Discussing ACC Safety rating

have you been playing solo modes a lot recently? (hotlap, free practice, hotstint)

 

Yes, for the whole point of building enough SA that I could actually find a race online that wasn't a crash fest

 

No I mean without opponents.
Anyway SA works like this.
There a number of games it considers. Anytime you start a new game, the oldest one gets ignored.
This means that if you had a lot of bad SA races, you will need a lot of time to recover. Even if you have two or three very good races, there is still fifteen bad races weightning down your SA.
Consistency is the key.
Never revenge, always respect the others and you will have all you data filled with very high SA races and it will be harder to go down again.
If you always have up and down, you always risk to go down more.

 

I have done about 70/80hrs since the big one at "The Mountain", where I did lose my temper with the AI a little, hence the sharp drop , I always race against the AI and spend very little time on the track alone.

 

Can you post a screenshot of your SA history?

 

The big nasty red bits was me trying to complete a Championship Race around The Mountain and then Laguna Seca - I generally run 1/2hr races at 97 AI Skill and 85% Aggression.

I would amend my estimate how long I have been trying to build a couple of points now, probs around 50-60hrs, its usually a couple of hours most days for the last month I have been trying to recover that SA, feels a lot longer when you have such static numbers tho tbh

 

You have many low trust low obwp games on the right that will be replaced soon so your sa will go up quickly, if you gain some trust from now on. To gain trust you gotta stay close, always avoiding crashes.
Instead if won't gain a lot of trust until that big green bar will be replaced, you will risk it. The fact that you have many mid range bars can explain why you gain sa very slowly, but it's meaningless in the end: you just need to avoid to get mad and before or after you will get to 99.

Red bars are OBWP (having contacts). Green bars are trust.
The less red bars and highest green bars will help you to gain quicker.
But you will gain anyway, if you don't have reds.

 

I normally have the patience and maturity of a saint lol, I got battered by the AI in both those races despite trying to drive around their quirks , and yes I went full retard and lost my sh*t briefly, no denial lol......

Whilst I am not chasing the SA and stats any longer I have not changed the approach to the game in general, so if the SA creeps up in the long term great, maybe I will be able to consider some online racing, I won't even waste the effort going online with 60 ish tho tbh.

 

Nothing wrong with 60ish SA for me (US based). If you start at the back of the grid, give nice big gap through T1-5, then start to race. For most of my races, a 20 car split has a 6ish sec time diff between 1st and last. I'm normally around the 3-4 time diff, so I get good racing trying to go through the pack.

Some people will have been punted at the start and be very aggressive to get back to 2nd, so watch their approach and either defend cleanly or let them past. 1 position vs a punt is worth it.
It comes down to do you race to get a podium, or to test your skill against other drivers?

Most of the time either someone thats like 0.2 sec faster than me closes or I gain on the car ahead. With that little gap, it gets fun when both drivers are trying for a clean and patient overtake.

 

Crashing AI is penalized far more heavily as opposed to crashing human players, I believe. If you're 99SA and you race against AI, your SA rating will drop a lot faster if you have contact with AI. Racing against humans will penalize you a lot less.
Also, racing against humans will give you a lot more SA rating once you're reaching higher levels of SA. The higher your rating is, the harder it'll be to gain rating from racing against AI. This is to prevent farming rating.

You don't need to worry about having 60SA rating. Even 80+ SA rating server often are a crashfest in the first lap. After that it's just a matter of getting lucky to come across people who can hold their lines

You just gotta keep in mind that public lobbies don't matter whatsoever. It's just for people to enjoy racing without any real consequences in case something goes wrong, aside from pissing of someone once in a while xD
Don't think of this is a free opportunity to crash people tho

Just jump in a lobby and have fun. You won't learn too much from racing AI, AI are kinda static and if you've done a couple of races you will exactly know where you can overtake them and you'll be doing it over and over again. Racing against humans is a lot more dynamic.

 

Few things I do like about AI from a racing perspective
1 - They are consistent, so if you are slightly faster, it helps you to be consistent
2 - Close following - for me this is a hard skill since their car is blocking my usual brake points
3 - Clean overtake - If you dive bomb, then take the racing line, they give up the corner. If you did this on a human, you will have contact (always, sometimes....). If you race against the AI and give them room during an overtake, they will be side-by-side through corners (in my experience with 100% aggro). For me, this is good practice to cleanly overtake as most humans will defend as much as they can side by side. Its good to be offline and see how fast you are for the apex / exit. If the AI is out front after the corner, then I use replay to see where I should be faster on it. If you cut them up mid-corner, then you might get hit.

One thing I found is that you can force the AI to defend a corner. You squeeze them to the inside down the straight since they always move over for you whichever side you appear on.

If you are not much faster, you can cleanly fight the AI for a while. Then you get bored and do a cheat overtake (dive bomb) for position.

 

Don't divebomb humans please. That's not racing, it's stupid Outbraking people, no issue. But don't send it from a couple tenths away, that's not how you should overtake people and you both end up losing time instead, aside from the obvious risk of crashing into someone.

 

I have generally had no issue with the AI to be honest, had good racing with them most of the time, occasionally you need to make special allowance for weirdness (braking and line into the dipper at Laguna ?) but mostly its positive, I just lost my temper after losing a ton of SA for no bad driving my side, then went full retard on them in a couple of racing having had the same happen in the next race as well

I am pretty consistent tbh....which is why I can usually get a good race against the AI

 

You can have decent racing against AI, but what I mean is just that it's nothing like racing other human beings. All AI are the same, they all act and react the same way, they take corners the same way, they're all slow at the same parts of the track and fast at the same parts of the track. They don't have individual strong points or weaknesses. Driving behind 1 of them is driving behind all of them, because they're all the same. They're static.

Racing humans is very different. Sometimes it's more frustrating, sometimes it can be very rewarding. It kinda depends on who you come across.

 

Yeah I get that of course, I have been racing online competitively since the 90s to be honest, back in the day at the sharp end against people like Mr Huttu etc, It is only because of the general poor quality online I don't bother these days, and I don't have the time to commit to online league racing.

Thanks

 

Ah yeah, I see. Can completely understand, public lobbies aren't the best experience most of the time.

 

I had it in my head if I could get into the 90+ bracket I could miss most of the idiots in the public lobby, combined with all the tips people mentioned above of course

 

If you're fast enough, you can outqualify 95% of them. If you're not fast enough, just start from the back and try not to get caught up in lap 1 shenanigans. After the first lap things will calm down and you can race somewhat normally.

I usually just qualify. If there are no decently fast people, I will just drop down to the back before the lights go green and then I will try just overtake as many people as possible during the race.
If there are fast people in the lobby, I will just race with them.

 

A suggestion would be to try the simgrid daily races: The SimGrid Daily Racing

 

Many times I love to take a noob and give him the fight of his life at his pace.
They end up being very happy about it and I feel like being jesus. Multiplayer is weird stuff.

But it's very interesting as training: you can never know what majestic lines they can switch mid corner, or what mid straight breaking points you gotta follow. Assisting a noob is something you should try, you laugh a lot. What I love the most, is when some of them realize we are actually playing casually and start breaking unpredictability mid corner( for instance in ascari) to surprise me and gain some time. They love it.