Last week we hinted already at some new developments. Today we’ve deployed a few updates to the code as well as an extra competition. A qualifier for the first BMW M2 round of season 2. In the upcoming days we will be running a daily qualification session next to the other competitions that are still ongoing. We also made sure to update our GT3 series after the BOP that got released last evening.
Next week we will be launching new competitions, and we are still looking at which parts of our upcoming GT challenge series we can now run as part of the regular competitions. We will certainly elaborate a bit more about that in next week’s blog!
We will also be looking at our roadmap in general in the upcoming monthly roadmap, so for the rest of this one, we’ll focus on some of the questions that came in this week. If your question is not yet on the list, don’t worry, we’ve moved a few to future roadmaps.
Q&A
Are there any plans to give out trophies or awards during the competition? I’m thinking of trophies or awards for a pole position, a win, a podium finish, the fastest lap in the race etc. I think that would also excite many newcomers and keep them interested. It could also contribute to the ratings in the ranking system.
wmann
It’s an interesting idea. We did plan to offer extensive statistics, but this might be a nice addition on top of that.
It would also be nice to be able to see the profile of the driver in this context (for example in the ranking list). If this is enriched with laps, completed, races and placings and the like, that would be very nice.
MarcG
That is certainly planned, the profile being the starting point for exploring your (or someone else’s) statistics and achievements.
On a side note, we actually need a punishment system unfortunately, the last few races have been sabotaged each time by a rider (the same on all races) who then waited for others on the track to “take them out”. Unfortunately, it is assumed that there are no such idiots, but this is a misjudgement.
wmann
We do need that. I don’t think we misjudged that, it’s still being developed and tested. Chances are high we’ll come with some experiments in some upcoming competitions.
I feel like in iRacing, after the race you’re able to watch your replay for a lot longer before the session kicks you (does it ever kick you out?). Would it be possible to have something like that in these competition races? A lot of times I like to watch my replay and especially analyse certain parts, but the session ends way too early for that and I have to reload the replay if I want to do that, which I lose the motivation to do because of another load time
Kaashif
At some point after a session we shut down our servers and that is a signal for the client to go back to the main menu. We could consider keeping the client in the (disconnected) session, but if you can’t be bothered to load the replay (again) I doubt you will want to spend much time reviewing it anyway. So honestly I don’t see a huge need for this. Of course, we can agree to disagree on this.
Would it be possible to have not only personal rating (as it is planned) but also team rating. For example there could be both ratings for temporary or permanent teams. For temporary teams it could be the mean value of all participants which would help in registering a team for a special event like 24h of Daytona, Le Mans, Nürburgring etc without having similar problems of iRacing where the highest ranked driver registers a team. As for permanent teams, it would rate a team as a whole in the competition system. I can see a few ways to implement it, but I would like to hear if you have something similar in mind already.
Robert
Our plans are to introduce the concept of a team in the context of individual competitions, where the actual competition will have constraints on what is and is not allowed when a team of drivers signs up with an entry. At that point we could certainly also add a constraint based on some combination of the individual ratings of the drivers in that team. We want to remain as flexible as possible here.
Would something like notification system for your selected “Nemesis” be feasible? What I mean by that is we would have a way to select certain individuals from either our friend’s list on steam or even directly a random person from online rankings in competition system that we would like to be notified of their progress, perhaps fastest lap time set in Hot Lap competition? For example, you are running in an offline session, and you get a pop-up that your “Nemesis Rich Richardson III” has just beat your time in HL standings. It would be a fun and interactive way to motivate you to come back and beat a time set by your friend and have banters about it.
Robert
I think that’s a great idea! We obviously planned to allow you to track your (steam) friends, but this sounds like a fun addition to that.
Would it be reasonable to also have a system that would allow you to download/watch replays from other people in such Hot Lap competitions? Like top 5-10 places automatically upload their laps to the public area where a person could just click from menus and have a quick look how person XYZ deals with his/her attempt to set the best lap time.
Robert
Yes. We keep those around, so we could offer ways to download (parts of) them.
Could we have a support system in place similar to rFactor’s competition that allows quick renting a server with selected content for a certain amount of time to host perhaps a quick event for friends without having to set it on your own machine?
Robert
Further down the line, yes, either as part of the competition system or as a stand-alone system. We are similarly also toying around with some ideas to allow leagues to use this system.
For when the use of skins in the competition system, would attract many more people, teams, photos etc, it is one of the strong points that attracts the community, being able to see their skin or see the skin of some other driver and motivate yourself and know what team it is.
Adrian Blasco
We are still looking into the best way(s) to do this.
I’ve been MIA these last 2 weeks in the Competition system because I have bitten off FSR pre-season and testing to join a VEC team. It made me think that if the CS used a car and track combo that’s the next round of such major leagues that a few people practising might jump in for a jolly. For example Sebring is coming up in VEC so Sebring in the GTEs for example.
davidporeilly
Certainly an interesting idea. Something we would have to discuss with such leagues, also because often they use their own BOP and/or content builds, so we’d have to make sure that those would be aligned too.
Follow up on this, I know there has been talks before about leagues on the comp system. With how stuff is like now, do you see a possibility for leagues like VEC (who use official content only and is run by the amazing Jimmi who is part of S397) or for example FSR, which uses official tracks and an original formula car, to be run inside this same system? Maybe also fun to have Jimmi his stance on this.
Remco Majoor
I will pass this question on to Jimmi as well, maybe he can respond next week. As I mentioned above, we are certainly looking at how to integrate leagues (that stick to “legal” content).
I don’t know if it has been mentioned before, but 5 minutes is a tight window to hit when dealing with ‘issues’. And currently there are always issues. At the moment each new circuit pretty much means writing off the first race or qualifying session that I join and then making meticulous preparation for the next on the basis of what problems I discover in the first.
benborp
Yes. We are considering longer sessions. At the same time, people also want to race, so this is a bit of a trade-off.
Is it possible to have a rookies’ competition online separate to the current one?
cristianuk
How would you define a “rookie” in this context and what would be the purpose of only allowing them and not everybody else. Sure we can have entry criteria for competitions, I’m just not sure what you want to achieve here.
Considering the amount of people that complain and already do not drive a series because they need to own all tracks in that series, why not make a middle ground? Series that are more for pickup racing (the ones that will run every 2 hours in the future for example) have like a new mod every track (all the free tracks in 1 mod), and the series that are more aimed at league style races, like for example the GT3 challenge (where it’s wanted that people drive the full season) everyone needs all the content to sign up. This way you won’t lock out the people that just want to drive one certain combo, but not the entire series, and it keeps peeps who join the more league style races more committed to driving all tracks that season.
Remco Majoor
I think the middle ground we have now is to also have competitions that don’t require paid content. Fragmenting the competition by having people only join part of it, apart from all the extra rfmods it generates, sounds like a bad idea. We want to encourage people to participate from A to Z. We might offer shorter, simpler competitions if that ends up what people want. Or more special, short events. Time will tell.
I would like to see some kind of career progression. Make a skip barber series, top half of the leader board can go for a USF2000 series, and go like that through PM18 until the Indy or something like that with Clio/Megane/GT3 Cup/GT3.
Juninho Tilambucano
That’s planned by having competitions that you can only sign up for if you meet certain criteria. We will obviously have to see how this works out, if enough people would want to go through such “ladders” but I think it would be a cool feature.
