My story of all this things happening...
I think its verry sad that there is no real drag racing in gt5, i have played for 10 months? and there is incredible good tuners around, and manny unique characters i havent seen in other games like these. But i feel that they dont get the response they deserve, thats why i stopped playing gt5. We put more time on getting a equal launch, than really tune our cars. As i have wrote manny times, we need timing system to see if our changes makes us come there faster or slower. For example, as it is now, you have a fast car, that is one that pulls you when you race it, then you try to make yours faster, and then the other one improves it again. But if you have timing system, and lets say the fastest one runs 1 mile in like 20.556 seconds, tuners can then improve their cars untill they reach that number, much more accurate than trying to get an equal launch and "match" up with the other one.
When i first started playing gt5 drag i saw it as "street" drag, where rules and accuracy wasnt that important. But as time went by, more and more cars became more competitive, and tuners wanted more accuracy so they could them sleves improve their cars even further. Not only so they could "beat" the same car as they were using, but also other more over powered cars. Now we all came to a big problem, that is the launch? In the beginning people run by the time, but soon they discovered that the total time wasnt accurate either, not to mention people that jumped/left late. Then we started running trees, but that didnt work either, since the tree gets affected by latency etc. We then try to find a tree that is some how equal distance to both players, and that can be hard, specially if you only have players from two areas, that is US and UK. It will never be fair if a UK person treeing, and a UK and US person racing, my bet is that the UK person will see the tree first, which is a huge advantage in drag racing. I have seen now and then, and from my own experiance, that if the person treeing lives closer to the person racing, he will get the launch, even if the other one has verry good reaction. You have to take consideration of latency + reaction time, and if we do that, we can clearly see that the person livin closest to the tree will be the king.
Whats next, well, we tried to anticipate the total time launch, that is, you know your opponent that well, so you know "approximatly" when you should release the e-brake to get an equal launch. That worked well some times. But "some times" and "approximatly" are terms that can screw up pretty much in drag racing. Hence thats why i was always saying, "we fight a war that never can be won", thats is, it doesnt matter how much we optimize our cars, we wont get the result we deserve with these tactics we are using.
Lately, it has also become a kind of competition on who has the best internet connection, since the tree gets affected by latency etc, and people have understood that it could be strictly hardware/software issues that determines who gets the launch and hence exit the finish line first. This wont work man, i have been in many rooms, where everybody is boasting about their connection, including me, thinking they are the fastest one, just because they got 100mbit. If it only would be that simple....huh. Well, they are right sort of, the performance of the room gets affected by the peers....but if we are getting that picky, whats the point of online racing?
Dont get me wrong, i dont want to talk bad about the user created drag racing in gt5, i was a part of it as well. But as 10 months go by, and you run into the same problems, and run out of ideas, you start thinking. We as drag racers have done everything, we have optimized alot of cars, and really tested them against others, and we have seen many interesting results. But to achieve that, we have had a hell of a hard time, just because PD failed to implement a basic feature of a modern game, and that makes me pissed of.
Solution?
Well, implement real drag racing with timing system, that shows you your own time, regardles of the other one. When your front tire is passing a certain spot at start, the clock starts, and when you exit the line, the clock stopps. You can have one time that shows you your reaction from tree + the time it takes for you to reach there, and a time that only shows you how long it took for you to reach there. Easy and simple. In that case, it doesnt matter if the other one "sees" the tree first, because you can still compare your time with the other opponent, minus the reaction time. As far as i know, that is how they are doing in real drag racing? And if not, this is the most simple and fair way to do it in online gaming. Our "enemy" is latency, and this is the only way to get around this so called problem. Think of it as a stopwatch, instead of you holding a physical watch, its implemented in the game.
Feel free to share your ideas......and for those that say that drag racing is only for a limited ammount of people living in the south, well open your eyes kid, i live in the south, and i like drag racing, so does manny of my people. But i live in Sweden, not US, its called the globalised world.
/TT3 a.k.a "i tree yall" not any more...
All I am asking is this.
Drag racing is definitely not the biggest thing.
