  Maximal center gauge (MCG) aims to detect some of the most important vacuum
configurations, suggesting thick magnetic flux tubes quantised to non-trivial
center elements of the gauge group being responsible for confinement. Due to
the NP-hardness of a global maximization of the gauge functional only numeric
procedures aiming for local maxima are possible. We observe a linear decrease
of the string tension with increasing gauge functional value of the local
maxima. This implies that the request to get as close as possible to the
absolute maximum is untainable. We compare global properties of the ensemble of
local maxima with other methods to detect center vortices and with
determinations of the string tension from full configurations. This comparison
indicates that the information about the number and positions of center
vortices is contained in the structure of the ensemble of local maxima. This
may pave the way for a future more successful formulation of the gauge
condition.
