Driver Ranked Servers

Thinking the above through a bit more, disallowing players from taking part in MP completely is likely gonna be too draconian and I would imagine would result in some people demanding their money back if they couldn’t make the grade and probably be a bit of a PR nightmare. Scratch that idea, it is stupid.

Should players be able to build their rating against AI when they’re just starting out in the game? I know when I first ventured online in GT I had quite a bit of trepidation that I was going to be too rubbish and ruin everyones’ race. It would have been good if the game could have given me some validation that my skills were good enough to take online or not.

 

If we keep firing ideals at Kunos then they will have more potential tools to nail the problem.
Actually I like the MR training against AI thought.
A great idea would be if the lowest rating meant you were denied online access until you up'd your rating against AI.
I'm sure this won't get past the 'interesting amusing idea' stage.

 

Race challenge’s like we have now but to get the highest award you also have to win without causing any contact could help train people. Or challenge’s focused specifically around no contact, something like: get past these cars without any incidents in one lap.

 

Why do community servers need to have rating at all? We saw how "well" it performed in AC and Pcars2. The rank should only be for the game's competitive mode on official servers through a queue system. Imagining the ranks follow the letters in a descendant order, if an A ranked player doesn't have enough A people in the queue for a complete grid, the matchmaking system will look for the highest rated B players to join that grid. Because besides every rank there is an mmr (matchmaking rating). Also there should be cooldown penalties for players who abandon an ongoing competitive race (you can disconnect but you need to join back within 3-5 min). To make it clear, people don't join the official servers, they join the queue and the matchmaking system allocates a server to that selected grid of players.

However if the game can't or doesn't want to offer this, then the online multiplayer will only be played through 3rd party systems, private leagues, racedepartment, pickup servers where everyone can join. So everyone is disperse among many places, among many different server settings and among servers with ratings that are free for all and servers with ratings that are so restricted it will take quite a lot of time to have a large enough grid of competent players. So those players will search for private leagues and pub racing will be left with mediocre A players (sorry for harsh word).

 

Id honestly rather have half a field of good drivers then a full field with half good drivers and the rest BCDNW or whatever ratings are left just to fill a grid.

MR works great in AC and you can easily have clean casual pickup racing with no issues or needing full time admins and kicking people. The fact that the majority dont use it to their own advantage is not really my issue any more. So many complain about how crappy the driving is in public servers when ratings and filtering cleans this up very well.

I really would hate your idea of every server open to everyone assuming the server is not full. If there is a wrecker hanging around and servers arent filling up they will get into any of them and all the better drivers will just give up on pickup racing and stick fully to closed servers and leagues.

ACC with the limited content will likely have more then enough people around wanting to have some MP racing so you should be able to get decent numbers in any servers even stricter entry ones which are where the best racing is. If I wanted your idea then I would join servers without MR in AC or very loose ratings and I have no interest in doing that. I am sure Minolin wont make his great rating system completely useless and cater only to those that want quantity not quality inside servers.

 

Then two parallel rank systems. One for the community servers and the same one, but unlinked from each other, for the competitive mode in case the game wants to offer its own official online mode with a queue system for e.g., later on at game release after early access is done. So this way what happens in community servers stays in community servers without the fear of losing your rating from the game's official competitive online mode.

 

Why do you need 2 ranks, the entire point of a safety rating system is to encourage clean racing. You really shouldn't need to drive any different in different servers. Your quite confident in your ideas too about this que system. Who will pay for the servers if there are to be many official servers? surely the last thing that's needed is to rely on P2P servers which are quite a mess.

Some official servers would be nice but if there is a good system easily accessible by server admins then community servers can be used. Have you done any coding towards your suggested que system? have you hosted servers and paid for dedicated servers to understand the costs involved? You say MR in AC is not very good then why do you think the creator of this system was hired to help out with the MP side of things. Why didn't they hire you to develop your (most likely) theory only system? If you think its such a great idea then why didnt you go and make it for AC as Minolin did with his very good rating system?

 

So much hostility, marty.
I have nothing against kevin's matchmaking system. I'm simply talking about where it will be used. A queue system is basically a playlist of players waiting to get matched up (using kevin's matchmaking). But the queue system is for online game modes, not for community hosted servers where players have a list of servers and join whatever one they want or can get in depending on the restrictions. Two separate things. I didn't say MR in AC or the ranking in Pcars2 aren't good. I just said that its usability in community hosted servers is pretty much a wasted opportunity but maybe in ACC it will work since is a single series game. Also, MR in AC is only a safety rating and not a performance rating.

Because community hosted MR servers will be used with very diverse settings and assists. In case the game introduces its own competitive game mode at game release after early access is done, it needs to run its ranked system in parallel from the one in community servers, because that game mode would have standard settings and assists and the community servers run whatever they want. So there's no point having players who got their high rating from noob servers mixed with high rated players from serious servers.

 

Its only hostile if you dont like the questions you didnt answer most of them too. A performance rating to me is very much secondary to a safety rating, it really means bugger all unless you are easily filling servers in the high safety ratings where you would then want to further filter out by actual drive pace. If numbers in mp are high enough that such a matchmaking system is worthwhile then it could be interesting to try but really wouldn't it just be the same as booking servers with MR filters over the top of it.

I still wonder how a grand official MP matchmaking and server system would be funded? surely not from a one off game purchase for the lifetime of the game. Would people be willing to pay an extra monthly fee for something like Iracing mixed in with the ACC ratings system? If this is a premium subscription based service which is the only way I could see it being viable then will the user base in this be high enough? Im sure many would love a free Iracing MP type system but there is a simple reason it hasnt been done. That is it has considerably costs even if run as a non profit extra which seems pointless for a commercial product there would still need to be some user fee. A free system would get more users too so have even more costs then a subscription service and charging a fee for it would only be worth while if enough people are using it so its not as easy as many seem to think.

 

I just thought of a motivator for safe and clean racing! Make the subscription fee vary according to your rating

 

Don't reinvent the wheel.
Look at iRacing one more time, they offer hosted races for 1$/h.
That system has two big advantages:
Is the easiest way to monetize the game.
Don't spread the community on thousand "track day" servers.

That races don't affect to rating, but the creator can set the minimum level.
Custom combinations.
Also can be protected with password for private leagues.

With this system I think public servers are unnecessary.

 

Using money as a proxy for assigning greater worth to an online race in a bid to encourage good behaviour is gonna be problematic, as the value of $1 will vary wildly across individuals throughout the world.

Yes charging a subscription would likely improve player behaviour but at the cost of pricing some out of being able to join in at all.

 

Lol may as well go to the full real money to pay for damages model, then we will need courts and lawyers. The racing will be much the same but at least a few people make a buck out of it.

Can even have a black market bribe system to buy your own rating.

 

The “matching based on ranking” system I’ve only ever seen implemented where you don’t get to chose a server, you just hit “play online” and the game closes a server for you. This would require the game to look at all servers, evaluate the ping, number of players in it and probably a bunch of other stuff. Not sure how viable this is. I think this only works when there’s a bunch of official servers available in every country/region

 

One thing that hasn't been mentioned which I'm sure will be looked at is the clunky way you set your own server up.
Setting up your own server should be as easy as selecting a server online and done through the main game gui.
This may be of particular benefit to those who race with friends regularly.

As for subscription , hmmm no thanks, I feel quite strongly about this but I don't think now is the time.

Minolin, do you have a list of things the new system must and must not do?
It might help in narrowing down options/sugestions.

 

And who would be paying to host these servers?

 

That can be done like PC2 with its P2P MP and its such a mess that its really not worth it. Anyone that wants to run a server can do it fairly easily as is but its possible the dreaded P2P network connection may be added to ACC. We will however still have dedicated servers and with filtering and favourites lists we should be able to join the good ones not those run from some kids basement on a dial up connection.

Having an idea of what they are looking into would be nice but I think this will be more info for early access where it can also be properly tested prior to release.

 

What's ACs definition of dedicated servers?, Seem a strange question I know but we can already run servers on the same machine we run the client.
Having run a server on my main PC and joined it from the MP server list I thought all the Kunos machine did was to list servers registered on it and enable people to join them.Is it P2P or dedicated or other? Please correct me if I have the wrong idea regarding the network topology.

Regarding the ideas generally, I thought they hadn't decided on anything and wanted to hear different suggestions before deciding which way to go.
My first idea (the hard MR separation) was commented on that it didn't allow friends to race on public servers if they had different grades.
I was wondering if there are other things we are not aware of that they want to avoid or achieve.

 

make online like iracing = problem solved

why is it so hard for people to understand this and why are devs so reluctant to do it?

 

Well I have never tried IRacing and I don't own Project Cars 2 (once bitten and all that) and I have never owned a console (a toy in my eyes) so any reference to prior systems on those platforms are lost on me.