Competitive Racing License

^ that's playtesting which can involve devs and testers (it will have done). It should also be tested for the environment that it is intended for, not a controlled environment in a lab.

PC2 should've gone to public beta first. There would've been far less uproar if players knew they were involved in a beta test.
 
mattikake
^ that's playtesting which can involve devs and testers (it will have done). It should also be tested for the environment that it is intended for, not a controlled environment in a lab.

PC2 should've gone to public beta first. There would've been far less uproar if players knew they were involved in a beta test.
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I can assure you that's not the magic bullet you appear to be suggesting.

Plenty of titles get large betas, some open and some closed, and yet still don't get these things right for launch and still have this 'uproar'.

No licence system is going to be perfect, they will all have ways to be gamed, that you will never stop.

Nor will any period of testing (open, closed or otherwise) remove all of those, as such it will at some point need to be face the 'metal' of release. Even that will not throw all of the issues up in a short period of time after launch, its an ever on-going task.

It even has some quite clear real world comparisons, just take a look at how BoP systems, driving ranking, championship points scoring and bracketing systems are constantly being adjusted over the years and decades.

I have to be honest and say from my personal view, of the two titles to have released with a driver rating system this year, the PC2 one is by far the more robust and less open to abuse of the two, and not by a small margin.

Do that make it perfect, and with no room for improvement? Of course not, but as a starting point I actually think it pretty robust.

The only truly difficult call I would say in it, revolves around the disconnect penalty, and that's one that I don't see getting changed and for good reason. Now first off I have never personally had a disconnect because the host left, as the migration system's worked well for me so far, nor do I agree that drivers should be penalized for this (and have said so before and it should be possible to ensure this is the case). A point which the @The_American agreed with and said would be discussed with the dev team).

However in any other set of circumstances, such as you connection drops, your ISP is being rubbish, etc. No way exists to know that is the case, and its not been disconnected because the driver didn't want to lose. In these cases unfortunately inuring a penalty is, in my opinion the lesser of two evils for the driver rating system as a whole.
 
mattikake
^ that's playtesting which can involve devs and testers (it will have done). It should also be tested for the environment that it is intended for, not a controlled environment in a lab.

PC2 should've gone to public beta first. There would've been far less uproar if players knew they were involved in a beta test.
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That would have been an ideal world...
But rescources (money+time) often push for less ideal situations. This is true for all products. The liscense system is not unplayable and so it would have been rescources thrown away for something that could be resolved in a cheaper way. These saved resources have now been allocated to morr pressing and importand issues or features.
The system does still have 1issue the amount of disconnects combined with the penalty.

Plus no finetuning the elo-system is not beta-testing! There are reasons to believe we where beta testers pre patch2.0 but no the liscence system is not one of them. Even with a beta they still would've had to tweak the system afterworths so again a beta for this would have been 'wasted' rescources.

Sorry but the sad truth is development works due to it's rescources so it's resources will descide what will be done and what not.
 
Scaff
The only truly difficult call I would say in it, revolves around the disconnect penalty, and that's one that I don't see getting changed and for good reason. Now first off I have never personally had a disconnect because the host left, as the migration system's worked well for me so far, nor do I agree that drivers should be penalized for this (and have said so before and it should be possible to ensure this is the case). A point which the @The_American agreed with and said would be discussed with the dev team).

However in any other set of circumstances, such as you connection drops, your ISP is being rubbish, etc. No way exists to know that is the case, and its not been disconnected because the driver didn't want to lose. In these cases unfortunately inuring a penalty is, in my opinion the lesser of two evils for the driver rating system as a whole.
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As I've said before at some length, applying an arbitrary extra penalty to the skill rating destroys the validity of that rating, for everybody.

Any other means to penalise it would be preferable.
 
Outspacer
As I've said before at some length, applying an arbitrary extra penalty to the skill rating destroys the validity of that rating, for everybody.

Any other means to penalise it would be preferable.
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Such as?
 
Scaff
Such as?
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Anything... if there's no alternative, then there's every reason to scrap the extra penalty altogether, since it does so much damage to the skill rating overall. (And for clarity, I'm still assuming that quits/disconnects would still count as a DNF, with points lost anyway - but, crucially, gained by those who remain. The points stay in the system).

When discussing it earlier, I thought the best / fairest idea was to track quits on a separate score, giving some penalty after the score rose above a certain ratio of quits to races entered (e.g. +2 points for a quit, -1 for a finish, penalty if it reaches 5). That allows for the odd disconnect without extra penalty. However, what the penalty should be, I'm not sure. Thinking of real world cases, grid position penalties or race bans come to mind. Grid position wouldn't necessarily punish since it couldn't always be applied, but might be enough of a threat to do the job. A race ban doesn't work outside of a season, but could be simulated by preventing entering an online race for a period of time. The goal of course is to get people to stay in races more - for that to become their habit.
 
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This is hilarious. All this rhetoric about SMS not needing to play test system and like the Elo system, that everything can be understood with data collection, everything can be tested in a simulation...


....it's like someone copy and pasted this convo off of an MMO forum from 10-15 years ago :lol: Nothing you guys are saying is original, ive read all this before, line for line. That genre learned from its mistakes, and now they put significantly more effort into testing than anything SMS has dreamed up.

Any word on when that next magical patch that will fix everything? ;)
 
twitcher
This is hilarious. All this rhetoric about SMS not needing to play test system and like the Elo system, that everything can be understood with data collection, everything can be tested in a simulation...
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Who said that?
 
Scaff
Who said that?
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...pretty much the convo @Mr Tree and I have been having.

He said that debs don't need to play the games themselves, don't need to test the games, as all that can be done with data collection and running sims.
Mr Tree
I didn't reply to your previous message as it clearlu showed how you did not understand what I meant.

But since you descided to keep up the war here goes nothing.

In short no a dev doesn't have to play. A dev needs us to play, while we play they store data on what we do and what happens. This way they get that info you say they should, according to you, receive through their personal experience. This way they don't have to put in the effort of playing themselves. Since elo-is a purely mathematical approach they don't even have to get your personal impressions to see if it works as they expected. As for an elo-rating only the end result is important.

Now to see if it FEELS fair or not it would be better to have actual communication between the player and developer (fora). But then again it's not nessescary to check if it works as expected.

So again why would the american need to inform you about his online stats/playtime? Why would anyone of sms need to do this?
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As to why I'm curious what @The_American's online stats are....i thought that would be pretty self explanitory. I'm curious to know how much experience he has racing in online public lobbies. Im curious how much experience any and/or all of the SMS staff have participating in their own online lobbies. Is that such a strange thing for me to enquire about?
 
twitcher
...pretty much the convo @Mr Tree and I have been having.

He said that debs don't need to play the games themselves, don't need to test the games, as all that can be done with data collection and running sims.
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Is this a deliberate strawman? :embarrassed:

Where did I say they don't need to test it? Please point me in the direction.

What I did say: Extensive beta tests for a system like the elo-rating are often not worth their money. Off course they should test it,...

What do you mean by simulations?

And on the no testing, is WMD not a testing community? Yes I know on playstation 'it wasn't tested'.

And I do agree on this title beeing a bit too glitchy on release, something I admited in posts before,...
 
Managed to build up my license rating back to 1454 after a series of disconnects made it plummet all the way to 1384.

Then got a disconnect again last night...back to 1414...

More interestingly I saw a guy that had 50 completed online races and had the silver ribbon in his license. Torston-Schmidt or something...

Wonder how the hell he got the silver ribbon and license with only 50 completed online races.
 
Let's add some positivity around this forum. So far it's been mostly about bugs, refunds, and disconnects. I still haven't had a disconnect in all of my online play, maybe it's due to PC, maybe it's due to my PC being connected via a short ethernet cable to my router, not quite sure. Online has been absolutely rock solid with great ping and close racing, unless I'm up again people from NZ or AUS and even then it has been pretty smooth.

Anyway, last night I was racing at Laguna Seca with CanAmVRL guys. It was a 40 minute practice with 15 minute qualifying and a 10 lap race.

I've qualified second in the GT3 class (it was a 2-class race with GTE and GT3) in my 488.
After the first lap or so I've been able to maintain my second place with @crowhop following me closely behind in his Lamborghini.
It's been a great race for second place in our class (and eventually for first, after the guy in front of us accidentally hit the pit limiter button and spun out on lap 3 or 4).

Now, @crowhop is a better driver then me (plus he spends about 3x time playing the game then I do), so the only reason it was a close race is that I had the Ferrari advantage :)
But boy has it been fun. We had pretty much the same pace for most of the lap, except for turn 10 where he usually would be able to gain a few tenths on me, but I was able to keep him at bay for about 7 laps.
I think right before the last turn of Lap 7 he finally had the advantage on the inside, so I had to concede. Still, most of the time he was right on my tail or we were side-by-side turn after turn.

Great fun!
This is just last night, I'd say most of my online experience has been similar, but maybe not quite as exciting. I hope most people will be able to resolve their disconnect issues and enjoy the game as I do.
 
FuriousDemon
Let's add some positivity around this forum. So far it's been mostly about bugs, refunds, and disconnects. I still haven't had a disconnect in all of my online play, maybe it's due to PC, maybe it's due to my PC being connected via a short ethernet cable to my router, not quite sure. Online has been absolutely rock solid with great ping and close racing, unless I'm up again people from NZ or AUS and even then it has been pretty smooth.

Anyway, last night I was racing at Laguna Seca with CanAmVRL guys. It was a 40 minute practice with 15 minute qualifying and a 10 lap race.

I've qualified second in the GT3 class (it was a 2-class race with GTE and GT3) in my 488.
After the first lap or so I've been able to maintain my second place with @crowhop following me closely behind in his Lamborghini.
It's been a great race for second place in our class (and eventually for first, after the guy in front of us accidentally hit the pit limiter button and spun out on lap 3 or 4).

Now, @crowhop is a better driver then me (plus he spends about 3x time playing the game then I do), so the only reason it was a close race is that I had the Ferrari advantage :)
But boy has it been fun. We had pretty much the same pace for most of the lap, except for turn 10 where he usually would be able to gain a few tenths on me, but I was able to keep him at bay for about 7 laps.
I think right before the last turn of Lap 7 he finally had the advantage on the inside, so I had to concede. Still, most of the time he was right on my tail or we were side-by-side turn after turn.

Great fun!
This is just last night, I'd say most of my online experience has been similar, but maybe not quite as exciting. I hope most people will be able to resolve their disconnect issues and enjoy the game as I do.
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Man, that was a blast. Good to have you in there with us.

I look to be doing this tonight...you should do it too.
https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/friday-night-fun-november-3rd-lmp900.362959/
 
Moved from U1500 to F1487 in 3 ranked races. No disconnects, no weird glitches and most importantly no a-holes so far.

My approach will be to race only cars on tracks I'm familiar with and right now that's the Formula R and Ginetta GT5 (nobody races those online :grumpy:). I took a chance on my 1st race and jumped into the Huracan GT3, finished 2nd; or was it 3rd? hmmm, but decided that was a risky approach.

I think the my problem will be having enough patience to learn a decent number of tracks/car combos (there's just soooo many :crazy:) to fully enjoy online.

EDIT: PCars2 needs scheduled online racing events.
 
It seems to me more and more as if the system is heavily tilted to want to punish you for any mistake and not really wanting to award you for good results. It should be balanced out more imo.

To give an example...after yet another disconnect I was sitting at 1414. Joined a race at Imola, qualified 3rd and at the first corner get rammed to hell. My car is severely damaged to the extent that I can't turn the wheel at all or I'll spin out completely. After the first lap I'm more than a minute behind. After another spin I decide just to retire to the pits and view the rest of the race so that I don't just quit/disconnect. At the end of the race I still lost 30 points...why? Doesn't make sense to me...I didn't disconnect or quit at all. There were 8 other racers btw.

Next race I run against 13 other racers at Monza and finish second...my score increases by 3. And there were lots of people ranked high 1400's and 2 in the low 1500's behind me.

I just don't get it...
 
Was a bit frustrated yesterday, leading the race, my internet connection resetted. Forced disconnect. minus 48 points
upload_2017-11-11_13-46-46.png
 
I have been rammed deliberately 2 times in the same race by an A rated guy who didn’t like the fact I was faster.

That cost me the race, 10 points of my skill licence and went down from my A rate to a B...

It’s clear that the rules to get higher ranks on the clean driving level should be reviewed. If a person that decides to ram gets up to A something is not working as intended.

I’m fuming right now...
 
I'm far more willing to join public lobbies with the license feature turned off now. Often there are high skilled drivers that are just fed up with the current licence system. I sincerely hope the system is tweaked in a future update. I love the concept, but feel the punishments are far outweighing the rewards.
 
Am i the only one who gets total beating in online racing? I always thought I am good driver. Not the best, but not bad. But in online in PCars 2 I am always near last position. I know i can have not enough skill, but before release i thought this licence system will work similar to GT Sport, matchmaking drivers with similar rank together for more competitive racing, and in PCars 2 you are selecting room, even if it have low Ranking, I am always racing with High ranked drivers that totally destroys me ;( To bad we don't have any Matchmaking which will put together drivers with similar performance on consoles.

Or is there a way to filter rooms selection for only Beginners driver to slowly develop skill?
 
Well, my rating is not going the way I would like it - after a good few races where rammers seemed to populate the servers, I have got some many cautions I've lost count. Although the frustration in the moment was abject internal rage with a hint of vocal abuse at the screen, I found it hard to curse the rating system overall.

The chances of it being anything like accurate overall are slim, I mean, look at F1, they can't please everyone with their decisions on who is at fault in a contact through close racing, and they are humans who are supposed to have cognitive abilities! A game? It will place some rules and hope that they cover 95% of the likely outcomes in a fair and balanced manner. - kinda what PC2 seem to have done.

Yes, it is a shame that it penalises someone for contact that isn't their fault. Yes it is annoying when your rating dies due to a disconnect through no fault of your own, but at least for me, I am happy to have some form of a rating system in place and am happy to wait until it is fine tuned / developed to reflect a fairer overall balance.

Now to find a server where rammers and people who think that an overtake is using you as a brake are far and few between :)
 
The thing is the licence system has taken a lot of fun away from the racing.

I used to play WOT a lot and rating is everything there. If you have a bad game, sometimes due to some RNG, other players or yourself, it's infuriating to see your rating drop. PC2 seems to be the same. I never used to get really angry playing PC1.

Lately to have fun, I've been entering the odd lobby race where the rating system has been set to off. You can just go in and enjoy a race, not too bothered where you finish as long as you have a few good battles along the way.
 

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