@newmedia_dev
DR is a journey, not a destination.
This is 95% of a quote famously attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1920’s. The subject was “Life”, however. I’m as sure as I can be that DR cannot be compared to Life.
It's a measure of relative ability at a given point in time.
If the factors of an equation are flexible then the result has no worth.
But it's just measuring race results. That's it.
Actually, it’s a reflection of your race results based solely on those races you participated in.
The reason we have DR is to balance the measurement scale for various factors.
Not according to the GT7 online manual:
・Driver Rating
This is an indicator of the player's "speed". There are seven different ratings in total: E, D, C, B, A, A+ and S. Achieving good results in Sport mode races will increase your Driver Rating.
It helps rate people with differing race numbers (those than can race lots vs those that can't can be measured in comparison)
“Chalk & Cheese”. And why does this comparative measure have to exist in the first place? People only “care” what rank they are because PD decided to rank everyone in the first place and then tell us what that rank was.
It indicates the consistency of your performance over time. Some times you are inconsistent or slower and your results reflect that (DR) sometimes you are consistent, fast and your DR reflects that at that point in time
It is a result solely calculated upon previous race results irrespective of when those races took place.
It is a sensible measure to try and group people of a similar ability to balance races.
Agree 100%……bet that surprised you. “Try”, however is the operative word. My personal experience is that the matching in GT7 has too many obvious flaws. There are many other posts within these hallowed pages where people have been confused by the make up of the fields they have been presented with. There seems to not be a published representation of the matching criteria/formula that PD uses. As far as I am aware, anything you may have read is either anecdotal or a guess, or both.
It will always be fluid, in any given race regardless of DR roughly half of the field has to lose DR.
Famine has said on many previous occasions that the net DR value in each race is always ZERO. Some will “win”, some will “lose”.
It's an interesting experiment setting up a new account, starting from a lower DR and SR level. What happened to me and I hypothesise this is what happens to a lot of people is that you initially perform awesomely because of the skill differential. So you progress much more quickly but that comes to a grinding halt when you hit your natural level similar to your first account.
Ok. So you have started an alt account. You then race in the knowledge that you will likely dominate these fields and thus increase your DR. In doing so, and because of the published Rank system, you will diminish the worth of those races and, more importantly, diminish the psychological worth of the players you have “beaten”. Some may actually “lose” a level as a result of your participation. If these races are in the WRS events, you have also reduced the perceived value of those events in addition to reducing the potential in-game currency rewards of others.
All in all, you will have artificially changed the DR mechanic to suit your own ends. If DR were not published, would you have still set up an alt account? Come to think of it, why did you set up an alt account in the first place? DR protection anyone?
It shows that DR works "mostly" as intended in classifying players in to logical groups of similar ability which is the point of it in the first place.
Agreed…to a point. That said, I didn’t ask to be classified nor should the classification of others matter to me. All that should matter is that I am racing in a field of drivers of a similar ability and mindset. Why do I need a published DR/SR system to enjoy that?
SR then tries to balance behaviour and as Famine has mentioned is the first part the system tries to balance people on.
- are players similarly considerate?
- are they roughly of the same performance ability?
- sort by quickest
But it is flawed, both in its definition and application. There are many, many examples of this within these forums. In addition, there are too many opportunities to “game” both systems. If DR/SR were not in the public domain, surely such opportunities would be diminished?
So for me now DR isn't the badge I thought it was, it's just a brute force (although quite elegant brute force) mechanism to group players and roughly indicate performance at any given time.
It was only a “badge” because we chose it to be and PD gives us the opportunities to both flaunt and worry about it equally. It is a metric that has become far too important and in my opinion, detracts from the fun of car racing.
Sorry for the wall of text. These are just my thoughts, for what they are worth.
