Ok, to start off, I'm very thankful that Reiza introduced a ranking system and stat tracking to AMS2. It's been discussed/speculated for a long time and it's a nice feature to have for the community. I like being able to easily scan the lobby and see who I can trust a little more in battle compared to others. With that said, I find AMS2's rating system is starting to suffer from the same issues as Pcars2's rating system. I want to start a discussion on how things could be balanced. I understand there's not much incentive to fix these issues since most people just want to pick up and race really quickly without much behind it. Sorry if this comes off as a bit of a rant, but I've been frustrated with this system since the Pcars2 days. If anybody has suggestions, leave them below. My current issues with the Multiplayer Rating System. The safety rating is an indication of playtime, not safety. I've been purposely rammed off the circuit, blocked, punted, etc. by people with A-B safety ratings. They weren't safe drivers, they've just played enough it balanced out. Safety rating prioritizes proximity over time without incident. iRacing's system goes by laps without incident, whereas AMS2's seems to prioritize time spent close to another car. So, if you're mid-pack, you can get away with a few incidents and still gain a good bit of safety rating, where someone leading will get punished for even tapping the wall because they're not around other cars long enough. A higher performance rating becomes really dissatisfying. 1800-1900 or higher falls into a loop where 4-5 races of wins can be negated by one rammer in a short race. I've had 3 times in a row of being over 1920+ and getting dumped 30-40 points for an incident that forced me to DNF. It makes it where if you're above 1900 you don't want to enter a quali last minute, or even be in a lobby if you suspect a backmarker might take you out. What is even the point of having a rating system without matchmaking? The community doesn't have enough people, let alone enough who have built up enough rating to lock off lobbies by skill/safety level. Also, as mentioned before, an A or above safety rating doesn't guarantee rammers won't sneak through. In iRacing you have to be at a certain safety rating to be eligible for certain series. While I understand locking off content that you already own seems like a dubious strategy, maybe for any upcoming official scheduled races you have to have a certain rating to qualify. Performance rating headroom. With a starting point of 1500 and the aforementioned problems with scaling once you get above 1800-1900, it gives players a much larger room to fall than to keep building upwards. I have yet to see any rating below 1400. The only time I can gauge someone's skill level is if they're above 1600. 1500 and below could be a brand new player, 1700 and they've had to work for it, 1800 and above you get stuck in the "win-crash" loop. There really isn't much headroom to keep progressing like there is in other rating systems. I understand my issues are a bit specific to the rating system meta, and not everyone will care about it. I just feel the system could be better and could have some actual use outside of "one-ups-man-ship." If AMS2 had higher player numbers, proper matchmaking could be implemented with the system that's already there, but at the moment, there's not much point.
You just summarized what I said months before about the PCARS2 MPRS and why it failed to provide a better experience in open Lobbies. Add to this that the Rating can be faked. altered and edited... I don't go into depths how, but it's all in your AMS2 user data folder. I was able to duplicate multiple S 2000 profiles for several players in PCARS2 just by copy and paste.
Great points. I hope they work in adjusting it as it is a beta. But I have high hopes as Reiza has yet to let me down. I think your third and 4th point are sorta related. The severe drop in rating after a race is because there aren't splits implemented yet, so essentially you lose to a driver with much lower rating which causes the big swing. Splits should come in due time, the participation needs to be there first though.
ontopic, i dont really see a problem with safety rating just displaying the "balanced out" result, thats the whole point, if u are on average safer than someone else, than you are simply safer. but i think the main issue with it, is that you keep gaining point, while the incident point penalty stays the same. so assuming u have 3000 safety points (hidden value), and u have contact u just lose say 5 points, ofc this wont have alot of impact. in acc they discard results older than X, that way u only have X amount of races that are being considered for your rating, which seems much smarter, than being able to endlessly grind no contact races and than u could go on a rampage for multiple races without losing your safety tier.
a system that only takes the recent X sessions into account. where X could be say 20. safetyrating = (X / incidents) * 100 that way u get pretty much the same scoring system the current safety rating uses, somewhere around 3000 points is S, or maybe it was 2500, i cant remember from the top of my head only issue is, that the first couple tiers are very easy to achieve (little points required), i think from U to C is just 350 points, but A to S is quite a huge gap in points
The score, thats what it is, and the "license" rating from U to S have nothing to do with each other. You can have S100... you just safely lost the last 140 competions. It's a score, not a rating.
in the background both the safety rating and the skill rating are numbers the letters just represent a bracket of that value. so for example 0 - 100 would result in showing a U, 100 - 200 would show as F etc (the values above are made up i have never looked at the bracket values for those low tiers) ofc they are 2 seperate things, 2 seperate number values that rise or fall depending what you are doing ingame.
O.k. let me try to explain the mnain fault of the PCARS Rating system... It can not be set to prevent the "A" alien to come down to the low ranking lobbies to shave off the casual F guys for an easy score. I went through that grind a few years ago in PCARS2 and i'm not willing to go through it again.
In other words you want to have a lower and upper limit in terms of ranking to better balance a lobby? (not necessarily safety as optimally we'd all be S) I can get behind that.
theres way to less people to split the community based on skill into skill segments. ofc they could implement it, but chances are u wont find alot of people to race with/against kinda controproductive for the multiplayer health additionally, i think u have misunderstood me, the number next to the letter, is the skill rating, which changes based on who u win/lose against. all i was saying, is that behind the letters, is a number value that changes based on how safe you are driving. so "'A' aliens" are just people who are driving safely, why would u lock those people out anyways
I doubt the online experience will change much unless an official or third-party service steps in to take the lead and organize some daily race schedule with potential to grow into things like splits and special events, etc. In the mean time I wish some of the current dedicated servers would be reconfigured to run 15-20min rotating daily race schedules, e.g. 2 servers running race A/B car/track variants that change daily, one open for U100 so everyone can play and the other with a minimum filter. ACC has lots of public servers running 20min races that fill easily. PC2 shows what will happen if the rating system stays as it is: empty dedicated servers and some random lobbies running GT3s or some crazy combination.
Reiza has acknowledged 3rd party support in the roadmaps before. The AMSU unofficial leagues have been running JustRace's service that uses AWS to track stats. In that safety is rating is expressed as a percentage but runs on a points system in the background. It varies points deductions on the severity of an incident. I will acknowledge, the system has many of the same flaws as the AMS2/Pcars2 system on skill level scaling given there is no matchmaking system. I do find it is way less punishing for races where someone crashes you. If over one lap your pace suffers, but you keep the pace of the leaders for the rest of the race, it seems to not drop points as drastically. Agreed, daily/hourly scheduled ranked races would actually make the ranking system have a purpose. The biggest problem is AMS2 doesn't have near the player base of ACC, iRacing, or even Pcars2. Sectioning off races from new players isn't the best strategy, but some form of matchmaking like that could give an incentive to work on raising your rating. Open lobbies would still exist, but it could draw a lot of the locked lobby Discord groups into interacting with the wider community. On the topic of Discord, link sharing or Discord integration would be really useful. There are plenty of great AMS2 Discord groups that run scheduled race events. In open lobbies for those groups, it's often easy to find out how to join their Discord if you ask around, but some sort of integration would like how Content Manager does in AC would really help with building communities. While you can invite players from Steam, it would be nice to easily link your lobby to the Discord community.
My experience from PCARS still was, that after a while even the S- driver became jerks. Back then i was missing the option to make a "beginners" safezone with a upper LiIcense limit. something like: F - D. The rating score does not matter much, that's just a podium score. I pledge for the license Rating as the only limit, not the score. And the license limit should be configurable to act in both directions.
Dissatisfying, frustrating, rage inducing, etc. The whole performance rating thing doesn't make any sense. Just got -33 points for getting rammed from behind on the last corner of the race and then hit in a way that the car glitched/flipped and ended up on the roof. Was in 3rd place when it happened. Four races before that got rammed twice by the same guy. -21 points for finishing 4th/5 in the end. Between those two races - three wins/podiums for +26 points. And the safety rating increased by 6 points in the two incident races but almost didn't budge (maybe 2 points) in the clean races with no serious contacts. That's just plain broken. Why did it take Reiza almost two years to "implement" (in reality just enable) the same broken system that was in pc2?!?
