Minorating.com (drivers thread)

Ok people, please stop it. I'm grateful for any feedback (approval+disagreement), new ideas and reports that might indicate bugs or similar. But please don't discuss this until everybody is on your line, won't happen.
Also please stop complaining about the online situation, there's a dedicated thread. And believe me: The problem is known. That's why this thread and MR exist in the first place. You have the tools and chose not to use them, ok. But please don't complain then, or at least not here. This thread is an excellent source of feedback, bug reports and exchange, please do not ruin it.

First: It is frustrating. Yesterday I wanted to spend quite some hours on MR, even was looking forward the whole week. The motivation didn't survive reading a few posts here. I'm so tired of people who think they are invincible and can complain about the fundamentally flawed system as soon as they drop a grade. This story has been told a dozend times in the last 100 pages. I should have the patience to go on like before, but appearantly that's not easy every day. I might be stressed by work and private life currently, so please forgive my bad mood today.

Second: Sorry for the hard words, but if still incist on "but the system punishes the innocent" you just did not understand the model behind. Honestly I don't know how to solve this communication issue.
Whoever thinks this is a problem, have a close look to what people like @martcerv , @V8_KB , @andy-riches and @TDS are commenting. They follow MR since the early days out of genuine interest (opposed to the biased situation of suddenly having a bad grade), and they understand the system damn good.

Third:
Whenever the "I have a bad grade, please check" reports peak like now, I'm highly alerted. Currently my inbox is exploding again, we have this discussion here and indeed the B and A grades are currently shrinking. Something seems wrong, so I spend lots of time to check the data and understand what happens (usually a bug I implemented in the past weeks). Eventually @McStinger 's data gives the reason, or at least at this point I began to understand.

He is a solid B driver. Sometimes he dropped to C for a short time, but also the same for A. But now he went down to D. Why?
MR stores every Driver's session including the distances and contact information, until the sum of the distance exceeds 1000km. Then the oldest session is droppped. That's absolutely necessary to regard changes in the driving skills - imagine a newcomer who needs 2000km to understand simracing rules and expectations, and then starts to become a good driver. If we would remember his first 500kms forever he'd never go beyond D, even when driving like an A. The same goes the other way round: We can't allow an A with 5000 km of good driving to wreck around for a weeks until he eventually drops to lower grades.

So @McStinger had ~25-30 rows of driver's sessions with pretty good stats at the 14th June. MR would pick the sums of 4 columns and the formula says he's grade B.
After the 14th July the new sessions are worse. Instead of a maximum of 2 or 3 contact points per race (which is still A or B) it goes up to 16 contacts. And for roughly every new session one of the older, clean ones drop out of the calculation. Currently his last session is of the 17th July, shortly after the DLC. That is any good session before is deleted, and MR only regards the sessions after the Red Pack hit.


Yes, the reason for most of your complaints is the DLC. It happens every time. Before a new DLC only the regulars with (in average) good driving capabilities are around. As soon as there is new content many casuals join AC for a week or so, driving a new car on an unknown track for the first time in MP. Combine that with MR AB drivers that do the same and join any server where there is traffic, you understand why the session stats have to become worse. Combine that with the complicated new cars (2x modern F1, 2x vintage F1) and you know something will hit the fan.

As you had good MR stats before this weekend, nobody would notice that the MR grades are slowly going to hell. But for the next weeks the bad sessions are there, and while the clean ones are deleted on after another you notice it now.

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So far to the explanation what happened. Ususally I'd take this as a problem that needs a solution. But there is no easy one. It's still the old-time problem: Either going full accident analysis, which would need another 1 or 2 years without success guarantee (and severe feedback problems). Or improving the usage of MR, which also can't really happen successfully from outside.

You can easily join an MR-AB server on DLC day and maintain your grade. Most B graders can handle a new combo without messing up too much. You will witness more crashes here as well, but also have the corresponding distances.
You can't expect the same on a MR-ABCND server. If you could, MR wouldn't work and I could shut down. But it does.

 

Ty, and no worries. I have to thank you - your case opened my eyes to the problem Your grade will be restored after the next 3 or 4 races, you got two nasy 16-collisions-sessions next.
But still, I have no solutions to the underlying problems. System + Community don't really match :-/

 

following a good discussion with @andy-riches:

Currently we have a huge problem with slowly degraging grades (after that DLC), but you don't notice. The timing aspect is pretty bad, so we're thinking of a way to give meta-feedback pretty early.
I was looking at the MR lobby, or a dedicated app - but who would use that? How about a short chat summary at the end of a session, like "this was a B-grade session"? Maybe with opt-in or out?

 

Not a bad idea. MR didn't know about the actual blocking restriction until plugin version 2.0, so I might need to think what I can do with it.
On the other hand - is the entry message really read?

 

Very good input, I'm starting to like the idea.

Opt-in or out, that's the question. I agree on spammy things and would prefer to opt-in; but that will destroy the whole idea of giving early hints of degrading stats.
Again, the ones who opt-in are most probably the ones who already know much about MR.

 

I agree on that; but I'm also afraid of having much more frustration among the users. When you don't know anything about the stuff in the background, you won't notice when a bad session is equalized by a good one.
As soon as MR is starting to tell you, you might get angry and afraid of your grade in many unnecessary cases.

I'm sorry for having a really bad day