And why does that not make sense as the game advertised matching with equal opponents?
Is an average A ranked driver an equal opponent on the track as far as skill set or lap pace or usually experience when compared to the average D ranked racer?
Does the average D ranked racer really stand a snowballs chance in hell of winning a race against the average A ranked player?
It doesn’t make sense to me to have a full grid of all D drivers to be a necessity. If it happens, great, but if you can’t get a full grid of any DR rank, then the ranks need to be mixed to get a full grid.
In my opinion, equal SR, followed by a full grid, are the most important things. It’s purely personal preference, but I can’t stand small grids. I’d rather finish last out of 20 people than finish first out of 5.
You could make the argument that, “well what if it was an incredibly close battle between 5 equally matched drivers.” To me, it still doesn’t matter, as I get little to no enjoyment out of an isolated 5 car battle. Why? There’s no context for the battle, and little to no consequences for decisions made in said battle. If you’re in a pack of 5 cars, battling to get on the podium, it’s awesome, but you have to remember, there’s a dozen other people another 5 seconds behind your battle. So you have to juggle the risk/reward of making aggressive moves, you and your battle pack have to manage overall pace so as not to be caught by even more people. If something does go wrong, now you have to scramble to get back on track and defend from more people, try to lose as few positions as possible, and recover as many as possible. If you’re in a 5 person race against equally matched opponents, you make one mistake and drop from the pack, that’s your race over - you’re not going to catch them up, as they’re of equal skill and pace. The rest of your race turns into a hot lapping session.
Regardless of the points calculations the D ranked driver beating another D ranked driver is just as much an accomplishment to him as it is for an A ranked driver beating another A ranked driver and that D ranked driver works just as hard using the skills he has at his disposal as that A rank driver does when he wins.
I disagree with that. A win against an A level opponent will always be more significant than a win against a D opponent, regardless of the skill level of the victor.
If a D ranked driver racks up 500 wins against other D ranked drivers, and an A driver gets 1 win in 500 races against other A drivers; to me, that 1 win by the A driver is more significant than the 500 by the D driver. Especially if any of those 500 wins came against less than full grids.
Yes, lets look at real life racing for a comparison, in real life racing most racing is divided into different series or divisions that the drivers advance through.
In GTS the DR ranks are very much like divisions with the E class being a low level club racing, the D class being a faster club racing and say the A+ class being the pro big boys or top echelon class such as the F1 class of GTS and the C and B class being in between those two more of the lower level or beginning divisions of actual series racing .
Now in real life you will not see Hamilton and the Sunday club racer being matched and placed on the same grid so why should GTS be any different?
In real life racing a driver moves up to racing against the faster racers by advancing to the next highest division in a race series or going into higher series where he then competes against the faster drivers within that series.
But to be on the grid and racing against the best of the best such as a Hamilton or a Vettle then he would need to be racing in the F1 class and unless he was in that class would not be racing against them.
This is pretty much how things work in every real life series out there, why should it be any different in GTS if we are trying to have the game mimic real world racing and it seems by some of the responses that many think they actually doing more than playing a game?
Show me where in real life that a casual weekend warrior club racer is placed on the same grid in a Moto GP race with Valentino Rossi and then maybe you can justify why a casual D ranked racer should be matched against and racing the A+ guys in the game as apparently trying to use real racing it seems to be the next attempt to deem justification for the unequal matching within the game to be okay as that is the way it works in the real world according to some.
Do that and then maybe we can justify why Lebowski who started this thread and is a D ranked driver should be okay and wanting to be matched against, Shotta072, IAMDOODLEBUG and Alpha Cipher all whom are at least A ranked racers and have responded in this thread with responses that is legitimate for him to be in the same grid as they are after all we are racing here.
I very much understand how driver rankings work in real life. I think the point I’m failing to convey is that, in real life, at the majority of club level racing, the split from the front of the grid to the back of the grid is massive. It is extremely rare to find amateur, club level racing where a 15+ car grid all qualifies within 1 second of each other. Usually, there is a spread of several seconds from the front to the back. This is because at a low amateur level, it is extremely diffficult to find people who have nearly identical pace (this is due to all the mistakes they make...find me two different racers who consistently make the same mistakes as each other). It’s only when you get to the very upper echelons of spec category racing, like Aussie Supercars or IndyCar, where you will see a full grid of 20ish drivers seperated by less than 1 second.
As far as racing Hamilton at a Sunday cup race as a lonely grass roots racer, it could very well happen, if Lewis were to actually show up at a Sunday cup race. If Hamilton were to just randomly show up at Brands Hatch on a Club weekend, they wouldn’t make a seperate race for Hamilton to race in by himself. He’d be put on the grid with everyone else, which would include kids, retirees, first timers, etc.
Furthermore, amateur drivers race against top professionals in real life, all the time. This is precisely what the FIA license ranking system sets up. You have Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum rankings, and in most sports car racing, there are Bronze through Platinum drivers on the grid. WEC, Blancpain GT3, WTCR, VLN, ELMS, AsLMS, Int GT Open, and more all use this format with a very wide range of driver skills sharing the circuit at the same time.
Well I guess maybe we should get PD to put on their game packaging unless you a serious player want to spend years "gettin gud" then Sport Mode is not for you if you want to race and be matched against equal players and actually frequently be put into races where you may win a race.
This is what many that take this game so seriously fail to comprehend that most people that buy and play games are not serious players and have absolutely no desire to spend"years studying and training" to play a video game as games are just not one of their major priorities in life.
Many players do not care to be at the top of the rankings or be one of the best, the game is a diversion or get away for a short while from the real world and whatever pace they may have is fine if they are having fun.
To me, the bold parts are quite hypocritical. If you do not care to be the best, then why are you so hung up on being given an easier chance at winning races? Don’t get me wrong, I understand the idea of wanting to win, but to me, it seems like you’re just asking for the game to come up with a system that hands you easy wins. To which I then ask, “for what”? That little insignificant, split second sense of glee when you see the race result screen and you’re in P1, or to see your stats on your profile page start to increase? Again, what is the significance of someone’s profile page claiming they have 500 wins, but they’re all against low ranked opponents?
Believe it or not the mindset shown by many on this subject is not what the mainstream desires, do not believe me is fine, just look at how many game accounts are active on GTS and then look at the numbers playing Sport Mode and that shows that Sport Mode as is is not popular with most players.
I would be willing to bet not having a fair chance of winning a race is one of the main issues that you would find when dealing with a casual nothing to do because it is raining and nothing is on tv type of racer .
And right here is the problem. Too many “average” and “casual” players also want to be “winners”. It’s a huge problem in motor sports in general, way too many fans and media are solely fixated on winning, when in racing, winning is really only a small part of the story. Regardless of your position in a race, a race is a series of victories and defeats - the final result is really insignificant, and only really matters at top level competition where prizes for winning are involved.
At the end of the day, I don’t think we’re going to agree on this matter, but frankly, in my opinion, your argument basically boils down to wanting to be given more of a shot at winning more races against easier opponents - something I just can’t get on board with.
True, but the big difference here is we're not talking about a field of, say, V8 Supercar drivers. We're talking about a game with a claimed player count across the globe of 5.5 million.
Fair point about the player count, but I’d just add in the counter that of those 5.5 million, only 6% have put any significant time into sport mode.
I get that in theory, based purely on the numbers, one would think it would be relatively easy to find 15-20 people of relatively equal skill to populate a grid. I just think the reality of that idea, in practice, is a lot more difficult to achieve than people are willing to accept, especially if the desire is to see grids split from front to back by less than 1 second (a random time difference I’m using, but I think 1 second is a fair approximation of a “close grid”). The reality is, that in almost any form of racing (baring things like short track oval racing), from Sunday Cup amateur racing all the way to the highest level professional racing, finding grids that are split by less than 1 second is extremely rare. Furthermore, the lower down the ranking system you go, the wider the gaps from the front of the grid to the back of the grid get. So like I was saying, you might get a Supercars grid of 22 drivers split by 1-1.5 seconds....but the chance of that happening in something like a GT86 Cup, or Clio Cup, is extremely rare.
I think that's part of it, but also just wanting close races in general. I know I'd rather lose a hard-fought race and end up fourth than not see another car after the first lap and win.
The current system leads to a lot of processions. You might get lucky and get a close fight with the two or three cars around you, but that's about it.
I’m fully with you about wanting close racing. But that’s just it, I want close racing, but I could really care less about what my overall finishing position is. I’m constantly judging myself, earning small victories, suffering small defeats, each lap, each corner.
Unfortunately, car racing in general is quite processional. For whatever reason, many of us fans have been led to believe that it shouldn’t be, that it should be like NASCAR or BTCC every lap, every race, but the fact is, it’s not. Most racing, at all levels, is processional. Close fought, wheel to wheel battles are an exception to the norm, which is why they are so exciting.
What I think a lot of people fail to realize is that close racing, actual hard fought battles with attacking and defending - the vast majority of those battles are caused (or set up) by a significant pace difference between two cars. In real life racing, this pace difference is usually contrived by tire degradation. F1, IndyCar, Aussie Supercars, they all use tires that are basically designed to degrade at an enhanced rate, and then they are forced by the rules to use two different compounds in the race (with a limited number of tires available for the entire weekend). This is what causes the majority of the pace overlap that leads to close racing. Series like BTCC, WTCR, and Super GT take it a step further by adding success balast into the mix - again, a method of artificially mixing up the grid for the purposes of producing close and exciting racing (as well as ensuring championship battles get strung out as long as possible). If it weren’t for success balast and the grocery list of tire regs, these series would be strung out processions. Almost forgot too, BTCC and WTCR use reverse grid formats, again, to “artificially” produce close, exciting racing.
Unfortunately, the other side of the coin isn’t much different. If you put 10 people on a grid together, and they all qualify within 1 second of one another - without articificial tire deg, success balast, or fuel strategy - that race will more than likely be a procession. It’s a pretty commonly accepted notion that in most racing, for anyone to pull off any kind of overtake, you basically need a 1 second per lap pace difference, at minimum (some series like F1, it’s even higher, up to 2.5 seconds difference). Without this pace difference, attacking and defending becomes a moot point, as the attacking driver simply will not have the pace to make a reasonable attempt at an overtake (ie not a rediculous dive bomb). It becomes a battle of “who will crack under pressure first”, which can be fun in its own right....but it is a very processional way of racing.
So again, to me, I’d rather race against a full grid of a wide range of skill levels, and just enjoy the variety of racing situations that come my way from one race to another; as opposed to racing against small grids of “equally matched” players. I put “equally matched” in quotes because that’s a notion that only works on paper, whereas in practice it’s very difficult to find a group of racers who are equally matched across all aspects of racecraft. One race, I’m fighting tooth and nail with the heathens at the back of the grid. The next race, I spent the whole race running nose to tail with another, equally matched driver. After that, I manage to jump out to an early lead, and have to focus my energy on managing my pace, controlling the gap to the person behind me, keep concentrated and not lose focus, etc.
. Respect goes both ways.
