Agreed with the post above, and what does a online ranking get you in the end? If you want a real reason gt academy beat that and you actually win a life changing experience, which is a lot better then a leader board position.
Online rankings have the potential to completely revoloutionize the online racing part of GT5. Outside of organized series and private groups, open lobby online racing is almost completely non-existant in GT5 nowadays. How many times have we heard, over and over ad nauseum, that public lobbies are smash up derby's, free for alls etc?. If we had a workable system we could have a ranking system for drivers as far as accidents go, speed, wins, average finishes etc. If you could then take one or more of those factors and use it to set up your own race lobby, you could potentially exclude all the jokers that want to run around in X1's crashing into people and driving backwards.
Say for example there was a system that ranked the number of times you made contact or caused a shunt. Someone who never makes contact might be a 100. Someone who makes contact on average twice per lap might be a 0 and everyone else in between based on some algorithm or something. So maybe I could set up a lobby and only allow people with a ranking of 50 or better to enter and race. No more crashers and bashers.
You might also have a standard driving test, like the AMG Academy, that anyone can take and earn a ranking as a driver, say gold, silver and bronze. I could set up my lobby for only gold drivers, or leave it open for all levels of drivers. Or maybe I'm an average driver and want to race against other drivers of the same calibre so I set it to silver only.
There are numerous ways you could sort through drivers to make a better experience for everyone, but PD has chosen to just leave things wide open and as a result, after 18 months almost no one is actually racing in street cars in public lobbies.
