he patch for May includes a lot of invisible tweaks to the engine to reflect a change in the game player density since the introduction of mid-season games.
Race Changes
The dramatic reduction in AWOL players has changed the gameplay and made the game more competitive than ever. Unfortunatly, this had the unforseen impact of making penalties of random events more costly because the number of cars that would often profit from mishap is now roughly double than a few months ago before mid-season games were introduced.
As a consequence, the effect of random events has been changed in two main ways - firstly it has generally been reduced overall. Secondly, and of greater interest to players is that the impact of sliders is now more dramatic. However, please remember these events are still triggered by a combination of factors - so if you are driving an unreliable car you will need to allow for this, or indeed if you are driving on a notoriously tricky circuit you should still think about packing your pace off a little and staying well away from some of the race strategy features that cause you to push harder.
The cause of events in BATracer is still a very complex process and can never be pointed at one particular thing - however as ever with good planning and foresight you can adjust your sliders to minimize risk and maximise your performance and bring home the top points.
Collisions
Generally the rate of collisions has been reduced by 1/3rd. This is a vast simplification of the changes that have been made, but reflects the rate of collision in testing. Previously collisions were the dominate form of retirement in many championships and left too much emphasis on the sliders of other drivers.
Driver Pace and Driver Error
The influence of the pace slider has became more stark. There is a 20% greater emphasis on the players slider settings. The slider "curve influence" is now steeper with reduced penalty at bottom end. There is less influence of circuit difficulty.
Mechanical Failure (race only, not qualifying)
The influence of the mechanical sympathy slider has became more stark. There is a 10% greater emphasis on the players slider. Slider "curve influence" is now steeper with very low penalty at bottom end. Engine reliability has became less of a factor, however - influence of the base car reliability and historical circuit statistical retirements are unchanged.
Race Starts
The chance of bad starts and stalling has been reduced overall. Furthermore the influence of the sliders has became more prominent. Finally the "die-rolls" for these events were incorrectly made with an integer model accounting for up to 10% increased-rate of incident than originally intended!
Other Stuff!
# A preliminary implementation of driver sackings has been introduced - see separate news.
# The number of practice runs awarded to mid-season players has been reduced from 20 to 12.
The rest of the changes focus on minor additions to the functionality or display of the profile page:
# Newbies may not add profile comments.
# All profile comments are now shown - deleted ones are displayed censored (with a link to who posted it) instead of not shown at all. Previously deleted comments however cannot be recalled (they really were deleted!).
# If a player has been subject to a temporary ban, the time of their "release" is now shown on the profile page for the benefit of other players.
# Sacking statistics are now shown on a users profile, both for the number of times they have initiated a sacking, and the number of times they have been sacked.
Where it says "you need a setup for bone dry" refers to the current warmup session, so you can disregard that.
It's really your call as to what to do with it.
