Hi, I have an idea that could help with the problem of too aggressive driving on public servers. When you want to have great wheel to wheel racing with fair opponents, the only thing you can do is join a community, that has some rules to follow, or join iracing. As the rFactor community is too big to make a racing ettiquette work without real penalties, maybe a sistem simular to that in iracing could help. When there would be a system implemented, that rates a driver by the actions and the behaviour he shows on the track and the possibility to set a minimum driver savety and skill level to let him join an online server this could make some people more carful while racing wheel to wheel. What do you think could something like that work in rFactor2? ANd I mean not only technical but also could this work in the rFactor community? Greetz
This has been discussed allot allready and opinions differ across the board hehe. Personaly i would be pro-rating but it is very difficult to get a balanced system without all kinds of negative side effects. For example a xml-hit-count could allready be used to determin how often and how severe a driver hits other cars, based on that you could create a rating, even if it was on the lenient side, ignoring most small hits or hits with immovable's (walls etc) to give people some breathing room. Hits-per-race so the rating go's up or down depending on how many races you've done. This would help leagues as well, now we have to do this manualy, with an automated-ish hitcount its much easyer to steward a race and a championship. If we then would have server settings to determin driver ratings, a server could be setup on various parameters, lets a,b,c,d. a beeing drivers with a minimum amounts of hits-per-race and d the max. so a league recruiting would setup a c-server, b-server for events, d-servers for pickup races or whathaveyou. a-servers for the maniaks The benefit is clear enough, it forces drivers to addapt if they want to join a certain type of server. want to have realy good races? better get a good rating. drivers whom dont care can do whatever they want still, everyone else has a goal and this would theoretically enhance driving standards accross the board because most people would want to join the serious races eventualy. But again, easyer said then done. i dont realy love the iracing system tbh but it still is 100% better then having nothing at all. even now in beta-stage, where one would expect the more serious simmers forking out the cash for a beta, we are seeing people complain about stupid pickup races and people ruining eachothers fun. (but then again, allot of people just have stepped in and go online to test instead of offline) so any kind of user-friendly system would benefit us imo. nothing too draconic though, that could easily cripple stuff as well. we still want everyone able to join the fun Fact of the matter is, RF2 is much more difficult then RF1 so we would see much more drivers out of controll as well and as RF1 has shown us, it does not take long before people realise public servers are a no-no and we once again end up with 80% of the servers on lock-down. not a good thing.
vote to remove feature. I'm all ears on a rating system but I've yet to hear one that sounds good. The iracing safety rating is only a marketing gimmick. Their irating is a start but only works if 100 people sign up for the same race which only happens on some of their nascar stuff.
Why wouldn't it work on open servers? You set up a server, select a minimum allowed rating and if user is not over that rating the server doesn't let him join. Similarly if the server monitors your rating during your stay on the server, it can automatically boot you from the server if your rating drops below minimum (for example you cause a crash or two). So you don't need any admin 24/7. The only problem is to come up with a good rating system. Even in real F1 they have a handful of stewards that watch every video angle and then many times also interview the involved drivers before they decide. That of course is out of the question in rF2 (except maybe for some high profile races). So bottom line is the rating system needs to be automatic (but supports manual rating correction for selected events) but the down side is automatic rating system that works perfectly for every situation is impossible.
Thats right an automated rating system can never be perfect. But it doesnt have to be too hard and it should be ok. I think the iracing rating system is not the worst. I had situations where I had a contact with another car, that was not my fault in my opinion but got the penalty for it. But nevertheless in the end of the race my savety rating was positive, because I had driven a clean race besides of this one contact. And when I have a look at the rating, other drivers in iracing get I see that the some of the not so good drivers are not punished very hard as well, but over time it shows clearly they are not able to do clean racing and should better go back to the test track without opponents. But I think this could work in rFactor if it was not that too restrictive. Maybe when setting up a server you can choose wheter you want to have a server that does driver rating and restricts joining to several drivers. And others are open as you know it now. Maybe you could also choose to let the rating system rate you in single player mode, to get your drivers rating up while trainig. Or you can do training laps or races to practice without the rating system watching you before you feel ready for it. In my opinion this would make racing in rFactor much more serious and add value, beacause you have to think in long terms and have to assess and train your driving abilities before going online.
Well I suppose our definition of working or not might be different. If a server is setup using a ranking system and it's empty most of the time, to me that isnt' working.
That's not necessarily a problem with the ranking system...even now most of the servers are empty most of the time and we don't even have a ranking system.
Rating system would be a nice touch, but then again could it be enough well made to recognize the "domino effect"? I.e. a pack of cars is approaching a fast turn in a sort of a formation as 2 plrs side-by-side and the pack is about 5 rows long. 1st car cuts the inside line a bit too much under the pressure and instantly spins off to outside direction and even possibly bounces back to track from barrier. 2nd row reacts to that and hits on the brakes and drivers try to make some sort of evasive moves to avoid collision. 3rd row just gets on brake in time and now you pretty much realise what probably happens between the fifth and fourth row... Is it really anybodys fault? Ofcourse you could blame it on the guy in the first row but then again its a thing called motorsports racing where anything can happen. Worst real life competition accidents happen under pressure when drivers are driving in the limit. So some sort of election should be possible for drivers on the server to "cancel" the effects of the crash regarding the rating system if it's not done on purpose.
There should definitely be an option to vote against the negative reputation after some huge crash...
That sounds good in theory but if users would get control of such a system it will be heavily abused. That is beeing done in every online game if there is the slightest loophole in the system. I allready can see people joining 'special' servers just to cancel out eachothers negative rating. it would become a subculture of troll-drivers joining a-rated servers and wrecking races because they think its hilarious. But its a good point and underlines just how difficult it is to have any kind of rating system in rf2. Even iracing gets away with it only because they controll what is happening within their closed system. if they would allow people to start their own servers their rating system would be crippled within a week for sure. From an ISI standpoint i could only asume they would favour freedom over restrictions because they have to account for any type of client and i reckon they are hesitant to implement something that has negative effects on people. One could argue the lack of driver-protection also has negatives and maybe even more so with public servers beeing a huge gamble by default but then again, this is also part of rfactor, as an open platform it is expected the community figures this out by themselfes(?) But even with that in mind it would be a big step in the right direction if ISI would at least consider giving us something to work with. even if its something that is only present within the sim but not enforced. That way server admins and communities could take it up for themselfes and work with the optional tools provided to them. For example better anti-cutting measures would make a BIG difference. It would give servers the option to determin how strickt or lenient they want races to become. It would give communities tools on how to approach events and best of all. any server would be able to hand out penalties on-the-fly. This would also 'force' drivers to behave abit more and drive in a sensible manner. Granted, it wont rule out stupid behaviour or wreckers but imo with rf2 becoming such a high quality platform its my opinion that issues like the above should not be ignored by ISI and should be worked on to improve just as they are improving everything else in the sim. Having good online races on public servers is just as important as having good physics. Emagin what can happen when everybody would be able to actualy enjoy open server-racing. Or at the minimum make it so that the annoyances that make us close our servers are kept to an acceptable level. if that level is acceptable servers could remain open. Its like fighting crime, the police knows they are not going to win the battle but that does not mean they should stop trying. Their task is to keep crime at an acceptable level so that normal people can live their lifes in a reasonable fashion. Ok maybe i should stop typing now because i can feel sentances comming up like 'i have a dream...' , i get carried away sometimes
Thread from build 90 but it shows what would allready be possible: http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.p...nst-online-wreckers-does-not-work-in-build-90
