PENALTY SYSTEM IS STILL A PIECE OF ****!!!

[Redneckchef]

I have to agree I was finding it cleaner all of a sudden as well. People far more willing to not bump too much, and not keep the position on a bump pass as the victim can now retaliate. Had some great racing with this new system, but I must be one of the only people not getting the CRB as I have either bumped a wall or picked up a 0.5 track cut every race since. Need to run some race A to get a streak going.

 

[VrapPlus]

My only question is, does anyone at PD actually play test patches before they release them? At least for the penalty system?

 

[sundaydriving]

My only question is, does anyone at PD actually play test patches before they release them? At least for the penalty system?

I'm sure they test it to some degree. It costs money with diminishing returns so they probably simply think they can save a bit of money and use the exhibition seasons to get some real results.

 

[Outspacer]

Races are still generally cleaner than with a penalty system, tighter battles, faster due to better matchmaking. Also thanks to the people on here for making it one of the best evenings in racing!

Heh, when I made this post back in June 2018 I think most people thought I was just being silly (in the bit I've now bolded), but it was a serious point to counter people who thought that any penalty system was better than none.

What any system absolutely should not do is leave room for dirty drivers to exploit it. By that I particularly mean any way to deliberately hand a penalty onto someone else. Also, what we have now encourages dirty players to find ways to be dirty without getting penalised (such as repeated taps on a straight to push someone off the road) which they are free to do beacuse any attempt at retaliation will likely result in a penalty. In some ways races were cleaner without penalties because dirty players had to consider that they could face revenge!

---

That's the thing with PD. We don't know (and we will never know) how many people work on the penalty system. If the rumors of GT7 being a launch title for PS5 are true, it might literally be one guy somewhere in a corner working on it in his downtime.

I had an alternative guess at the reason...

One is that SR currently works badly, even worse than at launch, the other is that PD do not appear to be on the right track with improving it (to put it politely). My ideas might be a solution to the first problem, but for the second there isn't much I (or we) can do. It started with a fairly clean, technical, design (that could've evolved into a good system) but since then has all the hallmarks of succumbing to design by committee - "bad driving must be punished", "skilled drivers should have fewer incidents", etc, with the poor programmers being forced to integrate those demands without appropriate design time.

In other words, the programmer is given a very poor specification of what it should do, yet very little freedom to devise their own idea of a good system. It seems like demands from users were not filtered through a competent designer before being handed to programmers.

 

[ROCKET JOE]

Heh, when I made this post back in June 2018 I think most people thought I was just being silly (in the bit I've now bolded), but it was a serious point to counter people who thought that any penalty system was better than none. ...

I honestly hope ( I can't tell you how much ) that they stick to a minimum penalty strategy since I'm 100 percent sure there won't be any automated system within the next decade that will do a proper job.
I want to encourage all the good racers out there to learn to enjoy less stress and fear and more options and freedom on track, even if being chaotic at times.
And I honestly hope, that PD's focus will be on altering and improving the SR system and the matchmaking. They're great tools when implemented the right way, so that's the next necessary step to make the whole thing work.

 

[xo3]

I had one of my worst races yesterday (constant ramming, 4 divebombs). I don't want to "teach" dirty players to behave. Maybe that is a solution for people doing several races a day. All I want is to join a race (often just one race a day) and have a good chance for a fair and clean run.
I am DR A/B and SR S almost all the time since I started (2 years ago). After they removed the penalties I had no clean race, which I would call good and fun. Even with the random penalty algorithm before I had far better races.
If I want something like this, I can do some matches in GRID too.

What I am interessted in is, in which DR lobbies do you expirience better, cleaner racing now and in which lobbies did you race before (DR/SR). Maybe I am just in a bad place where inexpirienced drivers meet dirty psychopaths and wannabe racedrivers missing racecraft?

Hope the piece of **** penalty system comes back very soon...

 

[Dorofint]

I honestly hope ( I can't tell you how much ) that they stick to a minimum penalty strategy since I'm 100 percent sure there won't be any automated system within the next decade that will do a proper job.
I want to encourage all the good racers out there to learn to enjoy less stress and fear and more options and freedom on track, even if being chaotic at times.
And I honestly hope, that PD's focus will be on altering and improving the SR system and the matchmaking. They're great tools when implemented the right way, so that's the next necessary step to make the whole thing work.

I honestly hope ( I can't tell you how much ) that they stick to a minimum penalty strategy since I'm 100 percent sure there won't be any automated system within the next decade that will do a proper job.
I want to encourage all the good racers out there to learn to enjoy less stress and fear and more options and freedom on track, even if being chaotic at times.
And I honestly hope, that PD's focus will be on altering and improving the SR system and the matchmaking. They're great tools when implemented the right way, so that's the next necessary step to make the whole thing work.

IRacing shows that a better system has been possible for years. But in a way, the developers of IRacing have it easier. Their customers are almost all racing enthusiasts who have something like racecraft. GTS, on the other hand, is played by many different players. Among them are children, chaots and arcade players. It is difficult to satisfy all of these players. A good penalty system is technically possible but would drive some of these players out of the game.

 

[Sven Jurgens]

I had one of my worst races yesterday (constant ramming, 4 divebombs). I don't want to "teach" dirty players to behave. Maybe that is a solution for people doing several races a day. All I want is to join a race (often just one race a day) and have a good chance for a fair and clean run.
I am DR A/B and SR S almost all the time since I started (2 years ago). After they removed the penalties I had no clean race, which I would call good and fun. Even with the random penalty algorithm before I had far better races.
If I want something like this, I can do some matches in GRID too.

What I am interessted in is, in which DR lobbies do you expirience better, cleaner racing now and in which lobbies did you race before (DR/SR). Maybe I am just in a bad place where inexpirienced drivers meet dirty psychopaths and wannabe racedrivers missing racecraft?

Hope the piece of **** penalty system comes back very soon...

Luck of the draw still plays a role. I have been racing all day yesterday, from 8:30 am to midnight (with a couple breaks) and my DR climbed from about 20K to 39K so I've gone through all the DR.B and DR.A rooms. On average they were all better than before, but yes there were still a couple bad ones. Less than before but you can still get unlucky and join the one race that turns into a wrecking zone.

First race today had both Canada's dirtiest and the Brazilian posted on before in the race. They got into it against each other I guess and finished last lol. One calling the other dirty after the race was the icing on the cake! The rest of people were all clean, leaving room, being careful. We don't need a penalty system, but we do need a new measure for SR to separate the bad apples and the reckless from the careful contact free drivers.

 

[ROCKET JOE]

... We don't need a penalty system, but we do need a new measure for SR to separate the bad apples and the reckless from the careful contact free drivers.

Fist bump, mate !

 

[Sven Jurgens]

Apologies to Canada's dirtiest, just had a very respectful clean race with him. He can turn it on and off, hopefully he'll keep it off now he met the other dude. The Brazilian is still terrorizing the room, all against him now, he finished last again.

This is the race before that, I went from 18th to 2nd in lap 1. You can see both dirty drivers in action.

Clean race bonus and fastest lap for that, stayed in 2nd to the end.

I won the race just now but it was a brawl with the Brazilian. I escaped his first brake check but then he punted me at the next corner. Still got to brake. When he tried to brake check mid karoussel the game ghosted him so we finally got passed for a nice 4 way race to the finish.

 

[Deadpool]

Maybe have SR penalties for contact but not time. So instead of receiving a silly time penalty for contact your SR takes a hit.

 

[05XR8]

I shared this in the FIA thread. From my alt account. I qualified a surprising P1 and this happens.


After this race, I said I don't care about penalties. It's the driving standards by the players, which is paramount. Some will never care. The majority do. We just have to keep racing.

 

[fastone371]

I shared this in the FIA thread. From my alt account. I qualified a surprising P1 and this happens.


After this race, I said I don't care about penalties. It's the driving standards by the players, which is paramount. Some will never care. The majority do. We just have to keep racing.

Besides dirty drivers the other thing that drives me insane are the crap crash physics in this game. When you drive in the grass and hit walls you should be losing massive time but in Polyphony's world that is how you set fast lap, what gives????

 

[Dorofint]

Besides dirty drivers the other thing that drives me insane are the crap crash physics in this game. When you drive in the grass and hit walls you should be losing massive time but in Polyphony's world that is how you set fast lap, what gives????

A strong slowdown is also not physically correct. Indestructible cars like in GTS would hardly lose speed with wallriding and would actually be faster than cars that drive the curve correctly. With damage, of course, things look very different. Then the cars would take damage after the excursion to the wall or in the grass and would then be significantly slower. Especially in the case of aerodynamically sophisticated cars, a trip into the grass would damage the underbody and that cost massive downforce.

 

[Voodoovaj]

It's just a vicious cycle now.

PD make a poor version
We complain and propose a fix
PD implement a fix that doesn't address the key issue
We make suggestions on how to fix the fix
PD implement a fix that doesn't really address the concerns of the previous fix

etc, etc, etc, etc


Maybe they are using a bad Google translate to get their feedback instead of using qualified community managers like everyone else does

 

[Mc_Yavel]

We don't need a penalty system, but we do need a new measure for SR to separate the bad apples and the reckless from the careful contact free drivers.

and a working report function.

 

[Tea_Leaves]

It does seem you're more reliant than ever on people behaving themselves and that isn't easy against random online opponents. That's also magnified in the EMEA region where the player pool is bigger.

A potential trickling problem is how it's more easy to reach (and stay) SR S. It will be interesting to see over the weeks how clean races will be if more and more dirty drivers are hitting S or whether there are changes in mentality if people are "ganging up" to take out the rotten eggs. Maybe they'll change their dirty ways. I can see that being a good thing.

I did plan to take a break from Sport Mode until the next update rolls out but I've seen some positivity over the current system (nice to see instead of complaining over and over ) and I'm compelled to give it a second chance. Although I still feel this is a quick and dirty "fix" to address the light contact 5 and 7s penalties. I hope it will be the foundation to a more robust system in a future update.

 

[Voodoovaj]

PD seems to have taken the "Sport" aspect of this game a little too lightly.

FIFA, Madden, etc, are all rules based games. There is no game to play without those complex rules sets.

For a very long time, PD has not had to implement actual rules and it seems they are struggling to do it. I don't really understand how this is such a low priority for them. This SHOULD be the highest of priorities.

 

[Sven Jurgens]

Races are pretty clean again at the Nord after the rotten apples from this morning left. It's mostly regulars, we all know each other and how to race each other. I had a bit of trouble with one DR.S driver but that sorted itself out quickly, next race was great, clean close battle with him.

The biggest change since the patch, far less cursing after the races. Mostly congratulating each other on clean driving and apologizing for messy moves. Rules are still needed, but a bad penalty system was only throwing fuel on the fire. It's much more relaxed now there aren't any BS penalties and pile ups at the penalty zones.

It's an interesting (although unintentional) experiment.

 

[Dorofint]

Races are pretty clean again at the Nord after the rotten apples from this morning left. It's mostly regulars, we all know each other and how to race each other. I had a bit of trouble with one DR.S driver but that sorted itself out quickly, next race was great, clean close battle with him.

The biggest change since the patch, far less cursing after the races. Mostly congratulating each other on clean driving and apologizing for messy moves. Rules are still needed, but a bad penalty system was only throwing fuel on the fire. It's much more relaxed now there aren't any BS penalties and pile ups at the penalty zones.

It's an interesting (although unintentional) experiment.

I'm not that surprised. I played Forza 7 when it was brand new and after a long break again a few weeks ago. Even in the races in which the new Foza penalty system was not active, the races were much cleaner than at the beginning. That also seems to be the case with GTS. When a game is new, many different players try it. Including many children and chaotic or aggressive contemporaries. That causes chaos online. Over time, many of these players switch to other games and only those players remain who are really interested in the game. In the first half of the year, the current penalty system would probably not have worked and caused even more chaos. In the meantime GTS is over 2 years old, the number of players has decreased but now the real racing fans seem to be the majority. This will be so especially on the Nordschleife because only a few casual gamers dare to do it. That is why the new system seems to be working. But before we cheer, we should wait a few weeks and see how everything develops.

 

[CrimsonKing]

No matter what PD do people going to complain.
It was better with the harsh penalties system.
People need to learn to drive better learn more than 1 racing line.
PD should just leave the penalties system hard.
Better to have than not to have

I don't care if penalties are harsh as long as they are fair. The last penalty system was anything but fair.

So, when's the next Forza coming out?

I'm still hoping for a Gran Turismo competitor on PS4. Perhaps something by Codemasters. I renewed my yearly PS plus subscription only for GT Sport but now Im on the verge of giving up on it.
And it's not only the penalty system. I play weekly races almost exclusively but they've been neglected horribly. Just look at next week races, same old same old Suzuka. What happened to RBR, or Monza or Alsace or St Croix, etc. All of this can be easily fixed but nope, not a chance.

Sorry for the double post dear mods.

 

[PaoloMX]

I did plan to take a break from Sport Mode until the next update rolls out but I've seen some positivity over the current system

I was thinking the same. Not played sport mode since the update. Was convinced at having everyone on Sr S would make it a divebombers paradise. But maybe it’s not sounding as bad as I thought so I’ll test it out when the new (i mean overly used) dailies come out tomorrow.

 

[djidane57]

dragon trail next week with this no penalty system......be prepared to be punted into the chicane of death and gain a 1,5sec wall penalty

 

[Tea_Leaves]

I was thinking the same. Not played sport mode since the update. Was convinced at having everyone on Sr S would make it a divebombers paradise. But maybe it’s not sounding as bad as I thought so I’ll test it out when the new (i mean overly used) dailies come out tomorrow.

I did some races at St. Croix and 2/3 were clean but I sometimes saw bumping and shoving in groups of cars. Nothing too nasty like divebombing or people purposely ramming others off. The majority were racing clean: giving space, no attempts at sideswiping when 2 or 3-wide, acknowledging they have made a mistake and not blocking cars behind.

Although sadly in my last race, I was pit-maneuvered by an idiot (I guess there's always someone willing to swing the balance of clean and unclean) and goes onto finish 4th while I lost 3 places. I think there needs to be a punishment (add a penalty on at the end of the race) otherwise this type of person will continue being reckless since they know there's no consequences to their dirty and unsafe driving.

It's not enough races for me to judge it so I'll remain neutral. Although I have to emphasize that you really are in a luck of a draw situation with lobbies and have to hope most are racing clean. I personally see no merit or fulfillment gaining places and winning in a dirty way. However, a proportion of people who play this game will see it as a "norm". I guess it's a case of weeding those people out.

 

[larrybr07n]

It's not enough races for me to judge it so I'll remain neutral. Although I have to emphasize that you really are in a luck of a draw situation with lobbies and have to hope most are racing clean.

Same. FIA was generally more clean for me today, I have a feeling more people know what they are doing there.

On the other hand, I did a race B tonight and I was absolutely butchered, dead last by turn 1 after being punted into hell, managed to get back up again to 10th before being sideswiped again at the last corner on the last lap. Very different experience from the races I did mid week, so yes, it's a draw situation really.

 

[Sven Jurgens]

Hmm the patch was after people already had 3 days to learn the tracks, then it took a while to catch on that penalties were gone. Now everyone is in SR.S, tomorrow could be the worst Monday in the history of GTS

 

[astrarobotica]

PD seems to have taken the "Sport" aspect of this game a little too lightly.

FIFA, Madden, etc, are all rules based games. There is no game to play without those complex rules sets.

For a very long time, PD has not had to implement actual rules and it seems they are struggling to do it. I don't really understand how this is such a low priority for them. This SHOULD be the highest of priorities.

I was thinking about this a couple weeks ago. Most sport/competitive games are designed to always be played from a fair perspective, meaning they are not coded to allow players to cheat or be intentionally unsportsmanlike (at least I think? there may be some exceptions) as you could in a real sport; outside of glitches and exploits that aren't initially accounted for, the game is only coded to even allow fair play.

But that's just not possible with racing sims, because the control inputs (in terms of what you're doing mechanically to the car) are nearly 1:1 with their real life counterpart. Whereas in Madden, if you were to grab someone's face mask, that would have to be intentionally programmed to allow you to do that.

Anything in a racing game done to limit a player's ability to play unfairly against other players (corner cutting excluded) would mean taking some amount of mechanical control away from the player. Or the simple solution would be ghosting everyone, but then it would effectively be a time trial.

Anyway, that's just a weird thought I had recently. I just want the old system back, pre-Laguna Seca update. It wasn't that difficult to maintain a high SR, and I had consistently good races with other S-rated SR players. If someone was acting like a dick, they usually got banished to the lower-rated lobbies. Now I mostly get matched with drivers I've never seen before, and it's always a mess. Before I could recognize people I got matched with regularly and let anyone else's SR tell the story. Now I go into every race blind, and it's always bad.

I understand not everyone wants a strict penalty/sportsmanship system, and that's fine. There are plenty of racing games to play if you want a free for all. But this was basically the only game outside of iRacing that offered that kind of system with proper matchmaking.

 

[fastone371]

I was thinking about this a couple weeks ago. Most sport/competitive games are designed to always be played from a fair perspective, meaning they are not coded to allow players to cheat or be intentionally unsportsmanlike (at least I think? there may be some exceptions) as you could in a real sport; outside of glitches and exploits that aren't initially accounted for, the game is only coded to even allow fair play.

But that's just not possible with racing sims, because the control inputs (in terms of what you're doing mechanically to the car) are nearly 1:1 with their real life counterpart. Whereas in Madden, if you were to grab someone's face mask, that would have to be intentionally programmed to allow you to do that.

Anything in a racing game done to limit a player's ability to play unfairly against other players (corner cutting excluded) would mean taking some amount of mechanical control away from the player. Or the simple solution would be ghosting everyone, but then it would effectively be a time trial.

Anyway, that's just a weird thought I had recently. I just want the old system back, pre-Laguna Seca update. It wasn't that difficult to maintain a high SR, and I had consistently good races with other S-rated SR players. If someone was acting like a dick, they usually got banished to the lower-rated lobbies. Now I mostly get matched with drivers I've never seen before, and it's always a mess. Before I could recognize people I got matched with regularly and let anyone else's SR tell the story. Now I go into every race blind, and it's always bad.

I understand not everyone wants a strict penalty/sportsmanship system, and that's fine. There are plenty of racing games to play if you want a free for all. But this was basically the only game outside of iRacing that offered that kind of system with proper matchmaking.

But it was no better before the update, yes penalties were handed out but more likely than not they went to the wrong person. It was so bad that a dirty driver could force your SR down.
In my opinion the game is far from what happens in a real car, the game is far to lenient to small mistakes and large mistakes that do not seem to cost much lap time.

 

[astrarobotica]

But it was no better before the update, yes penalties were handed out but more likely than not they went to the wrong person. It was so bad that a dirty driver could force your SR down.
In my opinion the game is far from what happens in a real car, the game is far to lenient to small mistakes and large mistakes that do not seem to cost much lap time.

I don't mean before the most recent update (which came with Laguna Seca), that one was quite bad with handing out penalties for no reason. Before that update however, it was fine, and how it's mostly been since I started playing over a year ago. And if you're talking about that as well, then our experiences are just different, because once I started driving with self-preservation, it was very easy to maintain a high SR, and I had consistently cleaner races when other players had high SR's as well.

And yeah, I don't mean the nuances of the physics, I just mean the input control is roughly analogous to actual driving. In terms of what you're manipulating to control the car. Whereas if you're playing a game like Madden, the controls don't translate at all to what an actual football player does. So it's easier to limit what the player is capable of because they aren't directly manipulating the body of an athlete. But in racing games, the playing is directly manipulating the car with a similar level of control as in real life.

 

[NoStopN]

I haven't raced much this week & I've kept it restricted to race B. But, I'd have to check the replays in order to see any improvements to the penalty system. But, I raced on Tuesday with the penalty distribution system in overdrive & Thursday after it got toned down & can say that I will take it like it is now (v1.54) as opposed to the v1.53 penalty algorithm.