"Easy" doesn't even remotely describe what you've suggested.
Take braking, as you suggest. How much leeway should there be? 1 meter? 2 meters? 5 meters? 10 meters? What if I hit my brakes to avoid an accident, and in doing so cause another accident? Am I dirty? Because that happens quite often.
What you are suggesting is an AI that is trained on the many, many, laps of the broad audience to determine what behavior is out of line, and what is not. Not easy (yet) and not cheap.
We have seen countless videos on this forum and debate who is in the wrong, and you think it's easy for an algorithm? There is more than can be done to apportion blame properly, but the current level of penalties is the most livable we've had in a while.
Let's make a difference between rekless driving and mistakes made in good fait.
If I try to avoid an accident causing by consequence an other one, I nevertheless caused a collision and I should own it taking responsability and accept the penalty. Still, that is an accident by definition and I know I wasn't intentionally trying to "hurt" anybody when losing control of the car.
An other story is when I brake 30 or even 50 m beyond the ideal braking point of the fastest lap so far during my race (Tokyo first corner fi). Let's say that I'm still in "good fait". I should try everything (i mean at least all is in my possibility) to avoid to hit the guy in front of me... rather than target his back to send him spinning around, allowing me to (diabolically) make the turn. The poor guy may lose up to 15-20 sec while I'm going away with just 4 or 5 sec. This kinda psico driving is easily detectable, let's say.
The delta in braking point depends on the approach speed, the higher the speed the higher the delta (regardless the differences in driver's skill). With the amount of data that Polyphony has on quali-laps from different skilled players, races (dayly or official contests) from all DR an DS categories, I don't see the "science fiction" of an algorithm monitoring and policing 12 to 16 objects (players) in a rather confined space. Especially when those aren't always altogether engaged like at the start (in fps games the algorithm takes care of 128-150 players)
That said, my approach may be lil too sim-racing than fun-racing, I know.
II don't know neither how it was when the game was released, nor the improvements throughout the different patches. I started just 3 month ago, visiting gtsport from ar 3 weeks.
I've already noticed the transparency trick in messy situation, wich is a huge pro compared to the old good times (early 2000). I'm sure, since I got finally g923 today, I'll find my place in rather clean lobbies than messy ones.
The thing is the game can't tell what you are thinking?
How does the game decide if you were making a move or the other person was? Or someone was defending too hard etc
Then you have the net code and frame rate issues where cars positions alter slightly when there is a spike in Jitter so one car may not visually be as close as it is in reality?
I mean I agree the penalty system feels pretty archaic now and even done a couple of videos of those crazy penalties you get when other people crash and they rejoin in bad ways, or where the pack comes to a standstill unexpectedly and you tap the back of a car after the crashes and still get a penalty.
I could go on and on about this.
The optimum solution but still error prone would be to use Sophys AI to steward the incidents and run it against its fair play Model to see what it would have done etc
For those situations that can be described as outliers (fi MV and LH at Copse in '21 and many others) there's not so much to do. I understand that the policy could be conservative, thus the penalty threshold should be larger.
I'm more focused on those deemed as reckless driving, like hitting whatever moves around you. I've seen many (imho already too many) in only 3 weeks. It seems to me that, regardless the missions room where overtaking without touch is mandatory, people tends to overtake like they're racing with bots. Isn't it? I know that when I'll rank up I'll see less messy races, but for now it is sometimes quite frustrating.
The trick is to find a good online racing club that hosts lobbies at times that work for you. There are quite a few out there worth joining.
I like the idea, thanks. I'll try that for sure in future.