Minorating.com (drivers thread)

I steer clear of the modern F1 cars, so I don't have that excuse with respect to any grade drops Does MinoRating take account of the speed at which cars are moving when it calculates the effects of contacts and collisions? I am just wondering about that situation I experienced the other day @ Magione, whereby my own car was basically standing still, and was hit twelve times by the field as they struggled to get past me. It was a bad place to spin with all of the cars in close proximity, and I had no chance of doing anything about it. I could have tried moving, but I think it would have made the situation even worse! I just had to sit there and wait for the storm to pass I guess there is no way to distinguish between a spun car that is standing still, and one that has been deliberately parked in the middle of the track. I have almost certainly been in plenty of situations like that on "wild west" servers over the past year, which has no doubt contributed to my grade slipping backwards. I should have thought about stuff like that before going into "critical" mode

I look forward to upgrading to "B" on a server near you real soon!

 

Well I have no problems with my grade at the moment but as I said in the past I think that it won't be possible to improve the situation if the system doesn't start to separate guilty and not guilty to some extent.

The goal of a rating system is to improve knowledge of the driving etiquette not to create enclaves of fair drivers and ghetto servers for the carnage.

A good rating system should rise driver awareness and let good drivers mix with the rookies so that the rookies can improve while at the same time keeping wreckers out and protecting fair drivers.

There is always a way in the middle between two extremes.
I think that rather than trying to code a complex contact analyzer (which is probably difficult) you can focus on rising awareness about driving etiquette elements that are important for the gameplay.

Here is how it could work:

By default blame will be 50-50 as it is now for any contact unless the situation is in a set of things that can be easily detected and are based on the motorsport gentleman driving etiquette (mutually exclusive cases in top-down order of priority).

For example:
1) Lapped Car racing leaders:
If a lapped car hits a lapping car we can blame it on the lapped car (90-10).

2) Outlap Racing
If a car in the outlap hits a car in the quali hotlap we can blame it on the car that is in the outlap (90-10).

3) Yellow flags
If yellow flags are out, drivers are supposed to slow down and be careful. A contact in this situation could lead to more points for both drivers (add a threshold of a few seconds since the start of the yellow flag so people have the time to react to it).

These three points will rise awareness about important safety points of motorsport.

Other more complex cases that could be later added are:

Rejoining track
If a driver rejoining the track has a contact with another driver blame could be mainly on the driver that is joining the track 70-30.

Position Gain
Contact between two cars that leads to a position gain should be blamed more on the car that gains the position 70-30.

Other cases could be:
Hitting a car in the back
Not waiting for the other car after a crash
etc.

The first time (and only the first time) any of these situations occurs you could send a message to the user in order to rise their awareness.

While, without any doubt, we can object that there are some racing situations in which the presented cases would result in an unfair outcome, the point here is not absolute justice but rising awareness about motorsport rules.

We want lapped cars to be careful and possibly even go out of track to let lapping cars pass, we want people do the same in the quali outlap, we want people to be careful when yellow flags are displayed, we want people to use brakes and not hit cars from behind, we want drivers to be careful when rejoining the track, we want drivers to wait and give back positions when they get an unfair advantage from a crash etc..

I think that this is what we should be concerned about and not creating a software that does Charlie Whiting's work which is hard even for him since he can't take the same decision twice .

 

Some good ideas, Brioche, but that "Position Gain" I cannot agree with. It will promote super-aggressive defense while we already have a plenty of drivers that don't have any idea that once the cars have a bit of overlap they should leave enough space for the other car, they think that as long as their car's nose is 1 cm ahead they have the whole track belonging to them

 

I've done exactly that with the Exos numerous times on the Tourist layout and normally it worked out quite well. Both on the Exos myself and as the slower car.
(Note that most Tourist servers don't run MR, afaics.)

The Tourist variant might be a bit of a corner case, since most people driving there seem to be aware that there might be faster cars around and they should leave space, but still I was surprised how well this worked out given the enormous speed difference of the Exos even to a GT3 car.

 

I strongly disagree here.

I was already in the situation myself. Was in a big fight for the lead on Spa with another guy and we ran into a lapped car.
On Kemmel he left space and this time it was me who thought "Slipstream! Yeah!" and crashed into him …
Obviously, that was my fault and it was quite an idiotic one. Sorry to the guy, whoever he was.
Will never do that again.

And it's not only that. There are quite a few racers who are very aggressive, when it comes to lapping others and that's just wrong.
While in an ideal situation, the faster car shouldn't lose time, there is no right for passing instantly.

It's totally ok, if the lapped car waits until the next straight to let the faster car pass and yet some race leaders seem to think they should leave the track instantly just to get out of the way.
Thus I don't think you can judge this situation that easily.

Basically the same as with lapped cars, but here it's also Assetto Corsa, that is to blame.
While in some earlier versions, you got a blue flag when a car on a hotlap was approaching you, this is no longer the case.
Yet there should be some warning.

Except that it's not that easy.
e.g. what happens during a mass collision in T1: You slow down to avoid collisions and since you can't pass anyway and somebody rears you up?
It would be really really unfair to give double points to you in that situation.

Except that if you got pushed off (happened to me numerous times), it's the other one who is to blame, clearly.

So, while I understand your appeal, it just isn't that easy, sorry.

 

Small addition:
Now that I think about it, some of these ratings would be potentially dangerous.
Example: Let's think of a situation, where you hit me in the previous race, thus generating some kind of rivalry (happens all the time between several people on the servers).
So now the next quali session began and I'm on my hotlap and spot you again. I know that you will get 90% of the points during a contact, so I just ram you off and you get the bill, potentially even a lower rating.
Do you still like your idea?

(Disclaimer: I would never do that! But there are people that think that way …)

 

That's why there's 90/10 and not 100/0 proposed distribution. When averaged, it will take care of those rare cases when blue-flagged car didn't do anything wrong.

It is not OK if the lapped car is like 10+ seconds out off the pace which way too often is the case. If he's that slow then moving the hell out of the way immediately will cost him another second which is no biggie for his pace anyway, but if the faster driver will have to hang behind him until the next straight he might easily lose the same second or even more and for him this is usually a big deal.

And for the car on the outlap this is simply wrong. You should NOT wait for the next straight to yield, you should get out of the way well in advance and not interfere with the hotlapping car in any way. Qualification is that part of racing when even 1 tenth of a second could be a big deal. I can't count times when guys ahead on their outlap were thinking that they shouldn't move over until I'm literally kissing their rear bumper not realizing that they were being a real obstacle

 

90/10 is still a lot.

That's true, but it still does not justify rearing up another driver because he couldn't get out of the way fast enough.

Yes, I agree, but as I pointed out, it can be abused.

 

Interesting. You've identified the root cause of a problem and metrics that indicate when the problem is occurring - should it not then be possible to close the loop by using the metrics as feedback into the ratings calculation? I.e. I expect that you know the distribution of "regulars" (the earliest record in their most recent 1000 kms was... not that long ago) to "casuals" (their earliest record was a lot longer ago) on any server at any time, or across all servers for that matter. You could, for instance, make the penalty for each incident in some way proportional to the percentage of players on the server that are regulars. Given that the period of time after a DLC drops until things get back to normal with mostly all regulars racing is pretty short, any kind of skew in the stats during that brief period would be largely irrelevant. It would just be harder to degrade your rating during that time.

 

Is there a way to determine if someone has "moved across" the track when two cars are side by side? I had some excellent "side by side" racing on the ALOOG1 server recently where neither car touched the other (and this was through several successive corners). However, I was punted off the track three times tonight in exactly the same situation, and this was simply because the other driver turned into me when I was on the inside. It would be nice to think that there was a way of detecting lateral movement from one driver that could determine who is most responsible for the contact. This may be too difficult to ascertain, but I thought that I would mention it

 

i dont know if this is possible but it is an interesting idea.

my ideal Minorating would be like a progression where people strive to race in a server limited to the best grade, creating great racing on AB servers and providing a good incentive for players that are a little more wreckless to up their game, increasing the amount of fair drivers overall but it doesnt seem to be something the majority are interested in. if we are resigned to the fact people will just race based on player count or with a specific car or track in mind this could be the way to go. i think there is certainly something nice about racing with lower grades or ungraded players, i have always seen it as going against this idea of progression that i had hoped for but i think if that was going to happen AB servers would be a lot busier than they are this far down the road. it might atleast be a way of reducing the amount of people moaning about their grade dropping after they raced in some wildwest server on these forums and i can still hope that MR lobby might channel more people into AB servers creating sim racing utopia like i had imagined Minorating doing when it landed.

 

Hi again and again thanks to Minolin for all the work and explanations.
If you've some time to answer to me it would be fine. I need some explanation for this:
I was rating in my last race in Spa for 8 laps about 7 times up and down.
In the race get the first message: You're up to AB grade. In the next lap I got one hit from behind on the entry of the Eau Rouge with ending spinning me and hit the wall. But not hard.
Next message: You're down to grade C.
Some close battles without any contacts: You`re up to AB. Next small hit from behind: You're down to grade C. And so on.

After the race I have read the chat which really confused me. Please have a look at the attached screenshot.
So my question: Was the downgrades related for only one contact after up to AB?
And if so I think it will be better to add a small buffer of amount of contacts before you go the next lower grade.
Or is this "chaos" all the archiving old session stuff related?

Thank you in advance!
Greets After_Midnight

 

Yes, it is a lot but reflect the fact that 9 out of 10 cases it is the lapped driver's fault. Being averaged over time it will work properly similar to 50/50 distribution for other collisions. I'd say that current 75/25 distribution is usually unfair to the lapping driver.
And I don't think that this (and the qualification case) is going to be abused because having a contact with another driver will:
a) ruin you current lap
b) inflict a damage which will make your next laps slower, sometimes several seconds slower
Both contradict with your desire to go as fast as possible. Sure there will be people who don't care, but I believe that A/B guys won't do that on purpose, so maybe the distribution of points in this case should take both parties current grade into account.

 

This is exactly what iRacing does with their safety rating. They have some sort of built-in hysteresis which prevents you from jumping from one class to another and then back too frequently. It works the following way: when you achieve the next safety level you get a small additional boost to your safety score (like 10% of the value difference between levels) and when you drop down there's the same extra value is being deducted.
E.g. you had 3.99 rating and then raced good enough added 0.05 to your rating and got promoted to safety class 4.0, then your new rating is 4.14, not 4.04. If you started with 4.01 and lost 0.03 you new rating is 3.88 rather than 3.98

 

Wild west servers are awesome!

 

Thanks for the consideration.

For position gain I agree it's a bit borderline (that's why I was suggesting milder 70-30 but one could also do 45-55 for that matter). I think that a clever driver can still outsmart overly defensive drivers and avoid contact. This will cost some time but it will still be better than overly aggressive driving on both sides causing a huge crash.

Pity about the outlap. I often see drivers leaving pits and racing cars in the hotlap for no reason whatsoever.

In any case, the suggested conditions are all optional. They were only examples as I do not have any clue about what info the game server provides.

And it's nice to know that some things are already implemented (for lapped cars you could shift the blame with an inverse proportion to the race position, so that if a lapped car hits the leader it gets 90% of points, if it hits the 2nd it gets 85% and so on, the reason being that the leaders are not likely to destroy their race to abuse on a lapped car).

I think feedback for certain cases (like lapped cars) is needed because otherwise people will not even know and keep doing that. However I agree that the game should take care of this (for me it should even give a DT if a blue flag is ignored for more than 1.5 km or teleport to pits if a car in the outlap races a car in the hotlap).

 

I think that the rating system should be considered more as a license system then a rating, you want to to achieve the highest possible rating to ensure you can get into top split servers where the better racing will be. This means the lower ranked servers wont be somewhere you really want to stay for too long and all in there would try to up their rating in order to step up too.

There is really no point in the ratings if people then still want to race with everyone, sure there is nothing stopping the better graded people from doing this but they also shouldn't expect by some miracle that the guys already identified as hazardous in traffic will somehow not be when they race them. Also I dont see any real point of trying to protect the higher rated drivers that want to go into the wild west servers, its their choice and the rules should be the same for all.

Also the way AC MP is atm allowing people to skip to pit then rejoin races it means any longer pub server race will by the end part include mostly people not racing just getting in the way, with tyre wear etc this could mean people much slower can in the end be quicker due to fresher softer rubber and this is rather annoying in the AC mp experience. I would like to have a server option to close pits and stop escape and resume and also stop late joiners starting races. This would also encourage people to take more care if they know damage early will end their race but with this blue flags really are a mess and big field longer races in pub servers really arent going to work very well til this is addressed.

The blue flag thing also I dont think you want to give the lead cars a license to kill, if you make it that them pushing slower cars out of the way is permitted then it will just encourage this behaviour. I think if blue flags were better then MR should simply award penalty points for people not observing blue flags after a certain period. Contacts should still work as they do but disobeying blue flags even if there is no contact should be penalized and a message sent to the person getting the flag and penalty.

 

As I mentioned above race leaders are not likely to kill their race on a lapped car just to prove they can (wreckers cannot lap anyone anyway).
Also if the damage simulation is correct, killing another car will result in killing your own most of the times and if this doesn't happen it's something that only Kunos can fix.

For the rest I agree with you ( points are similar to my suggestions here https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?threads/whats-important-for-mp.19434/page-9 ) even though you need to keep in mind that Minorating cannot substitute Kunos work.

I, for once, would love to see a changelog where the focus is more on simulating motorsport elements rather than improving ai or adding new cars (but I think I am alone on this maybe).
Racing is not only about cars but it's about people and what they do with their cars.
That's what makes the difference between a mp game and solitaire but I understand that this might be less appealing for sales in the short term ( even though a community of dedicated racers in the long term is what keeps a game alive ).
Considering how many copies this game sold it hurts a bit to see the server list at times...