As the title states, currently, as of writing this post, 4 out of 5 of the non-rookie ranked sessions (75-80 reputation sessions) are permanently locked in qualifying. I'm not sure if this was done intentionally or on accident, but here's how I think its caused. It seems like this game has an inactivity period every night (not sure exactly when it starts for you, but its about 11PM PST for me when activity starts to die off). When this happens, its rare for a ranked server to fill up, and most likely people are leaving during qualifying because there is only a couple people. I know I could just wait until the weekly shuffle resets or whatever, but this is getting a little annoying when there is only 1 working ranked server. It can mean taking multiple hours before being able to actually race, let alone the series you want.
A couple of them have been like that for a couple days. Edit: As of this morning they seem to be back in practice so maybe someone hit the reset switch. Either way, they should implement an auto-restart if everyone leaves. I think its the setting that disables the practice timer going down when server is empty, and its also applying to qualifying, which is bad because "join while qualifying" is disabled.
It's hard for me to believe some servers were unavailable for the whole day and it wasn't noticed and fixed. Let's make sure there's no misunderstanding. At the time you created the thread, the Norisring and Zandvoort servers should have been in quali anyway because these are the servers that work on a fixed schedule. They open up for practice every hour at xx:20. No matter the number of drivers, at xx:45 practice ends and they switch to quali which lasts for 8 minutes. Your message was posted at xx:51. So it fits. However, if they were still in quali phase after that, as in they were unavailable on the next hour at xx:20, that sure is a bug. Is that what was happening?
Might just have been horrible timing then. I can check again tonight, but you have a pretty solid theory. Could've sworn they were in qualifying for well more than the 8 minutes of qualifying and 15 minute race, but maybe I'm going nuts. I'll check again later in the day and see if it happens again.
Yeah, I seemed to get on and refresh the server list at the perfect time. Saw a server go from practice to qualifying with nobody in it (despite the timer saying "--:--") I guess it would fix the problem if they just enabled that damn timer going down even when nobody is in there, because the fixed schedule forces it anyways. I guess its just a little annoying I have to remember the times instead of being able to see a timer.