Minorating.com (drivers thread)

You're not alone on this. At least we have jumpstarts now

 

The thing is without extra sales from DLC there really wouldn't be much reason for them to add features as a free update and selling features as a DLC wouldn't go down very well. Also other people work on both and while more cars and tracks are made it lets Stefano do some extra coding to improve the overall racing experience. There is a fairly big focus on the SP side for obvious reasons and many of these are that general pub server mp racing is fairly crappy. Minorating has greatly improved this we really only need more users to actually understand how to use it to get the most from what it actually does.

Here is a race from last nite, not an open MR server but our league nite and all locals but pretty sure all the guys in the league would be AB rated though some haven't ran that much on the MR servers which is why I have MR AB+ a whitelist for all the league guys to enter even if they havent got a rating yet. This lets the league people jump into the practice server and never need to worry about any regular pub joiner as they will only ever be AB rated. I used to have the server as ABCN before the whitelist was possible and this made it pretty bad as league people had to deal with the regular N grade hassles at times. I could always have made the server simply passworded or entry list limited to league members. But Id rather let other good clean drivers jump in if some are practicing. When the current round is on an official track the numbers in the prac server are pretty good, if its on a mod track then numbers of general public are pretty low.

Here is race 3 in the ballasted jap pack series to show how racing can be in reasonably large fields with respectfull drivers even when the field is quite close throughout.



The standard of racing in an AB only server is quite often like this but add in C grade it drops a bit from that level, add in N and it can get very bad. This is why I still am amazed how many would rather settle for busy servers with all grades when they could try and fill AB servers instead. That way you know everyone joining is unlikely to ever be a problem to race. This also means they will be much more competitive, it doesnt mean all AB drivers are aliens but it simply means they can get around a track and not hit everything possible at any given chance.

 

I often read that "better to prioritize SP cause nodbody uses MP" argument but to me it sounds like "My car has a flat tyre so I'll buy better tyres for my bike to go to work every day"... ?! Something is not right there . If MP has issues and people don't play it because of them, time should be spent to improve MP because that means opening the product to a new type of customers and give new strength to sales.

In my opinion there is a bit of overlapping between marketing and development tasks here.
Marketing should always minimize the problems and emphatize the strong points.
Development should always do the opposite and prioritize the problems in order to give marketers a better product to promote.

MP can be a good driver for DLC sales because it's when my friends are using the new cars and tracks online that I need the DLC to join them.

That said don't want to go too much off-topic here or give too many free advices to Kunos (just kidding, don't trust my advices anyway ).

 

Well I personally have no interest in SP, I have just ran AI a few times to test them out. I rarely use hotlap mode but do at times spend an hour or so hotlapping in one of my AB servers if nobody else joins. I understand why the devs spend time on it and why its important even if its not something that interests me.

The truth is that the main issue with mp is the people. Look at this amazing system Minolin has made and it seems like less the 1% of its users even understand the purpose of it.

There are other mp features that would improve the mp experiance. But minorating is the best thing to have good clean pickup racing with any people that can join the higher rated servers. It will do away with most of the issues that many complain about regarding other people that ruin their experiance as it can filter them out of servers.

Also the basic issues such as t1 carnage has nothing to do with the game but again its 100% down to the people in the server.

The tiny amount of people actually looking for AB or even ABC only servers is dissapointing considering the number of people with these ratings and nothing Minolin or server admins can do to get people to change their ways and look more for these servers.

Minolin is now working on a launcher to try and get more people to actualy use the system as intended, I hope it works but no idea if it will. The grading and filtering system seemed easy to understand for me but clearly its not for many that would rather join MR all or ABCN and worse then compalin that the people in there keep crashing into them.

 

My opinion: If SP and MP are selling points it should be developed and supported in the same way.
My interest is just the MP.
But this is just my opinion.
And sorry for OT.

 

I'm also not interested in SP at the moment but this can change. Who knows how populated the servers are in 2-3 years... So i'd be glad having a decent AI to play with then.

 

Funnily enough the AI I would rate about C grade, If they were D, W or the average N grade then they would be horrible. I dont really want to race the AI but then I dont really want to race people even worse then the AI.

 

I doubt this is about MP being played because it's good or not being played because it's horrible.

Some people just don't play MP, period. They don't click the »Online« button or only in accident.
Some don't even notice that there is a button like that.

Most of these people don't constantly complain in online forums either that this and that is missing or badly implemented.

 

There probably is a bias towards MP on the forums for a variety of reasons. The sort of person who is disinclined to interact with other real people on track, is less likely to want to interact with these people in a forum environment either.

And we cant exactly sit here and moan that too much dev time goes to single player, off the top of my head I cannot think of any recent change which has affected only SP.

Have there been improvements to SP put into console versiom I wonder? Will our version align with that one in this respect on console release day?

Edit: wow sorry for the mega OT, I forgot which thread this was whilst reading it - assumed it was the FB one lol

 

I can: AI

Yes and no. Stefano explained that in the stream. The console has its own version and the PC will be ahead.
The console release will be more like something around 1.5 or so, possibly with specific changes.

Eventually they will align, but the PC will always be a bit ahead due to a lower release delay.

This is getting quite off-topic here, though.

 

Lol good point - how on earth did I forget that! </end.OT>

 

hmm im starting to wonder if something is up with minorating @Minolin. any chance you can check my races from tonight? we started off at bridgehampton where i did hit TDS and went off track a fair few times. after that we raced at Monza and then Magione, i went off track once at Monza and i dont think i went off at all at Magione, no contact after Bridgehampton. i seem to lose quite large chunks with a single hit but dont gain much with clean laps... it might be that im noticing normal MR behaviour that i havent seen before as i am checking speedwise quite a lot since i went down to B grade. might be worth taking a look though... you dont need to inform me with a write up of what MR thinks from tonight but maybe you can check if it does look as i described above. should be 1 contact and some off tracks iirc in maybe 6 races and MR went down not up.

i remember you saying MR doesnt know track limits, im sure i also remember you saying we get neg MR for off track during race? does it work only when we get an ingame penalty?

 

I'm wondering that also. I managed to get back to B after a couple of clean laps at the nords. After I had many clean races I got back to C after one contact in a cobra race at silverstone, then back to B a lap later or so, then back to C without any contact or offs... Been C grade since, even with multiple clean laps, with some in pursuit or attack position. I never saw this much variations in grade before. Dont want to rant or anything, just pointint out the recent behavior of MR I experienced

 

Andy, nothing related to your original question, but since I've seen this quite often now: How can you tell you lost your A rating? My speedwise only tells a or b. No distinction I can see, what's the trick?

 

I have been grade C ever since I had a couple of races on Marty's Magione "wild west" server To be fair, I have been racing on ABCN servers most of the time since then, and I have experienced quite a few bumps and bruises. That's the nature of those servers, so I will just have to be patient. I am curious though about how badly my grade can be affected by the erratic driving of others, and also just how "incident free" my races need to be for my rating to improve again....

On a side note, I was behind a guy tonight with the name of Wyatt Earp. I think that says it all

 

Maybe because you lost a few "clean" sessions?

 

I've been A/B rating for as long as I can remember but other week myself and a friend were put to grade C after some contacts in a server.
Almost as if the server had some multiplier on minorating, haven't been able to get it back to A/B since.

 

yes if nothing is wrong it is this... i guess i must of had quite a prolonged period of poor driving to see a few weeks worth of dancing percentage circle it is easy to forget km are being dropped all the time and look to see current sessions reflected in your grade.

thought it was worth a mention all the same. quite a few seem to have noticed a drop recently, it could be that most of this is down to DLC as Minolin suggested. pretty sure mine is more liikely to be previous km than dlc though, there has only been 1 night since the recent DLC where i was on the server and lots of random guys joined.

the colour of the circle green is king

 

Interesting minolin I will take a look, I dont see why this info really needs to be private per user but I remember you having some complaints in the past.

I still wish there was some way atracker and ptracker could at least get grades of drivers in a server the same way helicorsa does. It wpuld also be good to see when people moved up or down a grade in stracker session data.

Would be usefull info for admins at least seeing how it works for example in a beginners server.

When I had my beginners at ABCN it was generally full now moving it to ABN I dont think there has been more then 1 person at a time in there lol.