Minorating.com (drivers thread)

Perfect timing for your question, Alanra.

I ended up with a default answer to many PMs and questions like that:
Yes, you both will score the contact point in this situation. But it doesn't matter. It's fine if you get point from time to time. I really liked to be more fair, but this is logically barely possible. How could a system judge this automatically? No, it has to be simple, and a bit forgiving.
Unfortunately you didn't drive on plugin-servers since the last wipe, so I can't check your stats. But I'm absolutely sure you will always be above average. Always.

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But because it's obviously important (all of) you can double check your stats in the system, I've quick-hacked a little web interface so you can see your current stats (will be updated after each session transition).

http://www.minorating.com:81/driverinfo?steam=



Not very comfortable at the moment, but better than nothing I'd think.

how-to-get-your-steam-id
steamid.io

or via the forum link:

 

Thanks for your time and thoughts, @JackCY

> Yes and no. Yes if you wreck on well administered servers or servers with such system that could ban you from these servers.
> No, you can still join any other server or your own wreckserver.

Any other server without the system, yes sure. Nothing I can do about it.
His own wreckserver? Have no problem with that. His server, his money, his rules.

> Incidents are a problem, especially how to decide who caused an incident when even a jury of people cannot sometimes agree. It's going to be an estimation, guessing, and the more complex the less it will be able to process, CPU limit.

Exactly that. I won't try doing better with a limited-data automatic system if even humans can't do it properly. So we stick with a system that is unfair, but very strict and clear.
Isn't it right that iRacing kicks you after the 4th contact?


> What is whisper?
> Regular chat message?

No, a "regular" chat message just to you. No one else can see it.
Additionally every server message is displayed in the top (like laptimes), so no chat is required to be informed.


> Yes, when there is no contact. Otherwise... WTH?
> Confusing.

Yes, give you that. I try to distinct between a Contact (C) and Contact Point(CP).
You can receive 1 C and 0.5 CP for situation the AI is absolutely sure this isn't your fault. It's a bit contrary to the "unfair + clear" system, so I might hide the CPs completly.

> How is a corner defined in your software? Isn't distance driven better, maybe even available from AC? Time is the safe thing to use.

Simple lookup of track - corner written in the database. Distance is better, and we will switch to that soon. @Thomas Gocke did some decent stuff in the framework, wil merge that soon.
Corners is simply mubetter than tracks, like Nords-Endurance (I count 81) vs. Valle-club (10).

> Nordschleife vs oval. 150+ corners vs no corners.


> In other words the rating is floating and old entries are discarded after a while, so one can improve and degrade based more on the current performance.

Excatly. Everybody deserves a second chance; and havin a pretty good rating shouldn't allow to wreck around if you have a bad day without consequences.

> How do you differ between noob crashes that result in spins and wall hits vs experienced drivers that just touch a door during their close racing but no one spins, hits a wall or goes off track?
> Are these other events also catched and reported by AC and implemented in your metric? Wall hits, off track, etc.?
> Being able to tell the severity of collisions software wise and determine whether it is a racing incident, driver error, deliberate crashing, ... the lines can be very fine.

Difficult, yes. Currently the rating just counts player-player collisions. We can add environment collisions, data is there. Spinning, 360s and off track isn't supported (yet) by the server-API, so I won't start riddling around here.
I'm sure I'll spend some time here later, but currently there is no time for that.


> Newcomers can be a real pain, no experience, no offline training, blocking the track and driving worse than a grandma on sunday. Had to ban a few already as they didn't get it to practice offline first. Not even while racing, just a cruise on NoST, yet causing enough trouble.
> It should be terrifying

We will disagree regarding newcomers


> Yeah what if someone deliberately brakes 100m sooner so his rear crashes into my front when I am close behind, making it seem like I crashes into them when in fact they are the cause?
> What about 10m? What about 1m? Where is the line to decide? What about pro vs amateur driver, their brake points can differ a lot.

If he does this more often, you and others will have 1 points more, he will have X points more. That's the system.

> Exploiting, sure, reporting false data into your database, generated data with collisions of GUIDs of people that someone wants banned/restricted in your system.

That's Barbara's job. False data is a very valid concern. I can tell that the prevention is much more code and time than the acutal rating stuff.
You may try it. It's not perfect by all means, but I'm pretty sure you need weeks to learn enough to actually succeed.


> Above. Suggestion, have a look at Airio (cargame.nl uses rating system to restrict car access on multiclass race servers) and other LFS server systems, cruise systems, etc.

I'll do.


> Ok, so 10 people collaborate and crash into a single driver in order to give him 10 collisions while each of those 10 drivers only get 1 each. Guess who is going to get rated worse sooner? The victim.

True. Nothing we can do against this, except hoping that the wreckes won't be organized that well.

> How is the restriction going to work? Can server plugins issue admin commands? As in kick people out? Restrict their car selections? Redirect them to a noob server? etc. Ban people without the need to restart the server?

The server will be configured (this is future) to let only people log in who are in <grade or better>. Beginner servers would ask "is this one MR-C or better?" for example.
The Wrecker in class "W" will receive a error message in the login screen.

> What about DDOS protections? Might sounds strange now, but I've seen it before with popular game servers of not so popular games being attacked especially when people get banned/kicked etc. Script kiddie revenge, I can't play, no one can.
> So such a centralized restriction system would easily be a prime target.

Uh. Good point.
Can't do much against that I think. Then the service just isn't recording for a while, nobody will die from that.

It should. Yep, pretty stupid answer. Will try again as soon as my dogs had their walk.

 

Mh.. They didn't last that long, but definitifly long enough to get the information, at least if you know the template.

@Lord Kunos do you know from memory if both ACSP_SEND_CHAT and ACSP_BROADCAST_CHAT are shown as server message, and how long they are displayed?

 

Observations:

Just logged into a server, this came in after the first lap:


Also as a non-chat server message, although I was too busy to notice while braking that Nismo into t1.


The collision-whisper also occurs as server message on the top for 3-4s.

 

> Corner written in a database, so some monkey will hunt for every track ever created and input it into a DB?
> Seems more like a death sentence is better than that.

Yep, I'm the monkey. Have written down all the official tracks, if a server wants to use an unknown track it's data just isn't stored. But I got an TODO-List entry with the name of the track, so maybe I'll do it, maybe not.

> I think AC reports or at least knows sectors of a track, it say the names of them, corners though, don't think so. Would have to process the track and setup a detection from the track curve to get corners really.

Don't know anything about sectors, and it would be even more death sentence to maintain sectors and stuff.
No, I think we're gonna be very good with Corners + Meters.

> Airio uses something like player contacts, but for sure uses yellow flags caused by the driver. On the other hand I don't remember seeing yellow flags in AC yet, weird! Either I'm blind to check that top left corner for a yellow flag or they simply don't exist in AC. Off track = yellow flag too.

Nice concept. Maybe we can talk the lord into broadcasting flag data. Blue is relevant without doubt, but Yellow seems to be interesting as well.


> I've seen endless cheaters online in every game, networking and executables getting reverse engineered. Even in AC it seems like the protections are close to none and illegal copy players can get online.
> Only a matter of time and some people have enough of it for these things.

I'm confident. You may be right, but breaking security is always a thing between effort and gain. I know it won't be easy and doubt that someone will have the energy to do it.

> So the undocumented API does support connection handling?


> Personally I think it would be better if it was decentralized. Every game server would run a plugin and store their own ratings instead of the ratings being centralized and stored on one "master" server.

Not a bad idea.. I think we'll return to that after the first DDOS attack. Having a local cache of all the drivers is pretty much effort in time and resources. Currently I'm really busy with all the stuff to do


> I guess the algorithm, is more or less just a simple contact counter, nothing fancy. I thought it's something complicated when you called it an algorithm.
Yes, v3 is pretty simple. Not really just a contact counter, but not far away. v2 was very advanced, really loved it. Excellent in detecting wreckers in a few minutes / contacts. But too squishy, and very bad at giving decent feedback to the drivers.

> Contact point is? I thought it is for example, left/right door, front/rear bumper, left door/front bumper, etc. the points of contact on the two collision objects. Front/rear bumper = rear ended. I guess it's referring to something else. Something to do with rank points rather?

Haha ok now I get your confusion. Yes more rank points. I'll leave the "Contact" to the driver as someting they can feel, hear and count. But it won't be always "1=1", because the system will know when it's almost impossible that one contact partner is as guilty as the other guy. So it might be 0.5 or 0.3 towards the calculation stuff; but still 1 contact the driver can eventually see and calculate with.
Playing around with "your" contact points could be a source of judgement for that. Imagine the software can tell "if you got his tail at this track position with this speed, you definitivly shot him" - or the other way round, parking behind eau rouge. Yes, we're far away from that, but I want the system to be designed in a way it is possible to add laaaater.
(you know the forum guys here *lol* It's a foggy, rainy night here)

 

And I'll close for today. www.minorating.com is sligthly updated, including a more comfortable way to submit your steam id:


Of course you still need to get it :-/
Everybody is invited to crossread it, change words or passages and so on. I'm not a native english speaker and I'm also tired as hell now. And I hate web development.

Data looks nice, we have now 9 active servers participating and recorded 1.639 Collisions with 117.959 Corners driven (would be 44.042.207 meters, 11x around the world).
Average CpC is 0,0138946583134818, 2,8% more than yesterday.

 

> OMG. Do switch to some other metric Distance, time, etc.
> Avoid any manual data entry.
> Meters should work if you can get that from AC. Sectors is similar but less precise, still automated like distance. Always avoid monkey stuff.

You will laugh, but there is no reliable "meters" in AC, at least without hacks. Official tracks have a plain info field in a json file, some modded tracks ignore that (and it would be exploiting stuff again).
The current approach is that @Thomas Gocke enhanced the .net layer to calculate the meters driven between car updates, this should work.

> It may be easier design wise to count with it from the get go. If you code modular and layered then it's not a big issue to swap things but many people hardcode and then cannot reuse code, change things once it's done.

It's not a code or design, but data issue. The database is growing, and all the driver data had to be synchronized with *every* plugin installed out there all the time.

> Squishy? I can think of many ways to decide collisions but it needs data and processing power None of which are probably in abundance, a simple contact counter style should work well for the beginning to get started. You can always swap it with something else.

A good algorithm doesn't only regard the physical structure of an accident, but more the general behaviour of the driver (at least when it comes to the real, destructive wreckers). I didn't even need a lot car specific information to detect them.
But on the other hand the same accident can have very different results, based on the context. This is very squishy.

> How does it say it's almost impossible so it gives only 0.5?

Please understand that I don't want reveal every detail, but think about a scenario where you are leading and have 5 laps driven, colliding with a guy that just joined the race and left the pitlane.

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> Michael: it's easier to report falsified data with a script/app than spend time racing clean. Hence Barbara is trying to catch these.

Excatly. Barbara also identifies a server by multiple things (one is this trust token) and weights reported data by the trust she has to that server.