07-16-2019, 10:08 PM
I'll have to side with the guys who are against including incident average as a filter for a series.
I'm risking probably being heavily subjectively biased, but I'll speak from my own experience on SRS.
I've joined just before the New Year so it means I've been racing here for almost 7 months. In that time, I've done 93 races with inc avg 3.075, or 286 incidents in total. I'll disregard one outlier - one race at Nordschleife where I had 21. So, 265 in 92 races, 2.88. With a high degree of confidence, and opening myself to a massive amount of mocking, I can claim that out of those 265, at least 240 were not my fault. Sure, some of them could probably be avoided if I've moved away (and I mean all the way, not just off the racing line, sometimes even off the track is not enough), and vast majority were not intentional, but I wouldn't be too happy camper, if I'd have to miss interesting combo because somebody else can't play nice. Just this season, I've raced in 4 F3 races, and collected 10 incidents, none of which were my fault, all were done by people returning to track straight into me or forgetting to brake. I'm not trying to portray myself as some victim or somebody who's been extremely unlucky. I think it's the case with a lot of mid/bottom of top split, where I currently reside. I'm afraid to even think about what's happening in lower servers. It's just too easy to collect few incidents. For example, you are closely following one driver, while other is following you. At heavy braking turn, the guy behind messes up, rearends you and you hit the guy in front of you. You'll get at least 2 incidents, and the guy ahead one. And that's if you are lucky not to hit anybody/anything else. Or second situation. You fight with somebody, they hit you, you end up hitting one wall and bouncing on the other. 3 incidents for something that doesn't even have to be some long, tens fight. Could be just one wrong move from somebody else. And I'm not even going into AC's collision model where the game sometimes reports 1 hit as two (or even more), or it has existential crisis and decides "Screw it, I'm a pinball simulator now" so it starts bouncing the cars around like they're made of rubber.
And I'm doing everything possible to avoid trouble. If I see somebody catching me up fast, I'll lift off and let them past, if I see somebody whit whom I've already had bad races, I'll avoid them, I don't dive bomb, or try to Verstappen other drivers, almost everything short of just stopping as soon as somebody appears in my mirror, but sometimes (or a lot of times) it's not enough to stay away from trouble.
There is (concerningly) a large number of really fast guys, who just don't know how to race, and that, IMHO, is the biggest problem here. Some people just don't know how to adjust their pace. Hypothetical situation: you qualify in the middle or at the back of a filed, let's say 10-15. Somebody who starts ahead goes off / is involved in an accident so you overtake him. Few laps later, he catches up but doesn't have the patience to wait for an opportunity so tries to overtake by doing something stupid at the corner where you can't overtake. That results in either in you defending and he takes you both out, or you move aside to let him go (and as I've said, sometimes even moving over the kerb is not enough) just for him to spin out again. Rinse and repeat. People for some reason can't comprehend that if you are catching me by 1-2 seconds per lap there has to be a reason why am I that much slower. Somewhere my line is not good enough, somewhere I have to brake earlier, somewhere I have to be reluctant with accelerating... And yet they continue to drive like they are hot lapping, with nobody else on track and with damage turned off. That happened to me in at least 10 races, and I know I'm not the only one.
Again, this is not some "oh, poor me" post, just my two cents. Any system that automatically decides that it's equal blame for an incident, shouldn't be deciding who should be allowed to race in a series or not. So I would be against incident average being the barrier. I would prefer just rating, even though the rating itself can be very misleading, it's the best tool we have for measuring skill here.
Sorry for the rant
I'm risking probably being heavily subjectively biased, but I'll speak from my own experience on SRS.
I've joined just before the New Year so it means I've been racing here for almost 7 months. In that time, I've done 93 races with inc avg 3.075, or 286 incidents in total. I'll disregard one outlier - one race at Nordschleife where I had 21. So, 265 in 92 races, 2.88. With a high degree of confidence, and opening myself to a massive amount of mocking, I can claim that out of those 265, at least 240 were not my fault. Sure, some of them could probably be avoided if I've moved away (and I mean all the way, not just off the racing line, sometimes even off the track is not enough), and vast majority were not intentional, but I wouldn't be too happy camper, if I'd have to miss interesting combo because somebody else can't play nice. Just this season, I've raced in 4 F3 races, and collected 10 incidents, none of which were my fault, all were done by people returning to track straight into me or forgetting to brake. I'm not trying to portray myself as some victim or somebody who's been extremely unlucky. I think it's the case with a lot of mid/bottom of top split, where I currently reside. I'm afraid to even think about what's happening in lower servers. It's just too easy to collect few incidents. For example, you are closely following one driver, while other is following you. At heavy braking turn, the guy behind messes up, rearends you and you hit the guy in front of you. You'll get at least 2 incidents, and the guy ahead one. And that's if you are lucky not to hit anybody/anything else. Or second situation. You fight with somebody, they hit you, you end up hitting one wall and bouncing on the other. 3 incidents for something that doesn't even have to be some long, tens fight. Could be just one wrong move from somebody else. And I'm not even going into AC's collision model where the game sometimes reports 1 hit as two (or even more), or it has existential crisis and decides "Screw it, I'm a pinball simulator now" so it starts bouncing the cars around like they're made of rubber.
And I'm doing everything possible to avoid trouble. If I see somebody catching me up fast, I'll lift off and let them past, if I see somebody whit whom I've already had bad races, I'll avoid them, I don't dive bomb, or try to Verstappen other drivers, almost everything short of just stopping as soon as somebody appears in my mirror, but sometimes (or a lot of times) it's not enough to stay away from trouble.
There is (concerningly) a large number of really fast guys, who just don't know how to race, and that, IMHO, is the biggest problem here. Some people just don't know how to adjust their pace. Hypothetical situation: you qualify in the middle or at the back of a filed, let's say 10-15. Somebody who starts ahead goes off / is involved in an accident so you overtake him. Few laps later, he catches up but doesn't have the patience to wait for an opportunity so tries to overtake by doing something stupid at the corner where you can't overtake. That results in either in you defending and he takes you both out, or you move aside to let him go (and as I've said, sometimes even moving over the kerb is not enough) just for him to spin out again. Rinse and repeat. People for some reason can't comprehend that if you are catching me by 1-2 seconds per lap there has to be a reason why am I that much slower. Somewhere my line is not good enough, somewhere I have to brake earlier, somewhere I have to be reluctant with accelerating... And yet they continue to drive like they are hot lapping, with nobody else on track and with damage turned off. That happened to me in at least 10 races, and I know I'm not the only one.
Again, this is not some "oh, poor me" post, just my two cents. Any system that automatically decides that it's equal blame for an incident, shouldn't be deciding who should be allowed to race in a series or not. So I would be against incident average being the barrier. I would prefer just rating, even though the rating itself can be very misleading, it's the best tool we have for measuring skill here.
Sorry for the rant