even here, GPRO seems to be a zero sum game. No single race has boosted my ego more than Race 8. :P Just to be clear, your energy issue was only a small part of that. Speaking of zero sum, it was all reversed half a week later of course.
Thanks Brad and Roland, interesting interview as ever. I hope you keep playing for a long time Roland, Elite needs its legends.
Quote ( Brad Marshall @ August 28th 2020,14:53:41 )
Wherever you pick up game knowledge, whether from teammates, Google, some tool you're toying with or clues left in a GPRO forum post (all sources I've used extensively), you should be willing to scrutinise and question the information. To figure out for yourself how much you can trust it, how you could confirm it, how it fits in with potentially conflicting information from elsewhere, and whether you can improve it.
So it just means thinking for yourself and treating GPRO like a scientific endeavour. If you treat the game as if there's some gospel truth out there a few players are jealously guarding, and if you could only learn what it was you could begin to play the game properly and win, then you're going to fail because most of the knowledge you learn and blindly trust will mislead you to some greater or lesser degree.
nice read,big thanks to Mr.Postle and Brad. quite interesting that one hand being without a smartphone on other hand emphasis is given on AI for q's. does that algorithm guides for faster q's and by how much... it may be a good question when Mr. Postle will have 10th trophy in his cabinet.
Quote ( Ankit Jakhar @ August 28th 2020,18:39:53 )
nice read,big thanks to Mr.Postle and Brad. quite interesting that one hand being without a smartphone on other hand emphasis is given on AI for q's. does that algorithm guides for faster q's and by how much... it may be a good question when Mr. Postle will have 10th trophy in his cabinet.
We do have a lot of veteran players and that brings some challenge in terms of activity and motivation, as you'd expect and which most high ranking teams face
Most members of Edifice declare they're going to retire about twice a day =]
Quote ( Bert Huylebroeck @ August 30th 2020,21:49:51 )
For anyone interested in all the interviews
Thanks, Bert! This is something I've wanted to do however it's just going to get buried and isolated on a random page (if we're lucky). I could copy this to my profile but that's still not ideal.
The great Max Watson foresaw this issue when he created Quixotic Press and reserved the first post for such links.
Quote ( Brad Marshall @ August 30th 2020,22:24:58 )
Thanks, Bert! This is something I've wanted to do however it's just going to get buried and isolated on a random page (if we're lucky). I could copy this to my profile but that's still not ideal.
The great Max Watson foresaw this issue when he created Quixotic Press and reserved the first post for such links.
Quote ( Brad Marshall @ August 30th 2020,22:24:58 )
Thanks, Bert! This is something I've wanted to do however it's just going to get buried and isolated on a random page (if we're lucky). I could copy this to my profile but that's still not ideal.
The great Max Watson foresaw this issue when he created Quixotic Press and reserved the first post for such links.
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