Of course they can, assuming they're able to get as much information as Forza, they absolutely have enough statistics, it's just a matter of what you want the statistics to do. Right now it's clearly primarily a punishment system. It doesn't have to be.
If you get bumped once in a race, right now we agree that the system probably sees you're involved in an incident once every 3 laps. That's not good practice, statistics wise. It's flawed for many, many reasons.
Such as? You're legitimately involved in one incident every three laps. It's perfectly fine practise statistically, you just don't like the result you get.
How about this instead:
Break up a lap into say 4 sections. You get that bump in T1 of lap 1. Now you have 11 consecutive perfect sections. The current system doesn't reward this behavior, but I think it's a better way to separate terrible drivers (I think they should also tighten up the boundaries a bit, and tweak contact with walls). As we've seen, it's not easy to have the system place blame on contact, so you can take that (partially) out of the equation, and place the responsibility on the driver to race the rest of the race properly.
Seems like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to me. If you scale down incidents at the start and end of the race, all you're doing is incentivising people to have incidents during a period where they're already inclined to. You practically guarantee that there's going to be a T1 incident, because there's no punishment for doing so if you run the rest of the race clean.
All you've done is moved the problem out of the rating system and into the race. Imagine if T1 incidents had a quarter of the penalty of incidents for the rest of the race. Carnage.
Forza notices clean passes, and tight drafts; it doesn't do anything with this information, but if GT has access to that sort of information, they can utilize it in the sportsmanship ratings. More data points. More data makes the results more representative of reality.
However, is that data something that counts towards what you're trying to track? Does it incentivise the behaviour that you want it to? My view is that safety rating is about how many incidents you're involved (or not involved) in. Should a clean pass be worth extra, or is that merely the expected behaviour?
I agree with your view on the nature of the races, but disagree with your conclusion, that's why I keep saying their system needs to be scaled. You have to scale your information for your race length because it affects the outcome of your results, and because we've already established it's NOT an accurate representation of how people drive.
Ah, but have we? I'd say that it's an entirely accurate representation of how people drive, it's simply that the players are being placed in situations where safe driving is incredibly difficult and not at all encouraged. But that's the game, and the safety rating is accurately representing that a lot of people are unsafe in these situations.
That's what it's rating,
"How often do you get into incidents while playing GTS?" The answer for most people is "a lot". You may think that you or others deserve to be rated more highly, but all it's trying to do is assign you a number so that you can be grouped with other people with similar incident rates.
Without the ability to assign blame in a collision, it's a very inaccurate representation; it's assigning a blind number (blind because it affects all involved parties equally even if the reality is different) to a very subjective event, and in a 3 lap race you don't have nearly the sample size of events to just rely on raw numbers.
This is the downside of any no fault system. It needs dozens of races before it gets anything near accurate. You cannot look at any single race as representative of your overall performance, because it doesn't work that way.
iRacing also has lots of people that complain that they get screwed on individual races. It's missing the point, if you're a consistently clean driver then you'll end up with a high safety rating regardless of the results of any single race. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
Yes, people drive hard in the beginning, and the very end. The ones who need to be weeded out are the ones who drive idiotically in the beginning, middle, and end. In a 3 lap race, as you mentioned, 2/3 of the laps overlap. Therefore you need to look at more information, and weight your data.
My point was that in a three lap race, it's
all beginning and end. There's no middle. There's not enough time for the cars to space out and settle before it's a dash for the line. 3/3 of the laps overlap. You're either in a pack of cars going three wide, or you're sprinting for the finish line.
Which is stupid, because it ignores a massive part of very interesting racecraft and strategy in motorsport. But that's what the game is, and so that's what you're being rated on.
Besides, people who crash at the start and end of a race are just as annoying as those that crash in the middle. Or at least I find it to be so. I wouldn't support scaling those incidents. If someone crashes me out I don't really care when it happens, I still think that they're a tosspot.
