I've only been playing Multiplayer about a month. I've been slowly building up my reputation to try and get in some cleaner races. I'm not the fastest but I am consistent and always try to race cleanly. This week a combination that I wanted to race finally came to the ranked racing (GT3 @ Brands) just as my reputation went over 80. But for the first time ever the game crashed during a multiplayer race and my reputation dropped by 16.5 points. That is a lot of the time spent racing cleanly building reputation wasted and I now can't enter the races I want to this week. I do not get a lot of time to devote to sim racing and the time i do spend should be fun in races just for the sake of building reputation. considering how long it takes to build up I think 16.5 point drop for a game crashing is unfair. Is there no way to differentiate between a technical issue and a quitter? I really don't know if I can be bothered to put more time in if this could happen again .A shame as this is by far my favourite sim.
Hi Paul, assuming I'm looking at the right user profile I can see that you've done five races prior to the one you mentioned. You already said that you don't get a lot of time for sim racing and that's totally fine of course, but the simple truth is that 5 races isn't a lot when it comes to ranked racing. Any ranking system only really works (as in giving a meaningful, somewhat accurate evaluation of a players skill) when looking at many many games. That's why you're still on the rookie fast track, which allows the ranking system to get to "know you" faster by allowing for bigger in- and decreases in both rating and reputation. This mechanism was introduced in order to allow rookie players to get closer to their true skill ratings quicker. Once you've got enough races under your belt that system will be disabled automatically. Unfortunately in your case you've now had a disconnect while still being on the fast track, which resulted in this big reputation loss. The short answer: Unfortunately, no. The problem is that there's no way for us to know for sure what caused a disconnect. Might have been the game crashing, might have been the user pulling the ethernet plug cause he's unhappy about sth that happened in the race. If we created a scenario, a type of disconnect that didn't get penalised, people would figure it out and there would always be the potential of that particular way to get abused in order to rage-quit without consequences. It's tough and certainly far from an ideal solution, but for the time being, treating every disconnect the same is the fairest solution for everyone. In the end, rankings are a statistical game of their own and singular mishaps, bad luck or technical issues get ironed out by the amount of data that is recorded over dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of games. You certainly shouldn't let an unfortunate drop discourage you, even if it wasn't any fault of yours. Real life racers also only finish a certain portion of their races without having done anything wrong themselves, due to technical issues or racing incidents.
You are right, but there are really a lot of situations they needs to be improved. I just had a race with the Tatuus F4, and got pushed of the track in T2 right after the start. Got the incident points (collision) and a 0.43 seconds time penalty for cutting the track. The problem is, to serve this penalty, you have to drive really slow, so ~50% of the field passed me. To serve a 0.25 seconds time penalty, your laptime will be ~2 seconds slower, this is a gap you can't close anymore driving in the top5 with this slow cars in such a close field. The counter top left reacts much too sluggishly, your are off throttle and your penalty does not become less.
to quickly answer your question - no, there isn't. And that's it, disconnect is the same as rage quitting for the system.
I could call it "equal" but definitely not always "fair". If it's the other driver's mistake, it's not fair to be penalized for that too. Is it really that bad? That doesn't sound right. Also for me it's not like that: I lose more than a penalty, yes, but not that much more. But I assume I'm much slower than you.
I hear you, same happens to me, sometimes game crashes several consecutive races... its very frustrating After trying everythig I just bought a (second hand) graphic card to see if game stops freezing randomly... because this is too my favourite sim. I hope devs can find a way to detect when a game crashes so it doesn't penalize the reputation. And maybe the way to detect when you get punted and don't deserve incident points, would be great too.