Automobilista 2 April 2021 Development Update

Elo-based rating systems (gain rating when do better than expected, lose rating when you do worse) in games that have a large component of chance always have a feel-bad factor that makes people overly protective of their rating to the point that they'd rather not risk it by playing in some instances.

It gets even worse when having a couple of bad races can actually dump your safety rating to the point where you can't even participate in the races you bought expensive content for. I don't think any racing sim has really solved those problems.

 

I got those frustrations in iRacing as well, but the player pool is pretty large so if you improve your irating, you get to drive with better players who also are more serious and safer drivers.

 

Y

Kills it for me when I check with players and yes they can adjust after I set session to everything disabled, Only ones Im interest in are TC/ABS in wet races in particular.
GT3's are a shed load more alive/fun/challenge when genuinely off.

Agreed, makes an expensive experience very poor, gave up in the end.

 

Just use the secretly best GT3 car in AMS2, the Ultima GTR Race, which has neither.

 

Ahh. At least this part was/is solvable in the way iRacing have integrated the SR in their system.
Because eventhough I never personally got that low in SR then I know that people solved it by running some TT sessions where you if you dont make mistakes slowly can earn/harvest some SR points.

ByTheWay: TT sessions are as most know single player mode. No Sennas

 

Worst thing about ACC is how it is integrated with the single-player for two reasons:
- You see people suggesting grinding in single-player to improve the rankings, doing stuff like driving close to a slow AI for an hour to improve the safety ranking. That is a total waste of time and if you can grind it, it means that its implementation is not good.
- Ruined the offline experience for me because I was more focused on being careful to not ruin my ranking, especially because the AI was unaware/blind of the player position in some cases. I only started enjoying ACC for offline when I deactivated those rankings and just forgot about them.

 

Well, people with vr, triple screen and $$ direct drive sistem vs g29 single monitor (or gamepad ahemm..) guy. Ultra fast ping Vs triple digit ping. Nothing is fair, all is relative.

 

Waiting for the beta-release! Steam has been refreshed so many times now, I'm almost living in the future

 

I think most of the times it brings more people with extreme behaviors: in iracing any short race is affected by the fact that people send it at every corner so as not to lose irating. People get greedy with their rating very often and in the end in most architectures you can be a very bad/aggressive driver and still have a high rating so it does not provide for really cleaner racing. However in the community, ranked racing has become such a fetish that there is people refusing to race online AMS2 until there is a ranking system... Go figure...

 

I agree that the rating system in ACC can get annoying for singleplayer, specially considering how the AI in ACC, while usually quite well behaved, does appear to have a few blind spots and will hit you in a few specific situations.

But on the other end the public multiplayer in ACC does appear to have quite a better quality of drivers than what I'm used to from other sims. The fact that the players are worried about their safety rating does appear to make them a bit more careful in their moves, which is not a bad thing.

Of course there's always a few trolls everywhere, even in ACC, but the average quality does seem to be consistently higher on that sim in my experience.

 

The problem with that attitude if you are a sim developer is that a lot of (most?) sim drivers want to get as close to the real thing.
And in RL you can both get expensive damage and personal injuries if you drive like an idiot.
So to sim(ulate) this then any serious racing sim got to have some kind of virtual mirroring of such damage and injuries.
And this is called Safety Rating - in some form or another.

ByTheWay: The hippie like "solution" to make an appeal to al MP drivers to drive clean and to respect each others is officially declared dead after Woodstock

 

The really dumb thing is that the safety rating goes down without ones own fault. It happened to me several times in other sims that a guy driving behind me crashed in to me because he forgot to hit the brakes and I got punished for it. My solution to this dumb ratings is to not join public MP servers. I rather pay some $ to join a private League. No ratings, just fun. And if somebody screws up, the Race Director takes care of it.

 

There were more problems than donor accounts and spoofing. I was in a few unofficial leagues that had most of the guys that would dominate races and several of us had the same complaints. Here are just a few.

1. Safety rating is too easy to attain. Anybody could get an S safety rating if they played long enough. No matter how much they crashed, punted, dirty defending, etc. I cannot tell you how many times I've had an A or S rating driver either purposefully take me out, or be a salty backmarker punting the leader. Plus, iRacing's safety rating actually has consequences. If you have too many bad races, you might get dropped from a series you enjoy. Where in Pcars2 it rarely ever locked you out of anything.

2. The system didn't scale well in the higher levels. 1500-1700 rating is easy to gain if you have the skill, but above that, you had to be super cautious to keep from a DNF or non-podium. This is even more infuriating, with griefers and the previously mentioned safety rating issues. I'd win 5 races in a row against good 1600-2000 drivers and gain maybe 12-15 points, only to have one griefer ruin everybody's race, have the new U1480 kid win the race, and immediately lose 30 points. One angry player can ruin hours' worth of progress.

3. No real gameplay function. Yes, I know some of the time trial qualifiers had safety and skill point requirements, but the system was functionally useless. No official race series with matchmaking to pit you against similar drivers (iRacing's whole shtick), no consequences for punting everyone off the track, no reason to really care about what your rating is, etc.

 

Maybe a dedicated thread for those who have lots of experience with these systems is in order? ...Assuming some focused conversation could eventually lead to some consensus around a community recommendation to Reiza...because it sounds to me as though what not to do is as important as what to do.

 

I agree. A dedicated thread for the ranking system would be great.

Also, I believe it would be a good idea too if Reiza releases the ranking system as a beta version for testing, suggestions and bug detection by the community, stating that all ratings would be reset in the definite version.

But, until now, not a single word from them about how the ranking system will be. I just hope they are aware that with a boring and/or broken ranking system, plus no more improvements and new features on the multiplayer experience, some people that drive online 99% of the time, like me, are going to leave the game.

 

But deeply revisited

 

So what are the possibilities of being able to edit names/strength of the AI? If I can add skins and then implement new names and skills to drivers that renders AMS1 for me totally redundant. AMS1 to me had the best physics and FFB on the market, but since coming back to 2 after a long hiatus, AMS2 is just on another level totally FFB wise. It would just be fantastic if we could edit the names and skills!