At this time I am more interested in a non-series league. Where each week is a different car and there are no point totals. Allow for some driving of more cars instead of the same one over and over. Speaking of the Z cars, the Gran Turismo one in the new dealership would be fun, or even the Academy version.
This is more the direction I'm leaning right now. Honestly, the way they keep changing/breaking the game every few weeks has made it very difficult to run a points series. Throughout this whole season we've had to constantly make changes and compromises after updates and while we had an all time high number of participants we had to limit the number of drivers allowed in each race. It's been very frustrating on my end and has had a negative impact on my enjoyment of the season.
But what do we do instead? This is the big question. The weekly points series format seems to be the most popular, there are really only a few successful "clubs" and they all use different formats. We've been discussing various options internally but haven't come up with anything real solid. We've had some good ideas but some of them are too complicated, I firmly believe that the more work we require from the members and stewards the less successful it will be. I've never asked anything from you guys more than showing up and racing and I've built things on my end so it requires as little work from me as possible (thanks RDAardvark) and I think that's why we've been so successful and had 4 complete, solid seasons with well over 20 drivers each time.
One of the simplest things to do is just remove the points and a lot of these issues go away. We could still have our regular race nights/times, but we wouldn't have to worry about a points contender getting locked out of a full room, we wouldn't have to worry about cancelling a race due to low turnout or a host's schedule conflicts, we wouldn't need rules about not racing more than once in a night, we wouldn't be locked into driving the same car every week, we wouldn't have to worry about somebody's mistake costing a points contender their chances at a victory, and most importantly we wouldn't have to make new rules and procedures after every update.
That's pretty much the only solid idea I've come up with so far. We basically keep things the same but remove the points and every week or two I select a different car or cars that we can race during that time. Members could make suggestions for cars too, or I could put up a poll with a select 3 or 4 cars and everyone could vote on what they want to race for the next couple weeks. Vintage cars, street cars, race cars, karts, we could cover it all and get to enjoy each selection for couple weeks and then move on to a new one. I could recruit 5 or 6 capable hosts so we're not dependent on one or two people to host all the races, if we get enough hosts we could even have races almost every night, at both US and UK friendly times.
I haven't thought about it much further than that so I haven't fleshed out all the potholes and loopholes, but I'm not sure if there would be too many. This plan gets rid of a lot of the commitment and headaches that go along with a weekly points series and it's something I'd like to try for a little while. If it's a flop then we could go back to a points series but it could turn out to be even more fun without the points.
Thoughts? Feedback? Suggestions? I'm just thinking out loud here, throwing stuff against the wall. But racing with you guys is what keeps me turning on the PS3(s) every day and I don't want that to end. I just want some of the frustrations to go away.
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