re: dopers, I get what Armchair is saying - the thing in the past has been, at least from what I gathered (Hugo was the one in charge when the current rules came into place), that some people are just against picking former dopers as a matter of moral preference. The current rules were put in place, in my read, as a compromise so that those people weren't just told 'too bad, you should be more tactical' in this game. It's definitely a bit more complicated from my standpoint to shuffle through former dopers and have different scores and different rules, and it's complicated for people picking the teams. But these compromises have developed over a few years of conversation, so they can change over time. It's too late this year, as I think it was for the questions of budget and rider size. So, everyone wondering, the rules will be the same as last year for everything, pretty much. The only difference is that I want to tweak the end-of-season rules a bit, and I want to try to institute this 'weekly points ranking' cumulative competition that was mentioned a few weeks ago. Everything else will be the same. Officially sanctioned riders (like, currently sanctioned ones, not ones who were provisionally sanctioned and then cleared/overturned; also, not ones who were suspended by their team for internal investigation but never investigated by an ADA or the UCI) will cost the same as their last full season, unless they scored more in a shortened season since then. That has been the rule and will continue to be.
What I can offer is to, at the very least, answer a query as to what a rider's cost is if you're not sure (PM me), or if we want to be transparent, I can publish a list of sanctioned dopers in 2014 and their 2015 game cost. I am hesitant on the latter as that's a bit of a 'spoiler', but at least will be clear. The former just requires participants to be diligent about their picks, which I'm fine with. So unless I hear compelling arguments to the contrary, I'll just say 'ask me if you're not sure about a rider's cost'.
I'm sensitive to the timeline as well, and hope that delaying it a week (last year it started on the 11th; this year will be about the 18th) won't reduce the number of teams. But from last year's experience, I don't think it will. I got a glut of teams at the start from keeners who had obviously had them ready anyway, and I got most of them in the final week. I expect delaying it a week will add a few more teams to the initial glut but not really affect anything else. Anyway, I'm working on a 2015 template and a reworked main post, and that's my goal to get up as soon as I have more than a few minutes at a time to work on it. The doper's list will be in place soon after, so I just want to counsel a bit of extra patience. We'll be running smooth soon enough.