I have recently gotten a few of them and it seems that simply coasting for a while instead of accelerating isn't sufficient to satisfy them (even though the penalty was showing only .1 seconds when I noticed it, which isn't very long, and could easily be achieved -- and then some! -- by just breathing the throttle on the next straight, except it doesn't). I have taken to tapping the brakes to satisfy them, which ends up causing me to give back way more time than the actual penalty itself. Unless, of course, this is intentional and part of the plan? In a related vein, during a race last night, the driver in front of me went wide at mid-corner and after pulling back onto the course, immediately stomped on their brakes on the following straight, causing me to then bump them down the right side of the car as I took evasive action and tried to avoid hitting them. I initially thought I was being brake-checked for no reason I could see, but I later found out the driver was given a slow-down penalty and they said that a quick, hard stomp on the brakes is the only way they know how to make it go away as quickly as possible. So it appears I am not the only person who's come to the same conclusion, which naturally makes me curious about how others are addressing them and if there's any trick to minimizing the pain they inflict, not to mention their potential for harming an innocent driver that's following closely behind the penalized car ... suggestions?
The whole point of a slow-down is that it's a penalty for breaching track limits and gaining an advantage. If you could just lift off the throttle for 0.1 seconds to "serve" the penalty, how would that be a penalty? What incentive do you have to avoid performing the same violation on every lap if you lose almost nothing for doing so? So yeah, you need to actively slow down to serve it, the clue is in the name. You end up losing more time than you gained, and that is what persuades you not to do it again in future. Then they're an inconsiderate idiot, which you can't do anything about. Someone with half a brain pulls off the racing line in order to serve their penalty, so that they don't ruin the race of others. But personally I hate slow-down penalties anyway. I use drive-throughs instead, because that is a real deterrent. Sure it surprised a few people at first, but do you know how many drive-throughs occur on our servers now? One or two every few months. People have learnt to drive on the bloody track instead.
As a relative newcomer here (and in the absence of any sort of manual that covers these things or at least none that I can find), it seemed reasonable to me to believe a .1 second slow-down penalty was intended to be exactly that -- a .1 second penalty -- and not the much longer one it actually proves to be in practice. <shrug> And it seems particularly ironic when it sets the stage to affirmatively harm a driver behind the penalized one instead of benefiting them, as was the case with the incident I was involved with last night. This is definitely one situation I have never experienced in real-world racing, however well intended it might be in theory. <scratches head> I hear you, but for very minor transgressions, a drive-through penalty does seem quite draconian, as it will effectively ruin shorter races by preventing one from being able to achieve a decent result. But rules are rules and so long as they're applied equally and known to everyone in advance, I'm okay with this.
There's that, but one thing to keep in mind is that the warning-level is higher when using drive-through penalties. I.e. you'll get more warnings that you're breaking track-limits before something actually happens. So it doesn't penalize the occasional accidental off-track, but it does severely penalize people who are trying to game the system or consistently run off-track.
While I appreciation your clarification -- thank you! -- I continue to find it very frustrating that (to my knowledge, at least) there is no way to find this information except anecdotally. It would be so helpful if there was a "Book of RaceRoom" one can proactively read to become familiar with how RaceRoom works, its rules and its penalties, instead of having to wait until something comes up and post queries on a forum about issues that have no doubt been explained dozens of times in the past as every newcomer runs into them while enjoying an otherwise great racing sim. I know Sector 3 is a small company and probably understaffed and its employees are overworked and underpaid as it is, but every real world race series I've ever run under every sanctioning body (including some essentially one-man bands that ran races locally) had at least the basics written down somewhere and made them available to present and prospective competitors...
On that we agree wholeheartedly. There's (IIRC) three different physics in the game depending on when the car was last updated. There are different starting-types depending on whether you're in SP or MP. Stuff like the Adaptive AI and off-track warnings aren't explained anywhere. Which isn't that bad if you're a frequent visitor to the forums, but it does make it somewhat less intuitive to newcomers. Although in S3's defense, it's one of the unfortunate side-effects of dealing with a continually evolving product. The good news is that the game is being constantly worked on, but it does come with some pitfalls of its own.