It sounds like your objection has more to do with the fact that it's a different setting than what the rest of the league runs, rather than you believing that the setting itself is bad. Can you clarify?
That's only part of my objection. Since I became a steward, I've kind of always been a little surprised by how few incident reports come out of D1. As competitive as most of those guys are, I would have expected different. They have always seemed to be hesitant to bring up questionable behavior on track, for whatever reasons. Why shouldn't they pay for their mistakes the same way every other division's drivers do? Or, are they SNAILs from a different "escargatoire"?
Over the course of my stewarding tenure here at SNAIL, I've witnessed, while watching replays from every division, more cases where the penalty system, via ghosting, have prevented someone's error from becoming a multi-car pile-up, at the worst, or, at the least, ruining one other driver's race, than I have where its contributed to ruining more than one driver's race at a time. While I can't say it's consistent, because I've seen that same penalty system ghost a car for no apparent reason I can discern, it's still better than running penalties off with heavy damage on. From my perspective, if you're going to run the former, you should be using the latter. If you're really after realism anyway.
I've run in a couple series that use those settings and it's pretty much self policing, even though, by the time the policing is done, at least two someone's races are as well. So far as I know, the SNAIL philosophy is to promote clean, close racing and with these penalties off and heavy damage on, that wouldn't be the case for many. I will say this in favor of them though. It might encourage others to be more adamant and diligent in reporting SNAIL OLR infractions.
Imagine, if you will, the following example, 2 drivers competing for a podium finish, hell, it doesn't even have to be a podium, the guy behind brain fades on a brake or turn in point, goes off the racing line, gets squirrely, and heads for the car they were competing position for; with penalties on, there's at least half a chance the system will catch it and ghost their car through the other and only ruin his own chances at that position. With them off however, there is no chance at all. It might have been an unintentional mistake and both drivers know it, but the results, with penalties off, are at least one of those drivers is in the ditch and more likely both will at least get damage they will have to deal with, one way or another.
I reckon what I'm trying to say is, from my experience, the in game penalty system, flawed as it is, still has more benefits, promoting the SNAIL way of racing, than it has detriments. To have our best drivers, in our top division, disregard those benefits because they disagree with how and when the in-game referee blows his whistle, especially when they know when and where it might happen, just seems seven kinds of all wrong to me.
This has pretty much all been said before, back when the D1 guys brothered up, grabbed the democracy sword rack and asked for it, then got it. I was against it then and still am. The fight was lost back then, by the side I stood on, and I'm not really interested in fighting it again. Well, except for this last salvo. If they want help dealing with drivers who abuse their no penalty setting, they know where to click. If this boils into a movement to make all divisions run without the penalties on.... So be it. At least then we'd all be running under the same "Spec".
Does that clarify my stance on it at all? I can be much more brutally blunt about it, if you'd like me to be.
