Please BOP the GT3’s at altitude

I love the fact that Reiza have simulated the altitude effects on GT3 cars.
GT3’s are BOP’d in different ways by different racing bodies to make the racing competitive. Are there any plans to either bop them and or have an option for online racing and league racing to turn the altitude effects off?
The GT3 class isn’t set up for great racing, if I race Bathurst I’ll always choose a macca because by default my lap times are around two seconds a lap faster compared to what I can do in a porsche and to me and other players this simply isn’t fun.
On Sunday I took part in a GT3 race at Bathurst and no surprises everyone in that race chose the macca, which also isn’t fun and makes the grid look dull with everyone choosing the same car. When we race Silverstone you see mixed manufacturer grids and it looks awesome.
Both the FIA and Imperio BOP the GT3’s in different ways to make racing entertaining and fair. Would be great to see Reiza simulate BOP and also the option to turn altitude effects on or off.
Reports - Império Endurance Brasil - Racing Sports Cars

 

i am pretty sure reiza didnt simulate anything here. air density comes with the game engine, and so do the resulting effects.

i am not sure how you would go about disabling altitude effect, assuming you would use a fixed air density over a variable one, than i'd imagine one type of engine would still have the advantage, but now at all tracks instead of the ones that have the respective airdensity

 

I still think the best option would be to allow server admins to handicap certain cars by way of ballast or restrictors.

 

What goal are we really talking about here? Some examples based on what's been mentioned so far:

1. Balance car performance with altitude effects off, and then allow altitude effects to be toggled on/off for a race session
2. Allow server admins to set a success ballast per car model for a race session
3. Simulate Balance of Performance as it's done in FIA and Imperio GT3
4. Ensure similarly skilled players can get similar hot lap times regardless of car
5. Ensure similarly skilled players can finish the race in similar positions regardless of car
   
6. Incentivise players to race a diverse set of cars so the grid doesn't look dull
7. Make the experience of racing in the less popular car more fun

Multiplayer balancing in games is complex, and with no clear-cut solution. A lot of the art boils down to game theory and human psychology. What is fair from a mathematical or game logic perspective is not necessarily what is fair from the player perspective. In game design, a perfectly imbalanced game can be more fun than a perfectly balanced one.

What should determine when cars are balanced? FIA rules? Lap time? Win rate? Grid popularity?

 

IMO you are overcomplicating things. The goal is simple, alow all cars in the same category to be competitive in any track as much as possible. The GT3 are already really balanced, except from the fact that in high altitude tracks turbo cars are completely dominat.
What is going to be done really don't matter, as long as the goal is achieved.

 

Fun and Fair are the only requirements!
Its not Fun or Fair that I can drive a McLaren over two seconds a lap faster than I can drive a Porsche at Bathurst.
It's not fun having a class of GT3 cars where everyone chooses the same car at altitude. At Ibarra I can't get within four seconds a lap of a McLaren when I drive the Merc and I can't ever get above fourth gear.
Make the cars equal at altitude, the same as they perform equally at Silverstone or other UK tracks, which is fun!
What's the point of having four cars in a GT3 class, if everyone keeps choosing the same car to race at Spa?
If Reiza can fix the game engine diffs issues, I'm hopeful they can work their magic to make GT3's fun and fair!
ACC seem to have worked it out and look how successful that fun and fair game is!

 

And if you go racing on Monaco you probably see all Porsche?
I think the class is fairly BOPped for a championship, and I think the length of the race also affects
how the BOPping is experienced, maybe the fuel consumption and wear is not equal. If it was a short sprint race, everyone will indeed sit in the fastest car because those factors are less important. And maybe driving aids were allowed that make it possible to drive over the limit of the car.

BOPping depends on many factors, many of these factors can be different per race (Settings or Circuit). I don't expect disabling 1 factor to solve your BOP "problems". You could also think of a fixed (longer) race length, banning driving assistance, Always racing with damage and wear enabled...... etc

 

They are fairly BOP'd at low altitude, but what would happen if a league championship decided that all races were to be held at the South American circuits? How would that level out in the long run? Yup everyone uses a McLaren and no one dares choose a Merc or Porsche. Super Fun!
The driving aids in GT3 aren't going to help because everyone I race with has TC set to 0 and ABS set to 0 because they are of 0 use. The GT3's are so planted you never need to turn them on. Even when the tyre's are sub 50%, you still don't need to turn assists on, that's another area where the GT3's in this game are in need of some help.
The only BOP it needs is - The McLaren, the Porsche, the Merc and the BMW will reach very similar top speeds in a similar time frame down the Conrod Straight!
That's it.

 

Global BoP can only get you so far, and even in real life certain cars are dominant at certain tracks. AFAIK the SRO runs four different BoP categories for different tracks. Fast track have another set of BoP requirements than slow technical ones. This is something ACC simulates because it specializes in SRO GT racing, but is realistically completely out of scope for AMS2. You can have some rudimentary BoP going on, but cannot account for different tracks and air densitoes globally.

Thats why IMO the only way is to allow per race rebalancing.

 

This has been discussed several times and there are no simple answers. AMS2 has a very strong power reduction at altitude for NA cars, stronger than any other sim I've seen (but maybe realistic?), and the only straightforward way would be to turn those effects off completely in MP. But that would still not guarantee that every car would be competitive at every track. ACC is full of cars that aren't really competitive anywhere despite endless BoP changes.

Reiza are not going to start doing track-specific BoP for GT3s just because someone wants to win a MP race at Bathurst in a 911, there are better uses for their time. Giving users the ability to add ballast/air restrictors is mostly a band-aid and does not solve the problem either, as anyone who has tried to balance a field full of different cars in AC can attest.

 

I wish they could simply work it out of the game entirely.
The only way to work around it for leagues, is that we now are able to choose a different car per track so that it keeps the races close and allows us to be able to choose any track within a season without the obvious disadvantages between manufacturers. When we were tied to one car for the whole season, it made the racing really poor at high altitude tracks and in one season no high altitude tracks were put on the calendar to compensate.
This is far from ideal, but currently its the only way to create a GT3 league that offers fun, fair and close racing at every track within a season. Similar to what they do in real life racing haha
Fingers crossed Reiza can come up with an idea and do a great job implementing it!

 

I think I’ve heard this discussion before ad nauseum, and its probably not going away any time soon.

 

Why not be a bit more constructional than this pro/con against track specific bopping?
Without any sarcasm then there is enough guys here who related to other issues like the former diff thing tested a lot and used a lot of time trying to sidestep this diff issue via setups.

Conserning Mr. BoP then everybody with some knowledge about this will (probably) agree that it will be possible (via trial & error) to work out a ballast list for the mentioned cars in class.
For all used tracks.
And if Reiza are ready to cooperate with their own community then it must be possible mandatory to BoP every car in the class with the ballast the community has agreed on.

ByTheWay: If Reiza dont care about this then I wonder if it is instead possible to force such car/track individual ballast in normal MP races. Because then the issue is solved - without any killing

 

Ballast is a very poor solution to addressing fundamental differences in aerodynamic performance. It does very little to the top speed and creates hazardous situations in hard braking zones because you need tons of it to get the kinds of effects people are asking for here (2 seconds slower at Bathurst!). Some cars like the 570S GT4 are basically "un-BoPable" because no more weight or air restrictor can be added without compromising the handling of the car.

 

NO. I'm not doing without a realistic feature just to benefit your league

But maybe check if the values are correct and if the superiority of Turbos at high altitude isn't exaggerated.

 

I remember when people got defensive about the blatant diff issues.
There's no diff issues, how dare you suggest this, all you have to do is change clutch lsd, this is how all cars feel when you turn, I'm happy with my steering wheel acting like a bumpy see saw as my car trips over itself round a corner and it's built into the engine so this is how it will always drive.
Then version 1.3 came along, widely applauded by the sim racing community and yeah awkward moments for those naysayers haha
The GT3's are the new diffs. Too many people running defense or suggesting it shouldn't be changed and its fine the way it is.
I love this sim I truly do and its the sim I will most often jump into because it's fun, its easy to use and I've met some great people in discords because of it and I want it to be the top dog!
The GT3's in this sim for online lobbies and leagues are a mess and I hope they make it fun and offer variety of manufacturer at all tracks without a two to four second a lap differential. How can anyone defend this or find it acceptable that one car can be up to four seconds a lap faster than another in the exact same class with the exact same driver. How can it be that we can race any GT3 car with both ABS and TC set to Zero, even with severely degraded and worn tyres and think yeah that's fine too. Madness.
Reiza are magic and they actively resolve issues the community voice about.

 

The difference between the diff issue and this GT3 BoP issue is that the former is moving towards realism, whereas the latter is moving away from it.

The diff wasn't working properly. This was proven by the telemetry, as a clear difference from realist behavior was found (the sticky diff).

This BoP thing is the opposite. it would require dumbing down the physics, or removing realist effects.

Some cars are better at some tracks. That is just the nature of motor racing. And yes, turbocharged engines outperform NA engines at altitude.

I would only be in favor of such a "BoP" if this behavior is different from the real thing. Or in other words, if this two- to four-second gap exists in real life, it should be there in the game as well.

 

maybe if they could add an option for a lobby host to choose to enable something like equal performance, seems like a good compromise to me, as i do agree that especially for league races it should be more equal, 1 or 2 tenths a second difference is not the issue, but more then a second is to me, it should not have to matter which car i pick in relation to the track, you should be able to hop on track in each car and do about the same pace.

 

For me a car being 2 to 4 seconds faster than the other cars in the game category isn't realistic at all (taking into account drivers with the same skill level, obviously).
No one is asking to do some unrealistic changes, just to increase fairness between the cars like real life organizers do.

 

You can see quali times, race lap times, round winners and championship winners for GT3 both for the Imperio series and GT world challenge online. When you see that data and the different ways they apply bop to the cars to make their series fair and entertaining, it becomes very clear how out of touch the GT3’s are in this sim.
They do need to address this to make this series in game entertaining. Either you fully simulate it with the engines and how they are affected by altitude and apply bop, or you ditch it entirely and no car is affected by altitude.
A fair compromise to keep everyone happy is to give us the option to select between the two.
Currently the game provides no options to deal with this.
The time trial leaderboards in this sim read like this at the South American circuits - McLaren, then McLaren, then another McLaren then another and so on until finally you see a Porsche.
If you then reference this to the Imperio GT3 standings, it’s not remotely comparable to real life. Most importantly, it’s simply not fun and motor racing whether real life or in sim needs to be entertaining.