[Christopher Magan]

As we all know, player numbers have significantly decreased over the past year. I also had the feeling that over the course of a 6 week season, registration numbers would slowly drop. And then they would suddenly peak again in the first week of the new season. So I decided to examine several championships of the last few seasons to check my theory. I chose last season's Youtuber series, last season's entry-level MX-5 cup, and September/October's open-wheel Tatuus series. Below are several column charts of the number of participants per day and per round. 





My take on these charts:

• Compared to weekdays, there are more registrations on weekends. No surprises there.
  
• Mondays/Tuesdays are relatively popular as well. New car/track combos are exciting.
  
• Registrations certainly dwindle over 6 weeks. This could be explained by 1) players becoming bored with the cars or 2) players losing out in the championship and giving up. Maybe shorter seasons would solve 1) and increase average player numbers. 
  
• Fan favourites such as Spa and Brands Hatch attract more players (surprise surprise). Racing popular tracks near the end of the season might help even out participation numbers over the course of a season.
  

Looking at the charts, I think 4 weeks per season and putting popular tracks last would benefit SRS. What do you make of these numbers? Would a shorter season help increase participation or would it just increase the frequency of the meager last rounds? I will try to include a poll so you can vote!

[Donnchadh MacGarry]

Nice work, some interesting stuff there. Those trends are pretty much what I expected, but its nice to see actually numbers for it. I might keep in mind having popular tracks in the later weeks when selecting tracks with Michael and Sergio for our championship, I hadn't thought about that.

Personally I enjoy the 6 week seasons as it gives a good amount of time to get properly acquainted with the car, allow a bit of time for up and down moments in the season and then begins to wrap up when I've felt I've been using the car a while. I also found it useful a few years ago when I was more of a beginner, as it helped keep me focused and committed to learning how to drive a particular car well. Before that I would just drive switch between random cars on AC all the time and kind of got bored since it felt a bit pointless. A 6 week season gave me the direction that I needed at the time. 

There is no correct answer to season length though, its very much a personal thing. Even though 6 weeks is my preference (partly because I'm so used to it), I would be okay with a shorter season of 5 or even 4 weeks, but I wouldn't want anything shorter than that. I'm probably more against longer seasons. 8 is definitely the max and anything more than that I think is way too long for SRS championships.

Another thing that could help keep up participation in a 6 week season is that the championship standings would only count the best 5 results out of the 6 for each driver. That way if a driver misses a week or has a bad race early on, they might be less inclined to drop out of a championship if they feel its not worth it due to being so far behind in the standings. Discounting the worst result gives them a second chance. I've used that system in another discord championship I partake in and it definitely is something that was liked by the majority there. There can be issues with it though and it can be gamed. For example, a person might decided to cause an incident on the last week because they can guarantee themselves a certain position in the championship if the first 5 races are going to be the best results for them and the other driver they crash into.

[Michael Martin]

That's a lot of data!

[Ilmari Ylitalo]

I'm pretty happy with the 6 week season. The participant count declines towards the end of season but that would prolly happen in shorter series too. Out of the daily drivers series, many people drive their weekly 5/5 races early on in the week and are out of the week's races later in the week.

I like the idea Donnchadh already introduced: for counting championship points, it would be nice to have 1 week excluded from the final score. For many, it's a bit of a tall order to commit the full 6 weeks and get a good result 6 out of 6 times. Other things in life etc etc...

[Christopher Magan]

Another thing that could help keep up participation in a 6 week season is that the championship standings would only count the best 5 results out of the 6 for each driver. That way if a driver misses a week or has a bad race early on, they might be less inclined to drop out of a championship if they feel its not worth it due to being so far behind in the standings. Discounting the worst result gives them a second chance. I've used that system in another discord championship I partake in and it definitely is something that was liked by the majority there. There can be issues with it though and it can be gamed. For example, a person might decided to cause an incident on the last week because they can guarantee themselves a certain position in the championship if the first 5 races are going to be the best results for them and the other driver they crash into.

Lovely idea! The risk of a protest should prevent such incidents from taking place

The participant count declines towards the end of season but that would prolly happen in shorter series too.

That is something I considered as well and might very well be true. Only testing would give a definite answer, I suppose. Our championships are relatively short already since a season in iRacing is 12 weeks. To me, that sounds incredibly long. But maybe that is the origin of our six-week seasons (half an iRacing season?). I checked iRacing's registration numbers to see whether that would offer any insight. But their numbers don't tell me anything. Do we have a data scientist here on SRS?

iRacing charts:

[Maurice Klerken]

I think it would also help if places 2 and 3 get some praise in the statistics. Now only number 1 counts.
Then we should get rid of the incident points, as it makes no sense.
And shorter championships would be preferred in my case, but that's a tough one to call.

[Pasha Paterson]

A six-week schedule is just long enough to come back from one bad race and not so long that everyone gets sick of it.
I do like the idea of having one "drop race" in case someone has to miss or simply has a turn of bad luck during the season.