Multiplayer

Multiplayer can be absolutely brilliant fun but as of late it seems to be getting worse. The game is running fine but there is an increasing number of players who seem to just ram you off instead of defending or overtaking properly. I am not fast but i am fair and the other thing is when you get faster players who in qualifying know you are beginning a flying lap but as you pass the pits and they come out they just try to muscle past you just because they are quicker. Instead of letting you complete your lap then doing theirs once you are out of the way. I have had some great races online but it is definitely frustrating when this happens. Here,s hoping Reiza can get the AI just right so offline will be challenging and fun without the frustration. Thanks Reiza for a fantastic game though

 

Unfortunately you will find this behavior with every sim racing platform on public servers. It is one reason why I gave up on online racing on public servers. The only way around this is to participate in closed Community races where such behavior usually will be called out and punished in one form or another. There are several communities that offer racing on private servers. Some may charge a small membership fee, some are free. But this worth looking in to it.

 

Another way around it is devs providing tools to stop people being able to do this. Considering how crucial this is it baffles me it isn't an integral part of every racing game. Especially considering a guy managed to make a mod that does the job for free in his own time for AC

 

I fully agree with your irritation - but even iRacing with its extremely well organised online racing have this problem too. Even their safety rating and the possibility to report bad behaviour doesnt solve the problem.
When I was a member I was both taken out by intentional wreckers but also by people who was behaving way too aggressive when they were about to be overtaken.

ByTheWay: This problem is probably not solvable in open online racing - because it has something to do with the same behaviour as you see with uber agressive comments in forums just because people dont agree with you.

 

It has been a long time since I raced in iRacing but from what I remember the safety rating doesn't play a big part, it is more focused on peformance. A bit like SRS which has an incident average but it doesn't actually do anything.
The AC mod did a pretty perfect job in my opinion. It isn't a particularly complicated solution, just log contacts (even better if they can add some logic to determine fault when there is a clear fault of one driver) and give people an incident average or incidents per x km (something like 500km or 1000km) then split this into groups like up to 20 contacts per 1000km is group A 20-40 contacts per 1000km is group B and so on. Then allow people to set servers up with only certain groups allowed to join and problem solved

 

Thanks for the reply Micropitt will definitely check out those communitiy races
Cheers mate

 

OK.
But the whole reason for introducing the safety rating was to try to force people to behave reasonable against each other - because otherwise they get demoted to a lower licence level.
And lower again if they still insist on destroying their safety rating.
But the problem is "just" that you have to behave consistently bad before you get demoted.
But anyway then every season some members actually get demoted because of their SR

 

The problem with the SR, and that bothered me the most, was that you also loose SR when somebody drives in to you from behind and pushes you from the track. You will loose as much SR as the guy driving in to you.

 

The safety rating worked very well in AC, there was an issue that most hosts just left their servers too open to all licenses and then complained that the racing wasn't clean enough but the server I managed was considerably better with the safety rating system. I couldn't really care less about performance based rating but safety rating used to limit access to servers needs to be the norm IMO. New players can get the benefit of doubt and players who are too unsafe on track have some incentive to change their ways or else they are stuck racing only against similarly aggressive drivers. I can't see wreckers bothering to get a decent rating (most are probably incapable anyway) then using it to wreck for a session or two before having to build their ruined rating back up again. I never saw one when running the safety system in AC.

I guess the iRacing approach is somewhere in the middle between the AC mod (full safety only approach with server access only for specific safety license holders) and SRS (basically just a safety value that doesn't actually do anything as far as I can tell.) I'm sure a lot of people care about maintaining their license but from what I remember when I raced in iR all the cars I would actually want to race were in the lowest licenses so some others might feel the same and not mind being only D or whatever the lowest is.

 

Wreckers don't tend to want to pay a subscription, so it's not all down to the safety rating - its subscription model tends to attract a better (more serious) class of racer.

 

I think safety ratings work to an extent providing people set lobbies up to exclude the lowest tier. I recently bought F1 2020 to give it a try (got a refund already) and forgot what game I was playing - I tried to have some close battles with people and got deliberately taken out. You eventually learn the style of going for a move and then quickly backing out as they try to take you off the track - it usually results in them going off and you driving off into the distance. It's not fun though. If you want to crash - play Wreckfest.

AMS2 has a few of these people but more times than not, I can have good, close battles with people in public lobbies and other than the odd bump which you'd expect on a sim, I haven't encountered any real deliberate stuff like on the F1 game. The only deliberate one I've seen was a revenge attack when I messed up T1 and pushed someone off... It was my fault but my years of playing simcade games helped because I saw them coming at speed and dodged it.

 

About a year ago I was doing some PC2 racing to improve my rating so I could race with some more quality opponents. I never quite managed it though, as the better races I wasn't yet eligible for and there were so many wreckers in PC2 that you really couldn't avoid them (like the one where someone set off before the green and wiped out the entire front of the grid while they were stationary, or the person who drove slowly to let the fast guys catch up and swiped them out one by one. Obviously, I never got there and gave up completely, concentrating on AMS and rF2 leagues. Unless safety ratings can be obtained offline, like in ACC, then they're almost useless.

 

One way to do it is to allow some benefit of the doubt for "new" players. So anyone who has done less than x km online for example is eligable to join the safest rated driver servers but some amount of contacts within this time would cause them to no longer be able to join those servers. The way Minolin's mod did it in AC was to have an additional N (for new) license so server hosts could allow e.g. A + N license drivers or A+B+N

 

16 players online for an hour so far this evening in total ????????????????

As for wreckers have not had any here yet, but heres a thought I had earlier
The thing missing from racing sims in general is PAIN.
Rigs should have tazer high voltage points for body attachment with varying degrees of pain dependant on car impact and part of body, legs, neck etc. then people would have total immersions and not want to have an impact as in real life
(with the exception of some drivers irl no names here)
Sim racing lacks the fear of injury/death as we have in real life.

 

Yes i jumped in as a spectator briefly but it was spielberg, you were making up places and good to see some wet bits on track too



Edit 19 online now, so gonna fire up a session

 

thanks for joining all, well done Marius see u again

 

Last race was full, too many ai so will use 1 or 2 for the fast guys not 10 !!! nxt time
@96/66 in cat they are fast at brasilia and in the montana all 10 joiners beat them same setting so issue is vehicle dependant
Good win for Rama.
ai messed up some peoples game at start