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Poll: Is a series for newer drivers a good idea?
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Hell yes
58.33%
7 58.33%
No, newbies should suffer same as I did
41.67%
5 41.67%
Total 12 vote(s) 100%
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Series for folks with ratings under 500?
#1
Any chance you have considered doing a series for drivers with points under 500? It would let newer drivers advance perhaps a little faster and might be more fun. I saw you had a series for "over 500" but the under 500 could be cool and maybe you could do the same races just on the half-hour. 
Thoughts?
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#2
In my opinion, that's just server time better served being available to all drivers. If one of these under 500 races fell on one of my few race availability times I'd be pretty miffed.

Besides, putting all newer drivers on a server isn't always the best idea. I learn fastest when I'm able to race with someone way faster than me, and then watch the replay from their POV. If I were newer, I'd only be able to watch other sub 500 drivers in that way.

All that said, frankly driver rating doesn't really mean anything other than "constantly does okay and doesn't wreck a lot of people and has been here a long time". As has been stated many times on the forums, races requiring 500+ still have people doing boneheaded things from time to time. Might as well stuff as many people on a server as can sign up, really!
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#3
As someone close to 500, I would agree with Russel. Rating doesn't really matter. Sure, over the time and number of people it evens out, so it's doing it's job to rank people, but I've seen a lot of people in high 500s, and even in 600s, who are either fast and dirty (or maybe I should say reckless), or slow and clean. Nobody knows the correct formula for calculating the rating, but I think it could use few more variables. My guess is it uses number of incidents, and average rating of the field. So if you finish high with few incidents, it awards you the same rating if you finish low with zero. If it used more stuff like numbers of off tracks, cuts, your consistency (average delta from your best lap as well as from session's best) it would probably be more accurate. But then it would lower the impact of incidents and "encourage" people to bump others out of their way even more. So, TBH, I'm not sure how I would balance it, if that date is even extractable from AC. But that's too much off topic.

I think that the biggest problem would be that it would dilute the field even more. There's just not that many people who race here to justify cutting off a large portion of it. Ideal solution would be some kind of licencing system or beginner's cups, like you have in every career mode. Something that only new drivers can race for a week or two. So, pretty much the same thing that you suggested, but I would limit the participation by number of races, not rating. For example, you have to finish 10 MX5 races with less than 5 incidents and more than 6 drivers to be able to register for other races. But in the end, it boils down to the same problem: number of drivers. If you end up in slow week or two (registration wise) where there just aren't enough new drivers, you might be stuck in those for a while. And it would depend on how much work is needed behind the scenes to set everything up. After all, all this is free, and we can't realistically expect admin and his crew (if he even has one) to maintain everything, review protest, solve problems, and do everything else to keep this thing running 24/7, and ask him to add new features.

So there's really no easy yes/no answer for this. I'm sure everybody would like to have more even splits, but, IMO at the moment, there are just to many drawbacks to separating drivers into even more servers, so I vote no.
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#4
Thanks for the replies and thoughts. I hadn't imagined that a sub-500 race would take the place of an existing race but I guess I don't understand why the races are only on the hour and imagined that the new race would be that, a net new event perhaps on the half-hour or at some other time that wouldn't limit the main events.

In terms of races being light, I have never seen that, at least in the 20 minute events. I race mostly during the day in the U.S. but those events are always 20+ drivers with a global distribution.

And on the point that "points don't matter"... I don't disagree that the points don't matter, but it seems like if there were a sib-500 (or some class for newer drivers) it would give more people a chance to win races or come in top three at least. It's not a huge deal and it's still fun to be fast in the middle of the pack... but I always feel like I'm on Toro Rosso up against Mercedes.

Is there a technical reason a new race couldn't run on the half-hour? I admit I don't know how the underpinnings of SRS work so my bad there.
Founder, Dream Drives for Kids
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#5
I know of one case where a race was rescheduled to be 15 minutes later than "on the hour" due to a server glitch. So it can certainly be done. I think the problem is that a 20 minute race actually takes about 40 minutes or so in total, depending on the typical lap time of the track. 5 minute initialization (includes practice time), 10 minute qualifying, 1 minute pre-race, 20 minute race, then ? for the final lap of the race leader, then I think 3 or 5 minutes to let the rest of the field finish one more lap. So like 41-45. 1 hour races essentially take up 1.5 hours?

I too do not know about the back end setup of any of this, but I imagine he's kind of got things where he wants them and there would have to be a massive problem for something to change at this point. I can't even talk him into underlining hyperlinks on these forums so people can see what to click on. Big Grin
Tutorial on how to use Autodesk Mudbox and Adobe Photoshop to make custom liveries! https://tinyurl.com/yaetz4qz
Grab my PDash Skins (an Assetto Corsa HUD app) here: https://tinyurl.com/y95ewubz
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#6
You know there is also some drivers that are new in SRS but expirienced in leagues/other sims. I'm on 300 rating and I always feel aggrieved when I'm in lower split because I don't have much chances to race so I deconcentrate and make dumb mistakes because races are too easy for me.
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