Clean online racing - possible? Suggestions and discussions!

I think its a good idea to separate this topic from the driving school one...

For what its worth, my opinions on available options:

1. iRacing tier system where you earn your place in higher tiers through clean driving is a good approach. Maybe even the best thus far? Earning the right to drive fast cars online by having to prove that you are a safe driver with slow cars first may be a good idea.

2. Another suggestion would be based on assumption that most crashers are slow and vent their frustration in this manner. To weed them out, game/server could have personal records of hotlaps- when you are new to a particular server (+car and track combo), you have to run a hotlap which is then saved on the server. If this time meets the criteria, you're allowed to enter races there (and your record is saved, so you don't have to run this hotlap every time you join this server), if you're too slow- you're not allowed to race.

3. Do nothing, leave it to personal leagues like in LFS, rF etc. After all 90% of skill sims game buyers are offliners - they just cant compete and get their kicks from beating AI and feeling like Schumacher SPend money on driving school and career instead- catering for the bigger population would be healthier to the overall project and would be good to onliners too- longer support, more cars, licences, tracks, and maybe even a *proper* online mode - eventually.

PS Imo , something like the 2nd solution may be the best compromise. Iracing does not charge what it does for no reason, their service actually COSTS something like that (of course neither company runs a charity). AC has different business model, so it would be foolish to expect the same perks as iracing's.

 

If the server hosting is anything like the rest of AC, apps will be able to implement (2) pretty easily, and the server can run laptime requirements if it wants to.

I also think there's another strategy which is almost definitely in AC's multiplayer:
4. Qualifying rounds before races that determine your position. If you make the assumption again that crashers can't drive fast, then they just won't meet the qualifying standard, and not go into races set up that way.

Which kinda leads to an in-between option of 1 and 3:
5. tiers run by the same group - finishing a short race on the lower tier qualifies you to enter the upper one (not necessarily time-based; just clean racing). Depends how much of a server load it takes to operate this. If they run on different formats (eg. hourly races on the upper one for 20+ minute races, and shorter races starting whenever the grid's adequately full to get more starting-line practice on the lower one) then players can get qualified relatively fast.

 

I want to work on this and planned a similar thread when we know more. I've been playing pCars online, it's a mess, not sure if they will change things but right now the only place for public racing that work and is fun is iRacing. Sure you can join a league and race once or twice a week in other sims but it's a hassle and you can't just go and join a race like in iRacing

My ideas are fair ambitious and I don't know if they can be done but based around a "community steward" approach and licenses, it will take a lot of work and depends on how the AC guys do things. This is infact a very hard problem as it is 10% technical and 90% social but before we can do anything, it will need some help from the AC guys and what they have planned, also it depends on what Steam offers as well.

Without question if it ends up with just lobbies, it will become a deathmatch like game, it only takes one guy in a field of 20 to ruin the race for 19 others that are serious, especially if there is nothing at risk for being a wrecker.

 

iRacing is a business that makes a lot of money, it absolutely is too large of an investment for a lot of people. It has got a lot better but it would easily be possible to run a similar service far cheaper and do it as a community non-profit. My main problem with iRacing is the DLC pricing, the monthly charges are not so bad but to buy all the DLC is around $1000 (yes really).

Many people including me put up with iRacings problems because of the public online racing that you just can't get anywhere else. Sure the graphics are dated, sure even with NTMv5 changes you still feel disconnected with the car but the racing is very good because you need to earn your spot. In fact even iRacing's online only gets good once you get your D license.

Could we do a similar service for free? Unlikely but we could do it as a community non-profit that only has a small monthly fee to cover server charges and runs with volunteers.

 

1. iRacing system doesn´t avoid crashes. A lot of crashes in class B, in theory a class with careful people, multiclass has become from 2 or 3 splits to be almost desert, a big failure.
The big problem for me is you hardly feel the car limits and I feel I am skiing more than driving a car. So, a lot of crashes happen for losing the control car, spining and hit other cars.

But AC is different , you can feel the car, the limits, FFB, weight and tyres (5 differents + streets and others) inform very well about those limits, about lose grip, etc. so you can control much better the car and with respectful people I think there will be very few crashes.

2. I don´t think the slow drivers are a problem, the crashes will happen mostly with impatient, too agressive and disrespectful people.

3. Leagues could be a good option. Open online will be a COD. (gamepads, mouses, kids, psychopaths, you will need a kalashnikov not a car )

(sorry for my English)

 

I like the idea of earning your spot in league's and such kind of like iRacing because it promotes something other than "win at all costs" which is the general mentality behind most crashes where people push themselves or their car beyond it's/their limits.

 

Iracing has it pretty good for road racing and league racing has it sorted out.

Both working on the premise that you drive somewhat respectfully and not like a dick taking a move with a 10% chance of pulling it off knowing that if you crash you jump on another server.

I can never see pick up racing working as well as either of the above two systems. Sometimes you get a good race but it is practically never, it's hardly worth the bad 10 races to get the single good one.

I just dont see it ever happening. AC doesn't bring anything new to the genre in this respect and if anything for the hardcore racers it may bring more arcade racers.

 

In AC there will be a 2 Class-Online-Community

1.Class: with all DLC´s and Mods
2.Class: only with Mods

To run that you must have a good community that organise first of all this 2 Classes and then making a own Rulessystem. I dont know if the bierbuden will take ac into their collection of games or if i have to look for a other online community like racedepartement etc. If you have only public Servers with no Moderation MP is dead in shorter time then you can say "fu cheater/wrecker" or "spineless wannabe pro-racedriver who just pushs and wrecks you away cause he can go 2 sec faster in hotlapping but no skill to compete in a race with other humans"

 

I remember my LFS days where we never had problems with these things. People were just mature enough (no matter how old) and made sure they didnt hit anyone intensionally. These days however a lot of people are nuts and care only about themselves lol so AC probably need a system for this.

Im glad you guys talking about it though, and i hope AC gets a good system implemented with MP that ensures that people race the way its supposed to be raced - in real life. And an option to turn it off for those that wanna clown around (sometimes we all do to get a laugh), but thats sims in genereal - it lets us do whatever we want.

 

I agree, if you added an "if" there. So better said: if AC doesn't bring anything new to the genre in this respect.

If they say, "here's a server, go at it", then it's leagues only and that would be a shame. However, I can see good racing happening if we work together, sure it will be work but their is no shortage of passion here. We all also know the problems as well plus we have also seen it else where and many of us have seen what iRacing does right, yeah I know it has issues but really there is nothing like it and it is amazing fun especially once you get out of the rookie license.

Stereo said with making speed a barrier to entry, I don't agree because there are careful slow drivers but their needs to be some barrier to entry, at least to show you care. Why iRacing works can be summed in one word: Accountability.

There is one common sense thing that adds a barrier to entry, it won't be too popular at first reading but please think about it: Adding a small monthly cost, not iRacing prices but a small subscription of say $2 per month. Unlike iRacing this should never be mandatory so people have the choice, want open servers, go for it, run leagues, go for it however for people that want clean public racing, that service can be offered also.

Their needs to be a way to categorize the people that want to race and do it cleanly and the guys that just want to play COD with cars can go on the public servers, they won't ever pay a subscription, the people that want clean fun racing will pay it to get away from the idiots. It also means dedicate servers can be paid for, that cost would have to be covered.

iRacing's clean racing works because they include accountability, that is why they make people use their real names have SR and other things. SR has it's faults but it is something you have to earn and again adds accountability.

Accountability is the key to clean online racing and this is a sim right? It's much more immersive if something is at stake.

 

Manifesto time? This may be a loooooong post.

First off, to the guy who mentioned there are crashes in iRacing because of iRacing physics - don't think so. When you are trying as hard as you can, eventually you will make a mistake. If you haven't overcooked it, you haven't found the limit! That also doesn't even deal with the idiots and wreckers AC will inevitably have that are really not there in iRacing outside rookie series. Admin can take care of that though.*

Second, League racing is League racing. Every sim has good league racing. However, I don't think a sim can survive solely on league racing, unless it happens to have GP4/Papyrus quality AI. While it's cool to have a race a week in a league or whatever, what happens if it's a Tuesday, my league races Friday and I want a race for fun? Better open server racing means better league racing in the end, they feed off each other. This touches on another problem - why do league servers get locked when not in use? I think if the quality of racing is good, those servers would be more likely to stay open, as it would help increase population in the league (and therefore actually help pay for the server!)

If Kunos does nothing they might as well have just wasted everything they have done with AC IMHO. There are only two sims that have managed to work well online of recent note in terms of road course content (We'll ignore NR03 because with only one car, that solves many issues) - those two sims are LFS and iRacing. Two radically different approaches. LFS built itself up strongly and capably on the back of being so niche only certain people even knew it existed. If you were playing LFS, you probably already knew what you were doing. iRacing, well, we all know the system - it's good, it's bad, it really doesn't do as much as people think but it's enough to make people think different enough. Many people claim that the system is why iRacing uses a sub fee, whereas the reality is that likely goes towards the fact they are hosting a buttload of servers to support the (license and safety rating) system. For AC, that is out of the question, and Kunos has already said they won't be going that route.

AC is not LFS. With the wide spread attention it has comparatively, I think we will have a lot of people who don't know what they are doing. So being so niche and "unknown" to the world is not going to happen.

So, where does that leave it? As I see it, I think what Kunos should attempt is to rip a page out of the FPS book. Specifically, Red Orchestra 2 / Rising Storm. A system that is simple, effective and not intrusive at all. You could even cross that system with what NFS Shift and Forza have done.

What? Follow me.

In RO2, you have a bunch of different levels, but let's focus on one. You have your "Honor Rank", which you gain by killing people, capping objectives - that sort of thing. You can lose it however, by doing bad things, like team killing. Now, TKing isn't penalized enough over there, but by simply having something that says "(-2) Team Kill" pop up in the corner in red, it's enough when coupled with the fact you just shot your pal to get people to generally not intentionally teamkill. If you just play the game as you should, you gain honor - never something to worry about. Switch over to iRacing for a moment, the safety rating system is the same in many ways. If you check the forums, there are always people complaining about "incidents". When what you REALLY should worry about, is what those incidents meant. Personally, I don't hit other cars because I can get damage. BUT, many people don't hit cars because a green text line tells them that is bad. And no, I don't think the damage display that pops up will do the trick. Needs to look more menacing - Oh Shi, I GOT DAMAGE! (after bottoming out on a rumble strip) should be the reaction.

Keep the NFS and Forza line in the back of your head still, stick with me, almost there.

The fun thing with the RO2 system is that (in theory, rarely happened though because TKing wasn't penalized enough and the community is a real gem who plays properly) server admin could lock out lower honor rank players, or even set a honor rank cap. It was not, never was nor ever will be a skill rank, but is much more of a "does this guy do stupid things too dang often" rank. This takes the need for a live admin and helps to minimize it. If you want a rookie server, get rid of the high rank guys. If you want a more serious open server, remove the rookie ranks from eligibility. As that game was designed (but failed because of a piss poor launch that probably in the long run made the community stronger - please dont do that!) - you had to spend some time in the "rookie league", but then got into the rest. Think it was roughly around 5 games or so spending time in the rookie league would be expected originally (I think they also might have disabled stat tracking / or planned it originally). This isn't a iRacing license system, it's just a basic "learn here before you get into the real thing" - a quick proficiency check to show you the ropes unless you couldn't figure it out. If desired, you could even have offline racing count as part of your "basic proficiency exam".

Now, how would you calculate such leveling?

That's where Forza and NFS come into play. In those games, you get points and stuff for doing good things. In Forza for example, you are judged on a corner per corner basis of how well you did. When you pop into a slipstream, you get another "bonus". Make a good clean pass, "bonus". You could take it a step further - off track into a penalty zone, rather than get just the penalty, lose points. Run in close proximity to another driver cleanly, "bonus". Now, the big gripe I think many of us (myself included) are how obvious they are. Always with the displays popping up in the race, silly XP bars and crap that don't scream realism or help me take the game more seriously. That is the major flaw. I think most, if not all of this should be displayed post race, and only post race. But it MUST be shown.

Encourage good racing, discourage bad racing. Then show it in their face. I think one of iRacing's biggest flaws is it doesn't take into account the racing itself. If I'm battling hard in a V8SC, contact is almost entirely expected. That's not something that I should worry about, so long as it wasn't dangerous contact, overly violent or overly frequent. Their system doesn't care if the racing was ultra close for 45 minutes, it only cares that contact was made however many times. It only punishes the bad behavior, rather than encourage the good.

Restricting content is not the way to do things. Remember, GTR2 and GTL both "tried" - and everyone just used the cheat file to fix that. However, perhaps you could have things like extra skins restricted and available as unlocks after choosing your initial skin. Something very simple and very minor as a reward. Or if the career mode is credit based, gain credits in online races, pay for damage.

My $2.

 

LFS had it's wreckers but they tended to be kept on the demo servers, in fact that was a nightmare there but they could do their damage for free and then got bored. LFS was also much more niche of a title to be honest but AC to many is a "driving game", you know they will buy it in the Steam sales and it looks pretty also which will attract people. They will turn up with their controllers and treat it like a game and miss the bigger picture, not a bad thing as it will get new people into simracing but it's a bad thing for people that already are and want good clean racing.

Please find some youtube videos of how pCars is, this channel is informative, it's a mess and while there are a few good races, so many people don't get it and many more just rage quit due to the poor driving of others.

Edit: Linking is not obvious, here's the direct link to the pCars channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/besweeeet2/videos

 

I wonder if a system would work where after each race you are asked to rate your fellow racers and your average rating would be displayed and remain with you. Those that have a certain number of "bad" ratings in each race, don't have their own ratings of others count for that race to avoid crashing trolls just trying to make everyone's life difficult.

iRacing's system is almost perfect, but I doubt we will get anything as good as that in AC. But if we can just get something that rewards safe driving and thus provides the impetus to drive safely that would be great.

 

I was thinking kind of along the same lines, but rather than every driver after every race, there could be a report function (like iRacing) and the community gets to vote on the reported driver, perhaps a bit like line calls in Tennis you are allowed only so many reports per race to stop people reporting everything and keep the workload down. You start off with 100 "karma" points and gain more for safe driving: this could be a race without incidents and also as a reward for taking the time to vote and you lose some if found at fault? It could even cost you karma points to report someone and you get them back if you are right. You would need so many "karma" points to get into some races / servers. At least this is my current thinking.

The people that get to vote are the ones with good community standing, they get the replays sent to them in a queue and select if the driver should get points removed.

This could work better than iRacing as iRacing is fully automated and blameless, it also ignores normal racing incidents and you get auto blacked flagged for infractions that are not dangerous. No one is really sure if the iRacing reports get looked at, it's unlikely to be honest but more like a secondary SR feature where people with many reports get flagged.

While what I am suggesting is not perfect, nothing is, anonymous peer review that is crowd sourced will work well I feel, at least real people and real racers would look at the reports, having the community do things is far better than having a business do them as quite honestly it's staff for them and expenditure to reduce.

I have zero doubts I could certainly create something like iRacing but more community focused and address some of their shortcomings as well, however it needs collaboration with Kunos Simulazioni. If the AC APIs were there it would help but despite how great AC is, Kunos really suck at communication with us and what their plans are. I get it they are busy but I can't write any code until I know how they plan things, I would prefer to make an community based Open Source project with our own API they use so that other sims could pick it up also, kind of stuck till we know more of Kunos' plans though.

 

I think while iRacing physics aren't the sole cause of craches, they definetly contribute to them. Bought iRacing few days ago, and started doing some races in MX-5, and that car is just terrifying to drive quite frankly. Very hard to go fast and keep it on track. And you proved it yourself i think in your race. Ruf is much better in that respect, but it still lacks the "feel" AC cars have in my opinion.

 

I dont know how hard it is to code, but cant there be an underlying code that checks how you drive in MP when options are turned on for proper realistic clean races? If you full throttle into people then you get negative points to your profile that you then have to up, and you could set servers to a certain limit of points people can join with. Too much negative points and you cant jump on that server.

Like i said, i dont know much about coding and how hard it is to do something like this, but rating people i think is bad as that will definately spur *****s to rate everyone negative no matter how well they drive.

Good points made about that AC is known by more people than LFS was which definately will bring both *****s who crash intentionally and those who are learning (ergo, crashing a bit) so i will probably, at first, try to make some buddies within this community and race with them.

EDIT: And im by no means an expert driver, but i rather race clean, come last and learn in the process.

 

The problem with anything automatic is you can work around it, you learn the rules and exploit them, AI can only get you so far and some people see it as a challenge to beat the system. In iRacing there are even A and B class licensed players that know how to game things, sure they get a 4x for the collision but they know exactly how to take people out of races, this was why their report function was added we all suspect.

 

Which is why you spread the voting around and make it anonymous, you also don't let people with a low karma vote. If it's a 200 Karma race, them only people with 200+ karma can vote on incidents, also if 5 people vote on an incident and 4 agree their was no issue and one states there was, you can draw metrics from that also over time.

Think of it like referees in any sport, there are good and bad ones however with the right metrics you can weed out the bad ones, remember the Major League Umpires strike and how bad the stand ins were? Or look at the World Cup in soccer, they don't have any old referees, we also have two advantages, we can use comparison metrics and even better the referees are actual drivers unlike real world sports.

 

Virtual replays also have some nice advantages... For example, you can reskin the cars at will, so it both makes voting simpler (green car vs. blue car, who was at fault? click green or blue or 'both'/'neither'), easier to follow in the replay, and more fair (you can't just vote for your friend unless you saw the incident happen)

 

Some great ideas, particularly some of Empty Box's ideas. How about incorporating the career mode and the online mode, so you progress with a series of licenses? Fast times and clean consistent driving get you licenses quickly. Wrecking often, and not setting fast times means you'll be driving the Abarth 500 around Magione forever. (This could also be the demo). It would be great if there was a system for detecting a damage, % done to other cars that varies for each car lets say, 15% for an open wheeler or 25% for a regular car, damage over this percentage gets you black flagged and do it three times and you go back to the previous license and/or lose ponits in progression.

I really only want clean racing especially not being smashed off at turn one by some wrecker. In many sims every public server is just a wreck fest, I don't even bother to set a qualifying time lest I start the race in front of a wrecker. I know I'll be waiting for a smash in turn one no matter how late I brake. If Kunos could avoid that and build it into the game somehow using a 'carrot and stick' method of some kind, I'd be really happy. If it ends up the same as some Simbin games I'd be a pretty disappointed.