Hi everyone, I've been playing Raceroom since March 2020 and although I'm fairly new to the ecosystem, I have played other race simulators before. The way the penalty points work in Raceroom is such a painful despair that it detracts from what makes the game so good in the first place: Someone thinks they can win the race right at the start in turn 1 and runs into the back of you? You get penalty points! You get ploughed into on the inside of a corner? You get penalty points! Someone gives you a nudge? You get penalty points! You've had a hard race after the first three points have happened and you're one point away from DSQ. Someone touches you. You get penalty points! ....and you get DSQ. Your tyres are overheating like mad and you run off track (which in itself is a penalty)? You get penalty points! I understand the penalty points system is used as a detractor of bad behaviour but it makes no sense in the way that they're attributed to drivers. There is no fairness at all in this system in the sense that it doesn't determine who actually caused the incident. Take for example the first bullet point which we know is all too common these days. Another driver caused a turn 1 pileup and all you hard qualifying effort is lost as a result. To add insult to injury, you are penalised by another driver's behaviour when you aren't at fault and also can do nothing to avoid it. With Ranked Multiplayer servers this gets even worse and clearly favours those who are happy to drive along at a sedate pace and don't push to go faster. This needs to be fixed so that penalty points are given to those who cause the incident. If not, Raceroom will be more like Saferoom!
Can the game engine not be used to determine liability for an incident? I mean we have the car's calculated trajectory and impact/collision force between two cars vs driver inputs to the controls. Some situations might be tricky but ploughing into the grid at turn 1 caused by: No braking at all Very late braking Aiming for the path of other cars ....would be sufficient data to work with so that every other person in the incident doesn't receive penalty points.
In ACC there are many servers with SA level that avoid this situation. I have seen many rookie server and others 75+ servers empty or almost empty. I cannot understand why. Maybe there are less people that use this SIM...
I can understand why many 75+ servers are empty. I was trying the Slovakia Ring track that's seeing heavy rotation on the Europe servers and I got caught up in a few Lap 1 incidents and also had off track excursions (my fault) that harmed no one else but myself. The result was going from a 77.8 rating to 70.1 in the space of one race. This means spending the whole of the following morning doing WTCC races at Spa in the rookie servers whilst trying to avoid kamikaze rookies. All this to increase my rating so I can go back onto the 75+ servers. I felt like I was playing a MMORPG and having to "level up".
No. Way too many ways to exploit any attempt to do so. In most parts a racing sim is just not as clear cut as for example a shooter. Friendly fire is friendly fire. No doubt about that. Racing is not like public traffic where the guy behind is responsible to keep a safe distance. Cars are driving close and they are supposed to do so. If you always penalize the guy from behind this will only lead to brake checks to exploit this. Another example: did the one on the inside line do a hilarious divebomb or did he just cleanly outbrake the guy on the outside who carelessly turned into him? Taking different skill levels into account speed differences won't help you in this matter. Overtaking will become impossible if in such a case the guy on the inside always gets the blame, as everybody being overtaken will just turn into him, knowing it will be counted as a divebomb committed by the other driver. But if both get incident points, both will act with more caution. I could come up with countless more ways to exploit automated blaming. And if you took some time to read on this forum, you would have noticed that this has already been discussed over and over again. The devs even had a system in testing that was made to do exactly what you want. But it was impossible to implement it in a non-exploitable way. And looking at my example with the overtaking, exploits might even lead to a worse problem than the automated blaming was made to cure in the first place. And one more thing - it's NOT penalty points, it's incident points. And this is not only semantics. An incident is an incident, no matter who is to blame. And in the long run dirty drivers will always accumulate more incidents than clean drivers, so it gets balanced over time by itself, even if you might have had bad luck in a few races.
Just have a look into the eSports after race incident reports, i.e. WTCR https://forum.sector3studios.com/index.php?threads/esports-wtcr-2020-incidents-and-penalties.15822/ to see that it isn‘t as simple as it do look like. And the stewards have to spend a lot of time to watch and judge.
Ok, what about these two simple ways to overcome the flaws in the system which don´t require arbitration or much programming? 1) Give back incident points over a race e.g. 1 point for every full lap driven with no incident. 30 would till be the max. That should stop people getting excluded at the end of a race and allow some last lap battles. 2) Give a limited time e.g. 6h server ban to any account with more than 100 accumulated incident points over the last hour . That should weed out the deliberate rammers, bad drivers who have no business in open lobbies yet and give revenge rammers some cool down time. During the time out you could still do competitions and single player to encourage genuine players to become better.
Incident points are not just there to punish wreckers and divebombers. They're also there to punish hotlappers who think the rest of the grid owes them the racing line, people who don't bother learning the track before joining a ranked race, and people who crash out then complain how slow and bad the people who beat them are. Sounds like they're working exactly as they should in this case.
What? Are you one of those hotlappers who thinks their superior speeds means everyone should just dive out of their way the moment they appear in their mirrors? As for the rest of the discussion, it's an automated system. To that end it is never going to be accurate or reliable in correctly determining who deserves what in every situation... or even the majority of them. You need human marshals for that, and that clearly isn't going to happen on public servers. Making it overly complicated by trying to adding in a bunch of calculations to determine fault/intent would be extremely time-consuming, resource hungry, and still result in an inaccurate system because it's still automated and wide open to abuse. I forget which game had a system like that... Gran Turismo 5 perhaps? It was a long time ago. Anyway, the system did the calculations and still got it wrong on a regular basis. Waste of time and effort. Instead, why don't people who want to race on these servers just take it easy, stay away from other drivers, and finish the race wherever they can? Once your rep is up you can join the higher ranked servers and get away from all the rammers who don't care about such things. It may mean not being particularly competitive in the initial races, but surely that's better than having to put up with them for an extended period because you keep getting rammed off?
you're exaggerating If there were a lot of us, whether I was completely in front or completely in the back, I finished without DSQ (but I almost got the maximum number of IPs), but if I was in the middle of the field, I did a few races without DSQ. my profile: game.raceroom.com/users/jirbun01
Are you a member of a league? There is a world of R3E who have R3E servers and eSports Teams and race in big prize competitions here at RaceRoom. Or do you like public racing?
I do agree to a point with @Vale in regards to the earning back of points, 2 out of the 3 GT3/Slovakring races I've entered has ended up with myself being punted through the litter and into a barrier, sustaining copious amounts of both engine and suspension damage, both times I had to pit and both times I was lapped by the majority of the field but being a brave little soldier, I carried on to the chequered flag with a very poorly engine, my reward, sweet, fanny Adams, where is the incentive to continue?
It would be great the x0 penalty in case of a little contact. In TCR category the are people who fights for the position so close to each other and contacts happen very often, and that means a x4 penalty every time. Maybe a total of 20 incidents per race with x0 contacts is more balanced.
The no.1 issue with the penalty points system imo is that the incident count is only on the screen for a few seconds - typically while you're still in a corner. That means that most of the time I have no idea how many incident points I've accrued.
Not a good enough incentive for most, I often pop on a ranked server and people disconnect regularly in quali and through the race, in fact I rarely see anyone repairing their car as the race is so short but if you could gain a bit of your lost rating back, I'm sure more would. The beauty is this one is purely on oneself to show a bit of humility and grit but to not get rewarded or should I say penalized less, is BAH HUMBUG to say the least and losing a great chance of showing everyone it's not all about the winning. Wouldn't this largely alter the imbalance between rammer and rammed, rammer is more likely to not bother and take the points hit, where as rammed is probably going to try get some of those stolen points back, not perfect but does give some redemption.
The in game damage model does seem to inflict a lot of damage on cars if they hit the barriers, but very little from car to car contact, even heavy car to car contact. Maybe increasing the amount of damage sustained from car to car contact would be helpful in encouraging drivers to be more careful.