09-21-2020, 03:39 AM
(This post was last modified: 09-21-2020, 04:11 AM by Martin Smith.)
The eternal question of sim racing, isn't it? How to clean up the racing.
Obviously SRS is a huge step forward from open lobbies as a few newcomers have stated, and as the size of our membership can attest. But there's always room for improvement, of course.
There are 2 steps to cleaning up the racing, the first is to identify risky drivers and the second is to teach them to drive safely or isolate them from the rest of us.
For the first step the SRS incident rating system actually does a fair job of identifying the riskier drivers.
The biggest shortcoming of the current incident rating method is that the further back a driver runs in the pack, the more incidents they will be exposed to even if they are very clean drivers. So there is a bit of a bias against them there. If needed, maybe there's an 'adjustment factor' that can be devised to reduce the incident rating of drivers with lower performance rating? Then the relative safety of given fast, medium or slow drivers can more evenly be compared to each other.
But I think what we have is good enough to use to separate out the worst offenders. And if we ever manage to produce cleaner racing then that problem might just fix itself.
So the next step is reforming or isolating drivers.
1) As it stands we don't actually use the incident rating for any pupose, which is what your first option suggests we do. I had suggested this before >link here< but Henrique indicated he's not in favour of a restriction that would shrink the field on server 1. But now that I look at it again, maybe the 2nd server could be formed by incident rating rather than performance, so the 1st server is always full?
Either way, I don't think there's ever a need to remove high incident drivers from a race, they just need to be isolated.
2) Same with this suggestion. There's no point in removing drivers by performance rating (especially if we filter out the risky ones), they only need to be split in groups together when possible so they race each other as much as possible, not faster or slower guys. That's what SRS does already.
3) Enforcing yellow flags could be a good way to reform bad drivers, the ones who are a bit clueless to how racing works. But I don't think that's technically feasible with AC. More techy guys can chime in on that, I'm just guessing.
4) I'm a little confused on this one. There seems to be blurry lines between a licensing system, pre-qualifying system, and simple safety or performance rating splits as discussed above. I mean, aren't we pre-qualifying with every race we do? And isn't the rating a type of license if used to differentiate drivers? Serious question, I just don't know. Besides, I wouldn't assume that just because someone did well in an F3 series, that they want to progress to F1 rather that compete in clean MX-5 races.
So the idea of saying you have to complete 'x' within certain standards in order to be eligible for 'y' is very complicated, and inevitably a bit arbitrary, and perhaps even futile. Better to simply use each person's performance and safety ratings to establish who they race against compared to the ratings of everyone else who signed up, in a more seamless way.
Obviously SRS is a huge step forward from open lobbies as a few newcomers have stated, and as the size of our membership can attest. But there's always room for improvement, of course.
There are 2 steps to cleaning up the racing, the first is to identify risky drivers and the second is to teach them to drive safely or isolate them from the rest of us.
For the first step the SRS incident rating system actually does a fair job of identifying the riskier drivers.
The biggest shortcoming of the current incident rating method is that the further back a driver runs in the pack, the more incidents they will be exposed to even if they are very clean drivers. So there is a bit of a bias against them there. If needed, maybe there's an 'adjustment factor' that can be devised to reduce the incident rating of drivers with lower performance rating? Then the relative safety of given fast, medium or slow drivers can more evenly be compared to each other.
But I think what we have is good enough to use to separate out the worst offenders. And if we ever manage to produce cleaner racing then that problem might just fix itself.
So the next step is reforming or isolating drivers.
1) As it stands we don't actually use the incident rating for any pupose, which is what your first option suggests we do. I had suggested this before >link here< but Henrique indicated he's not in favour of a restriction that would shrink the field on server 1. But now that I look at it again, maybe the 2nd server could be formed by incident rating rather than performance, so the 1st server is always full?
Either way, I don't think there's ever a need to remove high incident drivers from a race, they just need to be isolated.
2) Same with this suggestion. There's no point in removing drivers by performance rating (especially if we filter out the risky ones), they only need to be split in groups together when possible so they race each other as much as possible, not faster or slower guys. That's what SRS does already.
3) Enforcing yellow flags could be a good way to reform bad drivers, the ones who are a bit clueless to how racing works. But I don't think that's technically feasible with AC. More techy guys can chime in on that, I'm just guessing.
4) I'm a little confused on this one. There seems to be blurry lines between a licensing system, pre-qualifying system, and simple safety or performance rating splits as discussed above. I mean, aren't we pre-qualifying with every race we do? And isn't the rating a type of license if used to differentiate drivers? Serious question, I just don't know. Besides, I wouldn't assume that just because someone did well in an F3 series, that they want to progress to F1 rather that compete in clean MX-5 races.
So the idea of saying you have to complete 'x' within certain standards in order to be eligible for 'y' is very complicated, and inevitably a bit arbitrary, and perhaps even futile. Better to simply use each person's performance and safety ratings to establish who they race against compared to the ratings of everyone else who signed up, in a more seamless way.