Earlier this week we started four new series, including two with the Alpine A110, bringing more diversity and some properly licensed community content to the competition system. We also did a few smaller UI improvements such as a better looking standings table.
That said, the talk of the week has certainly been the build update we released on Monday, with a couple of hotfixes the day after. We did test all of these updates, and they passed, but it quickly became clear that a lot of people were having problems we did not see in testing. Therefore we have decided to roll back to an older build today.
This means some of the newer changes have been reverted for now, and it’s our intention next week to communicate a few more improvements to make sure that first of all this does not happen again and second of all, if it does, there is an easy way for our community to revert to the previous build. We are also considering having a public-beta build with newer stuff for people to try and give feedback on.
By now the competition system has been started up again and sessions will soon start. The rollback does not affect much in terms of the features of the competition system, and we will look at bringing back the few things we added soon.
Stability is still our focus, as well as ironing out some smaller issues with upgrades for cars. This week we also got a significant amount of questions again, so without further delay, let’s jump into those.
Q&A
Q: Is there any penalty for signing up to a series and not driving?
Remco Majoor
No. We intend to give penalties to people who register for a session and then don’t drive, but signing up for a series and not driving is something we have not considered penalizing. It could make some sense though.
Q: What driver aids are allowed on the competition system?
BadWallflower
Right now, only auto clutch. It’s configurable though so for different levels of drivers we can allow different settings. As you know rFactor 2 also has a system of “penalties” so when you enable an aid, we can make you go a bit slower. That way you can learn with aids on and at some point you’ll want to turn them off again to maximize your performance.
Q: Can I view the standings, schedules and such only inside rFactor 2 or is there a website as well so I don’t have to open the simulation?
Max Melamed & Gonçalo Costa
Since these are basically the same question, let me explain a bit what our plans are with this. First, if you look on our discord right now there are a few third party apps that do this, but our plan is basically to make all relevant parts of rFactor 2 available “remotely” meaning you can take your phone, browse to the rFactor 2 website and see a similar view with panels that you would see in game. Obviously not everything you do in game will work on your phone, so no this is not a sneaky announcement of a mobile version of the simulation, but things like browsing results and schedules, signing up for competitions, watching live streams and similar things you can expect to be available.
Q: Would be nice to have at least 1 practice server for each series!
Jtilambucano
Okay, you sneaked in a suggestion. This is planned actually, to add specific practice sessions for the various competitions. That said, because each competition is a separate series in rFactor 2 you can also simply select the series, choose a car and track and do some off-line practice.
Q: Can someone explain to me what the qualifying sessions are for in the competition system? It confuses me, because there are many races and various classifications.
Andres Valles
What the exact role is of a particular session in general depends on how the competition is setup. In the current series of competitions, we group the results of all qualification sessions together per event to make a single ranking out of them. That ranking is then used to determine how splits are done. The fastest entries end up together in a split, followed by the next ones, etc. Everybody without a time ends up somewhere at the end of that list.
Q: Can someone, please, explain the scoring system of the Tatuus winter series to me? Do I gain more points if I race people who are much faster than me?
Neil Tyler & kajoti
All current competitions have a scoring system that works in two steps. The first step is where we aggregate all race results of an event together. We use those to calculate a driver rating based on the performance in all of those sessions. What matters is where you finish, who you beat and who finished in front of you. Those ratings are then sorted into a list. The list is assigned a points table. This is also why, during an event, even if you do not race yourself, your points can change. As soon as all races in an event are over, you can see your final points.
Q: Why did you choose to make a single series (or rfmod) per competition instead of a separate one per event or session? Doing so would allow people to compete who do not own all the tracks, if they are interested in competing in only a few sessions.
lagg
We debated that and decided against it. Series are an important, and underused concept in rFactor 2 and be properly leveraging them we can use them as the basis for not just online competitions, but also single player events and offline championships in the future, and people can easily use them to host servers with the same content. If we ended up having to generate a series per session in the most extreme event, you’d end up with a ton of them on your system and we would have to start making ways to uninstall them again, etc.
Q: Where can I find the screens with extensive statistics (similar to iRacing) where I can browse session results, driver profiles and related reports and “drill down” into this information?
burgesjl
This has not been implemented and deployed yet. We do have statistics, but we did not add the screens yet to show it. So this is simple something we will add later. We figured we’d let people race first and then look at stats later.
Q: The current competition standings are multiple tabs with results, and worse, with mixed info in the grid. The formatting should be improved and you should add pages. Where is the design for this?
burgesjl
No argument about the poor formatting. There is a design for this, and it’s not fully implemented yet. Currently some tables look odd, with words wrapping at awkward places. It gets the job done, but will be improved.
Q: Oval series would be cool in future.
Frederik B.
Most certainly. At the moment we have only a few ovals in our repertoire, but we know our stock cars are quite popular within the community so it’s definitely something we want to do.
Q: Will there be voice chat built into the system for general and teams?
James Foster
I think most people are used to being on TeamSpeak or Discord or a similar voice service already, so it’s unlikely we will add something like that ourselves when there are existing solutions out there. I could see us integrating with one of those services going forward, but that will certainly be longer term.
Q: If the competition system remains free of charge as you guys wrote in the blog post how do you afford all the servers? Hosting at scale is expensive. Isn’t it a losing game?
Frederik B.
We’ve designed the system to be resource efficient, so whilst there is certainly a cost to hosting at scale, we think we can cover that. In the end, we want people to race (online and offline) as much as possible, so facilitating that is important to us.
Q: Why max 20 per splits by the way? Is the dedicated one the same as the one for public servers?
Julien Lemoine
This is something we can configure per session (or competition). The reason for using 20 now is that most if not all tracks we have support at least that many pit boxes. Also a field of 20 fits on most tracks. But we are using the “normal” dedicated servers to host these, so anything you can configure there, we can configure as well.
That’s all for today. Enjoy the racing, be fair and respectful towards each other, and stay safe!
