Why rFactor needs a well designed driver class/rating system

i think it is vitaly important, a big chunck of the buyers will go online regurarly or will want use the online part exclusively. Having a balanced -even a lenient if you want- system to guide all drivers into a surtain direction can and imo will make for a better community by default.
One could ask themselfes, whats the purpose of a race simulation? why are we doing it? and then ask, whats potentialy ruining it? we've seen what happened in Rf1, how did we solve it? locking servers, going private, joining leagues.

One could even argue that its he developers responsibility to cater for.....aww i dont wanna go there

 

Sorry, I have to argue with that one. Hehe

 

What has this to do with feelings? It is fact that stats ruining every Game!!

 

Let's just agree to disagree, since I feel that there has been plenty opportunity for all to bring forward their arguments and it's now up to everyone to make up their mind.

PS. wonder how ISI feels about this, if they acknowledge public racing leaves a lot to be desired? IIRC they already mentioned they wanted to organize things more with rF2, obviously one can organize things in various ways.

 

I agree with having options for preventing people crashing like iracing or something similar; that leads for much more clean races.
Just having a server option for turning on/off that option should be ok for all.
I tried iracing because it has that option mainly; I'm happy with the iracing system of keeping players with the same Security Rating playing together; really tired of being crashed on races, people don't finishing races and this stuff in rfactor.

 

Changed this:

into this:

 

To begin with you need to excuse my English, I just wanted to give you my 2 cents on this

I have played other games where I feel ranking is not a way to neglect players in any way, or make them worse as an opponent, but instead rewarding and a way to keep you pushing yourself.

My experience with Sim racing started to get serious with Forza 3 a couple of years back, and very much thanks to the ranking system being used I got more and more focused to do my best at each track, learning each car to beat my old times.

This lead to a higher ranking and I got to play with other players at the same level of experience that kept pushing me, and the higher the ranking the more serious the players are. Depending on how good you are or how much time you can offer, you will always play alongside people at your own skill.

About a your ago I almost entirely left Forza and bought rF, it took me 4-5 mounts to find and build a mod I liked, but the physics and ffb (realfeel) are just so much better, sorry to say I don’t play online because it feels to strict, either its locked to a specific mod or the players are wrecking you at the first corner, or you are out skilled by miles.

I don’t have the time to go into any leagues, and I don’t feel it’s my terrain, I just want to race some street cars against other cars equally equipped in terms of power.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a few laps in Forza where no matter what car, I can within seconds start an online race and feel surrounded by players at my own level of skill and have fun.

This is where rF lacks in my opinion, car classes. Instead of a plain ranking system, I want a car class system to go along with it.

I don’t think we will be seeing any ranking system for rF2, it’s simply too much work for ISI to implement at this time of development stage, ranking requires a lot of thought and investments.

All in all, I do want a ranking system to benefit the casual players still serious about racing, but it has to be easy and rewarding in the end.

 

In rF Endurance Mod should offer you a good time. I dont play rF no more so i cant tell how the lobby is but this mod with multi class car should provide you different skill level.
P1 - P2 - GT1 - GT2

GT2 should suit you well.

 

Rank system is work on dedicated servers already wanna host server and just allow the best fastest drivers to join server set RC rank type min 80 max 100 overall on dedicated server

 

As Tripp demonstrated there is a rudimentary rank system already included in the dedicated server. However like the thread on cheating its certainly not foolproof.

Managing skill levels and cheating will take much more then a few lines of code can manage. Both cheating and driver ranking is something I've been working on over the last few years and will be implementing after our current season of league racing is completed in November.

Our market will focus on the adult simracers who generally spend less then 20 hours a month simracing. Part of our goal is to recruit many of those racers who don't compete online for a variety of reasons. Many of them would like to race online, but they don't enjoy online racing when they're 5 seconds a lap off the pace of the leaders.

 

Drivers that use cheat admins can only caught after a race if they use some tools like the ones i now FSR use.
IMSA GTP wrote "they don't enjoy online racing when they're 5 seconds a lap off the pace of the leaders"
To try have close races some rank system from lap times from Qualify can be used where admins throw setmass to drivers that has to fast lap times then all other to adjust laptimes.
Setmass kg is stay all the way in race and can not taking back like a penalty in rfactor.
Or use off fixed server with just allow steerlook all drivers must use same setup that also makes closer racing.

 

maybe you should join a web site that goes for quality drivers over quantity of drivers. or just start your own. a ranking system sucks BIG time as how do they become better drivers racing against the same quality? and then you get your **** sticks going around self bragging it gets the game and the players no where. EVERY1 STARTED AT THE BEGINNING. sry the self braggers didn't PMSL at the braggers cheers

 

forza 3 shouldn't even be mentioned next to rfactor or compared too. sry but console games are way behind the times when it comes to anything simulated.

 

Coops:

The Forza3 comparisment was only to point out a surtain system they used. a game-system has nothing to do with the game or sim.


A ranking system should idealy be configurable and not static as it is in iracing. even most Leagues in iracing demand a surtain level from new members before they can join in their hosted event or even before they can become a member of their league.

That means that you have two outlets: closed communities (leagues, groups, etc) whom can configure the ranking system as they want, even ignoring the ranking system if they want.
And then you have the public sector where the ranking system can be used to prevent a surtain level of drivers joining in. This ensures a theoretical skill-level on the server and also should make lower level drivers want to level-up so they can join in the more serious racing. that is after all the aim, more serious driving. if anything they would have the potential for better driving.
And of course the option the turn off the rankings on any server, closed or public.
Having options is the way to go.
especialy for those people not able -for whatever reason- to join a league. you might see a bunch of full public servers in the server list as aposed to what happens now, a bunch of empty public servers and driver hopping from one server to the next spending an entire evening finding a decent server and eventualy giving up on it all.

The argument that drivers dont get better with a ranking system is kinda flawed. as it is now its highly unlikely that drivers on public servers will get better at racing, its much too random on public servers. the only way for a driver to get better at close racing is to join a fixed group like a league where everyone actualy pushes eachother to go safer/faster.
With an optional ranking system you can make the racing better and that will make drivers push for improvement.

 

Fact

 

I have an idea Everytime you wreck your car in RF2, you have to pay to ISI to buy a new car or repair the old. I think they like the idea. It's a sim, if you crash your racecar in real life it's cost money. I don't think noone want's to crash on purpose if you pay for it

 

+1 That would make it even more realistic. It would have to be carefully made though, because a high-tech formula car (Formula ISI) cost way more then some touring car (clio cup). If you crash a F-ISI it should cost at least a few thousand, if not way more. That would make the racing a lot cleaner for sure. You would think more then twice before you decide to wreck; wreckers wouldn't buy the game, just like bad drivers who wouldn't crash intentionally, but still get very big bills. So that would leave only a few good drivers. So you would have a way better average skill level, and the remaining people would have way less people to crash into, making it even cleaner!!!!!

you really should ask ISI money for that great idea

 

ahahah you're fools!! I don't think is in the ISI plan to make a game for a some elite and few players hehe

 

Me neither, think that's probably the reason noone proposed anything like that.

Still find the deafening silence from ISI on this subject both worrying and promising.

 

I followed this thread for quite a while now, and well, I don't think that such a rating system would change that much at all.
My team as well as myself are driving in multiple series at the same time, when the races of the different series take place on different days of the week.

What you just have to keep in mind is that probably 70% or 80% of all the servers in the lobby which are password protected are training servers for a specific league (notice their domains in the server name, for example). Those servers are usually not used for spontaneous races. You usually won't find 10+ people on there because people tend to train on different times, besides that, switching to the race session is usually prohibited, since other people who want to join then to start some training can't do that anymore.

I believe that most of the very fast drivers are driving in leagues. You can argue about that, but I believe it's simply a fact. We know quite a lot teams with great drivers who are quite succesful as well, and all of those guys are never driving on a public server. I for instance was driving on a public server probably like 3 years ago for the last time. It's boring because of the anonymity and the lack of good drivers. If you really want some competition, for me, the only solution is joining a league. But you got to watch out for ones where you won't be at least on the podium every time you race, and that's the more tricky part which of course is time consuming, agreed. But if you've been in the scene for quite a while (well, at least nation-wide, that is) you will get to know the names of people and whole teams who will make you work hard to earn some points in a championship. And when there's a new championship in one of the major leagues and a lot of those guys are taking part in it - join in too.

I'm usually driving in endurance series/events based on the Enduracer mod atm, but a V8factor unleashed series with a lot of competition became the most intense lately, where you would fight wheel to wheel for dozens of laps with some of the well known drivers around here. In this series, I was so happy to be actually driving somewhere around P2 or P3 when finishing in 5th position in the end due to speeding in the pit lane, fighting a lot of good drivers along the way where you can be sure you can make some great maneuvers because you simply know that they're always in 100% control of their car.

I believe that this is something you can't get in a public race, even with such a system. A simple value which should determine safety and/or speed won't tell you if someone is really a great driver or a wrecker. You don't know where he's coming from. And this is probably one of the reasons why most of the faster drivers are never seen on public servers. They need a constant environment to see if they're doing well. If you become stronger and stronger with every race it's probably you since the whole pack is more or less constant (since it consists of the same drivers). You can compare yourselves to each other, especially when knowing each other for quite a while. And when things are starting to turn from bad to worse, it's probably based on how much you spent training as well.

I know that a lot of people do not have the time to drive in leagues or that it's simply not giving them what they expect, but yeah, once you've found the right one (which can be time consuming, yes) you will have fun AND great competition for ages. A rating system won't change that for me, and I'm sure it won't for a lot of others as well.

My 2 cents.