Player created clean rooms are not a viable way to grow a large scale competitive gaming environment. Player communities are inherently clandestine and exclusive. I remember the clean rooms and it usually involved a bunch of regulars who could get away with murder while calling out the new guy for every little infraction. Interpretations of the rules from room to room varied and were inconsistent with divisive views on barge passing, blocking, etc. Ultimately people splinter into cliques and people choosing to specialize on courses the online gaming environment can spread the player base thin.
In Sport mode I can pick up a race full of cars typically within less time than it would take to: hunt for a room that has more than 3 people, a room that doesn't randomly kick me, watch everyone finish the race, change tracks, and then join a race with only 2 hot laps under my belt against the host's 2 hour stint at that track. Meanwhile everyone is optimally tuned while I still have default settings because the race just started.
I'm glad you had a great time in the GT6 lobbies but it wasn't that way for all of us.
Well, from all the angst from Day1 about the Sport Mode penalties, the endless confusing changes to them with no end in sight (and no consistent progress, more one step forward, one step back type 'progress') I'd say that the price for 'large scale competitive gaming' is a game that cannot adequately emulate the rules of the sport it pretends to simulate. I don't see that as any progress
whatsoever. I see Sport Mode very much as a soccer game that cannot tell if you picked the ball up and ran it in! Sure, it might LOOK like soccer, but no soccer fan would play it..!
If you had a bad time in GT6 rooms, you simply weren't looking for the right ones. No decent 'clean or kick' room ever randomly kicked. In fact, few of them even ran tuned. The emphasis was on driving and racing skills, not how many hours you put in fine-tuning the car. You saw many of the same faces that populated the SNAIL and WRS spec series, and until the PS4 came out and scavenged a fair bit of the player base while PD dragged their feet (as usual) plodding away for a couple of years before GTS was ready, I seldom saw clean or kick rooms with only a few players in them.
Perhaps you are thinking about tuner rooms? Seldom even labeled clean or kick, invariably run by someone that always raced at the front because of his hours of setup time, and with little care what went on in mid to back pack. You mean those rooms? Rooms of last resort!
Look, as I said, expecting PD to magically pull a rabbit out their 🤬 and succeed at automated stewarding when even iRacing, let alone any other game cannot is optimism of the wildest degree. PD's penalty system has sucked since the dawn of time, and always will. I'm sorry, but if you want this mythical 'large scale competitive gaming', simply give up on it being clean. It will NEVER be clean. It won't even be any good at emulating series that DID allow a fair degree of thuggery (I'm thinking old BTCC, for instance!). You either set up large scale competitive gaming yourself, do ALL the work that entails (join SNAIL, for instance) or you give up on the fantasy. Because you are all going to be complaining about PD's system for the rest of this game's lifespan. And the next. And the next.
