- 86,796
- Rule 12
- GTP_Famine
That's really just my guess. Okay, maybe a inference, based on the observed outcome and what we know about GTWS points and slots.
tl;dr: Even if they could just press a "DQ this guy and bump everyone in the race up one spot" button, the effects of the "incidents" - both immediate and longer-term - have already occurred and cannot be undone easily or fairly.
What they've done is disqualified the driver from the round, no matter in which slot the infraction occurred. I can see that this makes some rational sense - you can't just destroy races* and then go on to reap rewards later on when the other people may not have the opportunity to race slots 2/3 - even if it looks heavy handed.
However, after that initial choice it's a nightmare to do anything other than what they've done.
We know that each lobby's points are calculated based on the average DR of the lobby, and that poses the question: if they're disqualified, do they "finish" last or are they erased from the lobby entirely? If it's the latter, then their DR is removed from the average DR of the lobby and the outcome will see everyone's points affected - maybe for the worse, which is hardly fair on the people who beat them.
However, regardless of which path they choose there, it only affects that lobby. Players, including the DQ player, may have raced again that day in the hope of getting more points. Firstly, would they have even done so if they were one place (and up to 25pt) better off in the incident-affected race? If not, that affects the next race they choose to enter and the players in it who may have got more points from better finishing positions caused by the absence of a live event-tier driver. Secondly, if they got more points in the subsequent race it would make any adjustment to the previous race moot. Thirdly the affected player would be DQed from that race as well, affecting the points of that lobby in the same way as the first (and if it was the first and second races, the next race too!).
And that's just championship points; there's also the effects on DR downstream. In the 11 days between the first race and the first penalties, the players who raced in that first race and came out with the DR they came out with may have driven dozens of other races each - going in with the wrong DR, leading to the wrong DR exchange calculations, giving everyone else in the lobby the wrong DR - affecting hundreds of other players, all making decisions based on their DR ahead of the next championship races. And also causing the wrong points for Manu R1, Toyota R2, and Manu R2, and decisions based on the points scored each slot there too.
This can't easily be rectified - and the choices based on the wrongly calculated points scored cannot be rectified at all. It doesn't make sense to attempt it either, because someone (probably a lot of people) otherwise entirely unaffected by the original issue is going to end up being disadvantaged by it.
If they're going to be doing this (and I'm very glad that they are; driving standards have been dog** for far too long), it needs to be a lot less than 11 days after the fact. For that matter, as it's only happening to "top split" (ugh) races, it needs to be done in a dedicated "top split" (ugh) race. Like the old Top 16 Superstars races, which they can't do because only last year's finalists are S Ranked drivers now and in any case the way they used to do it basically ended the hopes of 95% of A+ drivers a quarter of the way through the season.
It's... a mess. On top of a mess. Hiding inside a third, larger mess. And a bit of a PR nightmare. Luckily Sony just laid off a whole bunch of PR people (including one of our GTWS contacts) so that's just great.
*Not that any of the original incidents we saw destroyed anyone's race; the worst we saw was about a second's swing between drivers. The fact that such a massive punishment was levied for such a minor barely-an-incident is incredible.
**Not helped by the non-punishments given in showpiece live events; had this current method been used in 2022, Fraga would have been the first two-time champion (though I always felt Miyazono was the most blameless of the front three)...
