Like in real life, there is limited number of hours drivers have to practice ahead of race day. Is there a way to achieve that in modding? For starters, a way to disallow offline play in a mod. That way track time could be limited by the league host to specific times and days and furthermore I imagine there would have to be a way to only allow mod owner to host? Just another suggestion geared toward league racers!
Why would you want to do that? IRL they limit track time only because track time is expensive. With sim racing, track time is free. If you limit track time, you will end up with a bunch of unprepared drivers and a terrible race series IMHO.
Once again, I'm troubled seeing guys who want to put their veto about things that might not even concern them. This is a proposition for an "added" game feature, that a league would chose to adopt or not. This proposition has pros and cons, and some leagues might find more pros than cons in it. I made a proposition for an "added" feature some months ago and people couldn't accept that some league organisators might think different : http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/7388-Escape-forbidden-and-things I personally think that having only limited time to make my setup and to learn the track might add some adrenalin, and in some leagues, see less "robot" driving style. The only problem I see is how to make such a feature, from ISI pov.
And the drivers will host a server and train online. How can you achieve that in your league ? I wonder how, in your mind, you can prevent some guys from training with a particular track or car, without bothering others. Or, if you're an admin, just announce the track one hour before the race. It can work with rF and its hundreds of tracks, obviously for rF2 it's somewhat limited at the moment. It's not exactly like forcing the drivers to go into the pits. Even the best simulator in the world will have the same problem : it's not real life. If you don't have time for training and are beaten by guys who do hundreds of laps before each race, deal with it.
I agree that it can be difficult to force drivers not to time before official practice. Anyway, it can be a good idea to try to get some realism in either way we can. A way to add some adrenalin. I mean, it's like the difference between 1 lap qualifying in superpole and a qualifying session of 1 hour, with illimited new tires. You have adrenalin because you only got one chance to do a good lap. Here we only have one chance of getting used to the track and its conditions, and have a good setup, instead of planning it long before you enter an official session. I agree with this. But can't we try to get the most realism as we can ? No problem with this, really, heehee and I can beat you in three laps haha (just kidding) I want to remind you that we are here in "Wish List" section, and as its name says, we simply give suggestions.
IRL, some series have limitations to how much you can test. Look at Formula 1, you can only do testing in the off season at a certain location and time in offical testing. You cant test once the season has started, except during Friday and Saturday practices. Even though team have sims to help learn new tracks and adjust to cars, even the drivers will tell you, real seat time is cannot be wasted, especially when learning a new car or track. Other series will limit how much testing you can do outside of the races, like ALMS. IRL you dont get 500+ laps to dial in a setup. You arrive to the track with a "basic" setup, based on previous track data, or settings based on what you expect from the track. You'll spend several sessions making constant adjustments, so by the time race day comes, you should happen to have a driveable setup thats decently fast. Since track conditions sometimes constantly change, it can be a crapshoot if a good setup Friday works the same on Saturday.
Being involved in an F1 league I've often thought about this, and there are a few things to consider both from an implementation and design point of view. First: very difficult to implement for us. I think I could have got something going in rF1 to make it impossible to drive the track except on the (correct) server and at specific times, and crippling the cars at any other time too. For sure ISI could do something on their end if they wanted to have that feature. How fair it is is another matter: some drivers with more technical nous might be able to approximate the used vehicles even if they can't directly pull them out to devmode (encrypted MASes) and get a feel for the track in use that way. Most popular series and tracks will have several versions so it's difficult to stop people getting close to what you're going to be racing. But then even if you can do it, how realistic is it really? As you mention the real teams have their own sims, so if you want to simulate that you at least need to let 'teams' run AI around the track with different aero levels to arrive at an optimum downforce vs speed balance, and maybe you need to have a whole second track that's not quite the same as the one you're going to use for the event so you're simulating the imperfections of the simulator and let people drive that up to a set limit (to simulate simulator time). Granted you could throw all this out to keep things simple (maybe allow something like 8 hours practice if you decide the real teams have 4 hours + sim work). If you're willing to take the compromises I think you'd inevitably have, it would be an interesting feature. But you'd also have to question how much it would be used, and therefore whether it's worth ISI spending time implementing it.
The League Admin could pull the name of the track out of a hat 48 hours before the scheduled race. That way even he would not know which one was coming.
It seems impossible, if I want to train on a restricted track could do it in a second installation of rfactor 2 ...
Another opportunity to limit the track time / number of laps a driver can do during a race is to limit the amount of tires available for a race weekend and don’t get him endless new sets of brand new tires ;-) Or who wants to start the race with already worn out tires?
This is what we have implemented for our current rF1 league at the moment. At the start of the season, everyone gets a track mega pack which has all 12 circuits that will be raced on. On race night, we get a member to randomly select a number which refers to a circuit in the track listing. This is put on the server at 630pm giving everyone at most 2 hours worth of practice before qualifying proper begins. Of course since people have the circuits, they can test away, but it's probably not worth doing anything major since the likelihood of racing that particular circuit is 1/12. You may not race on it for another month, 3 months at most, so it would be time wasted IMHO. It has worked a treat thus far and seems to have brought the field closer. There's no more people running 1000 laps perfecting a setup versus a guy who does a good solid 1 hour but gets nowhere. Much more realistic in my opinion, I agree.
