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

[Sven Jurgens]

Back to complaining about the current system.

How hard is it to detect that their is significant overlap and that the car on the outside needs to leave a car width room on the inside. It's just not possible to race with the current system. Just drive like the other car isn't there, 5 sec penalty.

This car should have been ghosted anyway, 2 bar connection, teleporting all over the place. He even disappeared for 3 whole seconds before suddenly re-appearing in front of me again.

 

[breeminator]

How hard is it to detect that their is significant overlap and that the car on the outside needs to leave a car width room on the inside.

Like I said, I'd estimate quite possibly at least 10 years of work to get it right from where we are now. If you think about what we have now, and how long it is since we first had online multiplayer racing, it wouldn't be all that surprising if a perfect penalty system still didn't exist 20 years from now.

 

[Sven Jurgens]

Like I said, I'd estimate quite possibly at least 10 years of work to get it right from where we are now. If you think about what we have now, and how long it is since we first had online multiplayer racing, it wouldn't be all that surprising if a perfect penalty system still didn't exist 20 years from now.

That might be correct since as long as lag can't be reduced significantly, figuring out who is where exactly is impossible in real time. If you look closely at the start of that gif the other car oscillates forward and back on the radar when my speed is pretty much steady. It's guess work for me where he actually is, how can you make clear rules about overlap when cars behave like that.

It might get worse first if game streaming catches on. That will put a lot of demand on an already congested internet. Plus 4K streaming is on the rise, cable tv is on the outs. Netflix alone is responsible for 15% of all internet traffic.

 

[gtpierre]

H AI won't do it here since you need human intelligence, understanding and feel to get penalties even remotely right.

this is not true. It is possible to program self driving cars, there are algorithms that can monitor crowds and detect "abnormal" interactions (...).
It is possible and probably "fairly easy" to code a penalty system that works better than this.
It's very likely that PD either decided that it is not worth allocating financial resources to code a good penalty system or it is not worth allocating the processor calculating resources to run this penalty system.
My guess is it's the second explanation, and it's understandable. Nobody would play a game with poor graphics and physics (compared to similar games) just because it has a good penalty system.

All I want is race likeminded people. I've got enough experience to know how it feels - it's a relief. It's an environment where I can easily forgive the accidental punt, the little shortcut in front of me or any other incident that annoys me like hell when it's massive, deliberate, overambitious, careless etc. etc.
As for me, SR needs an overhaul first.
The way it is set up now doesn't correspond with what sportsmanship is ( it' s a mindset ) - to me a working SR is the key.

So you want a better SR ranking system but no penalties ?

It could work but would be a bad idea for FIA races (1) and for the sport mode of regions that have less players (2).

(1)People would get the SR up by being clean in some sport races, and when it come to "important" races, they would do whatever they need to be first and get away with it unpunished.

(2)You would not manage to fill up rooms with the top SR in most hours: so either you fill up the room with some lower SR (and it fails your main goal) either you fill up the room with only the top SR, meaning some races will have 5 cars only or less.


This is why I think the solution is to force/help people to improve their sportmanship by explaining and showing what is right, what is wrong, and increasing the main penalties (the ones that work fairly fine).

 

[Dorofint]

That might be correct since as long as lag can't be reduced significantly, figuring out who is where exactly is impossible in real time. If you look closely at the start of that gif the other car oscillates forward and back on the radar when my speed is pretty much steady. It's guess work for me where he actually is, how can you make clear rules about overlap when cars behave like that.

It might get worse first if game streaming catches on. That will put a lot of demand on an already congested internet. Plus 4K streaming is on the rise, cable tv is on the outs. Netflix alone is responsible for 15% of all internet traffic.

That will definitely be a problem. I notice it every time my neighbor streams a movie from Netflix. Then I hear his 5.1 system and on my Internet, the data rate goes down. Very bad are rainy Sundays because then many neighbors watching movies on the net. Then online games are unplayable for me. It is very bad even if Netflix and other providers publish new episodes of popular series. Even then, online games are out of the question. This will not change, because according to my provider in the next few years, no improvements in infrastructure are planned. Online games can react to this only very limited. They can try to make their own data rate as low as possible. But since the movies continue to bloat thanks to 4k and the streaming providers have priority in the use of data with many net providers this will not bring much. I do not know how it is with you but in my region there is a guarantee that for the streaming of films is always enough bandwidth if you do your Netflix subscription through the network operator. If necessary, the bandwidth is reduced for all other customers and their applications. Nice for those who book this offer and for Netflix but bad for the other customers. But maybe there will soon be similar offers for PSN users. Sony is also streaming more and more. But if every major media provider makes that, there will be no data rate left for alternative things or smaller providers.

 

[ROCKET JOE]

I put a suggestion to overhaul SR and how to on the playstation blog over a year ago in a thread asking for feedback on the penalty system. The post got removed I guess I revealed the inner workings too much (DR reset upwards bug was still going on) ...

A sad joke, isn't it ?

... In a nutshell SR needs to be based on contacts over time driven instead of the broken point system. ... For example if you plow into T1 and take out 4 cars in secondary collisions, 4 incidents against you.

You're quick, mate ! A lot of promising aspects there and a lot of knobs to fine-tune 👍 ...
My approach always was a lifetime tracking of contact ( or incident / mistake / error ) so that you get an average count per driver. Then say SR E is below 10, SR D is below 8, and so on. You'd probably need an offset to start from in order to require consistency and patience to progress to SR S ... never thought about these details though tbh.

... It is possible to program self driving cars, there are algorithms that can monitor crowds and detect "abnormal" interactions. ...

I can't argue here in any way since I'm no expert, however, I think there's reasons why even manufacturers say it will take another couple years for self driving cars to seriously run in the public. I'd suspect an insufficient AI is one of these reasons.
To make an algorithm detect abnormal crowd interaction, you will have to define abnormal first. In racing, would a weird racing line that I choose because I think it's clever or fast or safe or whatever, be abnormal ? You see where this leads to ?

... It is possible and probably "fairly easy" to code a penalty system that works better than this.
It's very likely that PD either decided that it is not worth allocating financial resources to code a good penalty system or it is not worth allocating the processor calculating resources to run this penalty system.
My guess is it's the second explanation, and it's understandable. Nobody would play a game with poor graphics and physics (compared to similar games) just because it has a good penalty system. ...

I don't care why ! It's flawed ... for 18 months now.

... So you want a better SR ranking system but no penalties ?

It could work but would be a bad idea for FIA races (1) and for the sport mode of regions that have less players (2).

(1)People would get the SR up by being clean in some sport races, and when it come to "important" races, they would do whatever they need to be first and get away with it unpunished.

(2)You would not manage to fill up rooms with the top SR in most hours: so either you fill up the room with some lower SR (and it fails your main goal) either you fill up the room with only the top SR, meaning some races will have 5 cars only or less. ...

As for (1)
No. As @Dmac72 and me mentioned earlier : No rewards ( like championship points ) for dirty driving.
As for (2)
Yes, I'd gladly have smaller grids for the benefit of ongoing proper racing.

... This is why I think the solution is to force/help people to improve their sportmanship by explaining and showing what is right, what is wrong. ...

Of course ... you got my vote 👍.
And PD :
Type down racing rules and make them accessible right beside your demo videos. A FIA sanctioned racing game without rules kinda looks bad !

 

[Dmac72]

Have give a little thought to this over the last few days and here’s my suggestion. It is aimed at improving standards and rewarding good driving.

Due to varying intenet connection speeds/qualities when playing on a remote host server and the impossibility of an AI system detecting or understand intent, it is not possible to have a system which can correctly assign blame.

It is inevitable that contact will happen occasionally but it is removing any incentives for intentionally hitting another car which, to my mind, would drive improvement.


Firstly, I would only have time penalties for track limit offences. These should be harsh (5-10s?), they can be detected with accuracy every time and should include wall riding.


Any contact with another player should instantly remove any and all rewards for the race from both players. No credits, no xp, no DR points, no win credited to their total count. Nothing.

It is rough on the “innocent” party but would encourage people to be more cautious.

All credits awarded for a race should be shared among those who had clean races. This provides the incentive for clean racing.


SR and DR should be linked, with an SR increase (E to D, D to C etc) for 3 consecutive clean races.

Sr should drop 1 level if you have 3 consecutive races with contact.

3 consecutive races with contact at SR E drops you to SR S one DR step lower.

Only once you have got to SR S within your current DR category can you gain points towards a DR increase.

You would then start at SR E in that DR class.

While many will still not race cleanly, those who do will progress to a different level in the game.

Match making should whenever possible cover no more than 3 levels.

So as an example, you could have C/A, C/S and B/E rated drivers in any race.

I have probably missed something obvious but I think after a fairly short period of time it would shuffle things so every could have competition with players of a similar level.

EDIT - Time penalties should be added after the race. No slow zones, no waiting at the finish line.

 

[fastone371]

I have read some previous replies with ideas without Ghosting and they will not work , because if a computer game can not detect wright from wrong, what hope have we got for those other ideas. Ghosting is not a hot lap, and Ghosting will make it a lot fair for all racing, with no Ghosting and bring in damage to the game spells absolutely mayhem out on track.

Call it what you want but full time ghosting is not racing, period. If PD were to have a seperate hot lap session with full time ghosting as an experiment my guess is that there might be 3 people in that lobby.

 

[Dmac72]

Back to complaining about the current system.

How hard is it to detect that their is significant overlap and that the car on the outside needs to leave a car width room on the inside. It's just not possible to race with the current system. Just drive like the other car isn't there, 5 sec penalty.

This car should have been ghosted anyway, 2 bar connection, teleporting all over the place. He even disappeared for 3 whole seconds before suddenly re-appearing in front of me again.

I think that a huge part of the problem with any incident is that the other car may not be where you think it is and you may not be where they think you are. Poor connections to servers are always going to limit things to some extent.

Poor connections are a killer here.
Imagine 2 players each with a 50ms ping. That’s a difference of 1/10s between their perception of what is happening.
1/10s entertaining turn 1 at Monza and you would swear the guy break checked you.

 

[Sven Jurgens]

You're quick, mate ! A lot of promising aspects there and a lot of knobs to fine-tune 👍 ...
My approach always was a lifetime tracking of contact ( or incident / mistake / error ) so that you get an average count per driver. Then say SR E is below 10, SR D is below 8, and so on. You'd probably need an offset to start from in order to require consistency and patience to progress to SR S ... never thought about these details though tbh.

Lifetime is a bit harsh. People learn and improve (those willing anyway) so keeping your early days against you for the rest of your racing career would only lead to more people making new accounts over and over. But yep, an average count per driver is the way to go. I think its most fair on time driven, and a 'memory' of the last 6 or 7 C races / 15 A or B races sounds about right to me, or at least a lot better than dropping to B in one race / go from E to S in 3 or 4 C races. But you can always increase the 'memory'. Perhaps double, the last 4 hours is better. The longer the 'memory' the more stable SR gets.

Yet perhaps there should also be some entry requirement to get back to SR.S after you drop out again. 2 clean race bonuses in a row to level back up, which goes up if you drop out again too soon. Another 'memory' system. The higher your fluctuation rate, the higher the entry requirements for SR.S get. The problem with that is that people will abuse it and stay in the easier SR.A rooms to farm poles and wins. Yet perhaps with a better system those easy wins will dry up as the fast win at all cost drivers now get to race each other instead of moving back to SR.S after one pole to victory race.

I can't argue here in any way since I'm no expert, however, I think there's reasons why even manufacturers say it will take another couple years for self driving cars to seriously run in the public. I'd suspect an insufficient AI is one of these reasons.
To make an algorithm detect abnormal crowd interaction, you will have to define abnormal first. In racing, would a weird racing line that I choose because I think it's clever or fast or safe or whatever, be abnormal ? You see where this leads to ?

It's getting there

It knows where to brake, dunno if it has any racecraft though!

If you choose a weird racing line because you think it's clever/fast/safe, well if you have an accident it wasn't so clever now was it Certainly the system shouldn't penalize the car that's driving around text book style. If you deviate by driving an abnormal line, it's on you not to hit those that follow the generally accepted flow of the track.

 

[breeminator]

this is not true. It is possible to program self driving cars, there are algorithms that can monitor crowds and detect "abnormal" interactions (...).
It is possible and probably "fairly easy" to code a penalty system that works better than this.
It's very likely that PD either decided that it is not worth allocating financial resources to code a good penalty system or it is not worth allocating the processor calculating resources to run this penalty system.
My guess is it's the second explanation, and it's understandable. Nobody would play a game with poor graphics and physics (compared to similar games) just because it has a good penalty system.

You're underestimating the limitations of self driving cars. I've been in a Tesla and it couldn't even follow a lane on a motorway. When there was bright sunlight on the road that was brighter than the lane dividing lines, it followed those instead, suddenly veering towards the next lane. They're not kidding when they say they require a human to have their hands on the wheel and ready to immediately respond at all times.

The best way to estimate project timescales is to look at how long things actually take. The current penalty system has probably been at least 3 years in the making, and I'd say it represents no more than 10% of the work for an ideal penalty system. So that gives 30 years to get it working properly. Then you have the non-linearity problem, where projects that appear 90% complete typically are only 50% complete in terms of elapsed time, because all the hardest problems are the ones that remain when you're down to what many people subjectively see as the last 10%.

FM7 has also been developing a penalty system. It only works for track cutting, must have taken at least a year of work, and is incredibly primitive. It's nowhere near even 10% of a complete penalty system, so that implies something like at least 20 years.

FH4 has had some work done in this area. Initially you could just ride around walls, so they've implemented a wall contact penalty system. They attempted to make it so that if someone rams you into a wall, you don't get a penalty. They failed. That took about 0.5 years, let's call it 2% of the way towards a complete system, so that implies 25 years of work remaining.

 

[gtpierre]

As for (1)
No. As @Dmac72 and me mentioned earlier : No rewards ( like championship points ) for dirty driving.

Yeah, but how does the game know if someone drove dirty without well functioning penalty system ? Just with the number of contacts ? what about a race where you made several small contacts (lag caused overlap, tight overtake manoeuver ) but none of them actually caused anyone to lose time ? Do you still get 0 points ?

As for (2)
Yes, I'd gladly have smaller grids for the benefit of ongoing proper racing.

I agree that I would rather get a 10 cars clean race than a 20cars dirty race.

BUT when a grid is small, it also becomes boring very fast if you don't have a similar pace than the guy in front or behind. And if you crash, you are basically alone at the back with nothing to do...

 

[Dmac72]

Yeah, but how does the game know if someone drove dirty without well functioning penalty system ? Just with the number of contacts ? what about a race where you made several small contacts (lag caused overlap, tight overtake manoeuver ) but none of them actually caused anyone to lose time ? Do you still get 0 points ?


I agree that I would rather get a 10 cars clean race than a 20cars dirty race.

BUT when a grid is small, it also becomes boring very fast if you don't have a similar pace than the guy in front or behind. And if you crash, you are basically alone at the back with nothing to do...

Yes, I would still have no reward for “small contact”.
It is harsh but since it is not possible to prove or detect intention or to correctly apportion blame due to lag, that would be my preference.
A tight overtaking move which causes contact is still effectively pushing someone out of the way.
Trying to define a small contact or a little bit of contact becomes a matter of judgment. IT systems function much better in matters of fact....there was or was not contact.

 

[breeminator]

Yes, I would still have no reward for “small contact”.
It is harsh but since it is not possible to prove or detect intention or to correctly apportion blame due to lag, that would be my preference.
A tight overtaking move which causes contact is still effectively pushing someone out of the way.

But look, for example, at my race here, at 35 seconds:



Do I just nudge the car in front? I'm not sure, but if you look at my inputs, you can see that I'm braking on the exit from the chicane, when I'd normally be on the throttle. I'm braking because the car in front is going abnormally slow at that point, they would normally be on the throttle before the car behind, and opening up a gap, not causing me to have to brake. So that should be the end of my race at that point? It seems absurdly harsh to me. To guarantee to avoid contact you'd have to remain over a second behind the car in front at all times. Look at the car in 1st getting out of shape on the exit, that could easily have caused the car behind to hit him if he'd been following as closely as he ought to be able to.

 

[Dmac72]

But look, for example, at my race here, at 35 seconds:



Do I just nudge the car in front? I'm not sure, but if you look at my inputs, you can see that I'm braking on the exit from the chicane, when I'd normally be on the throttle. I'm braking because the car in front is going abnormally slow at that point, they would normally be on the throttle before the car behind, and opening up a gap, not causing me to have to brake. So that should be the end of my race at that point? It seems absurdly harsh to me. To guarantee to avoid contact you'd have to remain over a second behind the car in front at all times. Look at the car in 1st getting out of shape on the exit, that could easily have caused the car behind to hit him if he'd been following as closely as he ought to be able to.

If you hit him then you hit him. There was, or was not contact. I can’t tell if you did or not but the game would have the data to be certain.
IMO If you rear end the guy in front because he isn’t going as fast as you want him to (looks like he had poor traction out of the chicane) then that is pretty much your fault.

 

[breeminator]

If you hit him then you hit him. There was, or was not contact. I can’t tell if you did or not but the game would have the data to be certain.
IMO If you rear end the guy in front because he isn’t going as fast as you want him to (looks like he had poor traction out of the chicane) then that is pretty much your fault.

I'd say if that sort of thing became a race-ending incident, the number of people playing the game would dwindle extremely quickly.

 

[Dmac72]

I'd say if that sort of thing became a race-ending incident, the number of people playing the game would dwindle extremely quickly.

Why would it end the race? I’m not suggesting disqualify the driver, just no credits etc for that race. Perhaps they won’t rear end someone at turn 1 the next time.

 

[BallPtPenTheif]

I'm braking because the car in front is going abnormally slow at that point, they would normally be on the throttle before the car behind, and opening up a gap, not causing me to have to brake.

You had a cleaner exit out of the chicane than the car in front of you. You don't need to be psychic to assume that you'd catch him out of the turn. I'm not going to slight your move here though, if you slowed down too much there you'd get rammed so I understand having to play the game.

 

[Dmac72]

Just offering suggestions and am well aware no system is perfect or will work for everyone. There are 50+ pages of how bad things currently are so new ideas seemed the sensible way forward.

 

[breeminator]

Why would it end the race? I’m not suggesting disqualify the driver, just no credits etc for that race. Perhaps they won’t rear end someone at turn 1 the next time.

You said "Any contact with another player should instantly remove any and all rewards for the race from both players. No credits, no xp, no DR points, no win credited to their total count. Nothing.". To me, that means your race is over as soon as you experience any contact.

 

[ROCKET JOE]

@gtpierre , @breeminator
Everything posted right here right now can't be much more than rough suggestions - it's just how you do with any new concept, you start rough then refine it ( hopefully PD does the refinement ) ...
If 1 contact = 0 reward seems too harsh, you have a couple of parameters to tweak on. You could allow 2 mistakes per race for example or even combine that with the impact force detection. You could say 0 contact = full reward / 1 contact = 80 percent / and so on ...
The important thing is there's two preconditions you should not forget :
Matchmaking is working as intended - you race people as clean as you are.
The cleaner you race ( or the higher your SR ) the more progress, reward etc.

@breeminator
I second @Dmac72 's comment regarding your Monza incident. I admit it's harsh though and I'd let you get away with 10 / 50 friendly points !

 

[Dmac72]

@gtpierre , @breeminator
Everything posted right here right now can't be much more than rough suggestions - it's just how you do with any new concept, you start rough then refine it ( hopefully PD does the refinement ) ...
If 1 contact = 0 reward seems too harsh, you have a couple of parameters to tweak on. You could allow 2 mistakes per race for example or even combine that with the impact force detection. You could say 0 contact = full reward / 1 contact = 80 percent / and so on ...
The important thing is there's two preconditions you should not forget :
Matchmaking is working as intended - you race people as clean as you are.
The cleaner you race ( or the higher your SR ) the more progress, reward etc.

@breeminator
I second @Dmac72 's comment regarding your Monza incident. I admit it's harsh though and I'd let you get away with 10 / 50 friendly points !

A scale of rewards could work but not sure it prevents someone “saving” their contact until the last corner before taking you out. (Said with feeling after a week of La Sarthe racing recently and getting punted at the last chicane more than once)

You said "Any contact with another player should instantly remove any and all rewards for the race from both players. No credits, no xp, no DR points, no win credited to their total count. Nothing.". To me, that means your race is over as soon as you experience any contact.

Then avoid contact.

 

[breeminator]

Then avoid contact.

I think you're either trolling, or haven't thought the consequences through properly. Here's an example of a ~60k DR lobby, i.e. everyone is top <1% standard, and Zocker has another account with a 75k rating, and is regarded as a very clean driver. Yet there is contact here:



Bam, race over under your suggested scheme. Sorry, but people would just stop playing.

 

[Dmac72]

I think you're either trolling, or haven't thought the consequences through properly. Here's an example of a ~60k DR lobby, i.e. everyone is top <1% standard, and Zocker has another account with a 75k rating, and is regarded as a very clean driver. Yet there is contact here:



Bam, race over under your suggested scheme. Sorry, but people would just stop playing.

No, not trolling, but thanks for the accusation. As I said just offering suggestions and make no apologies for trying to encourage non-contact racing.
Would be delighted to hear others.

 

[CBH]

Call it what you want but full time ghosting is not racing, period. If PD were to have a seperate hot lap session with full time ghosting as an experiment my guess is that there might be 3 people in that lobby.

No one has come up with a better solution on how to make the penalty system better and fairer or all. So Ghosting is the one that will work, because the penalty system will never be fair like it is now, so you need to bring in something that will work and have fair Racing which will be Ghosting.

Ghosting is fair Racing without Ghosting it is not fair racing just demolition derby races, and to have damage in the game will make it a lot worse.

 

[Famine]

No one has come up with a better solution on how to make the penalty system better and fairer or all.

I did, literally in direct response to you.

So Ghosting is the one that will work, because the penalty system will never be fair like it is now, so you need to bring in something that will work and have fair Racing which will be Ghosting.

This is the longest run-on sentence I've seen that doesn't actually say anything. There's two "so" and one "because" that just don't belong there because you're not demonstrating or explaining anything. You're just restating that ghosting, which prevents any kind of racing action by removing other vehicles from the track as tangible entities and eliminating how they affect your track position (and you theirs), makes for fair racing...

... after ignoring the fact I responded directly to you with a better way of determining penalties more akin to the real world process, to which you never responded.


Real stewards get penalties wrong sometimes too. Should we remove penalties from real racing and just ghost the cars instead? Then we can all watch the great tactical battle from Monaco this last weekend where Hamilton on very old tires managed to hold off Verstappen with good car positi... oh, no, he's just driven straight through him.

 

[VulcanSpirit]

But look, for example, at my race here, at 35 seconds:



Do I just nudge the car in front? I'm not sure, but if you look at my inputs, you can see that I'm braking on the exit from the chicane, when I'd normally be on the throttle. I'm braking because the car in front is going abnormally slow at that point, they would normally be on the throttle before the car behind, and opening up a gap, not causing me to have to brake. So that should be the end of my race at that point? It seems absurdly harsh to me. To guarantee to avoid contact you'd have to remain over a second behind the car in front at all times. Look at the car in 1st getting out of shape on the exit, that could easily have caused the car behind to hit him if he'd been following as closely as he ought to be able to.

With regards to avoiding contact, I don't think it's always necessary to keep a clear distance of the car ahead, although that could help you out if you want to get a better run or if the latter makes a mistake. I'd say that no matter where they are in the race, it is up to every driver to make reasonable adjustments depending on what happens directly in front of, behind or alongside him/her. To illustrate my point, here is a real-life scenario from the 2018 BTCC finale at Brands Hatch GP - a closely-fought battle for the lead between Josh Cook and Ash Sutton.

At various points during the race, you can see both drivers backing off, braking early or short-shifting to avoid contact during passes. At 2:25, Sutton momentarily releases the throttle after getting a strong run on Cook out of Surtees, thus ensuring that he stays close to the former while not running into the back of him. While getting held up by a slower car can be potentially frustrating at times, it is another element of racing which all drivers have to face on any real or virtual circuit.

With that in mind, I'd say that you responded well to the Viper getting a slow run out of the first chicane. However, please consider that mistakes can and do indeed happen when accelerating out of slow corners like those. Complaining about drivers in front of you getting poor traction out of corners and forcing you to back out of a strong run seems a little too harsh on them.

No one has come up with a better solution on how to make the penalty system better and fairer or all. So Ghosting is the one that will work, because the penalty system will never be fair like it is now, so you need to bring in something that will work and have fair Racing which will be Ghosting.

Ghosting is fair Racing without Ghosting it is not fair racing just demolition derby races, and to have damage in the game will make it a lot worse.

For the umpteenth time, not every race without ghosting is a demolition derby. There are plenty of players out there in GT Sport who race properly and don't ram other cars at every opportunity; I have done enough races in lobbies and Sport Mode to understand this. Likewise, there are certain racing drivers in real life who, from time to time, are content with stretching the concept of 'fair racing' to its absolute limits. Permanent ghosting would only eliminate the immersion and challenge of passing and defending from other cars, and would almost certainly prevent players from battling in the same way that Cook and Sutton did in the video above. If ghosting was permanently enabled in a future Gran Turismo game - or any other racing game, period - could you imagine how many complaints it would receive from players wanting a genuine racing experience?

Our suggestions for the penalty system were simply that - suggestions. None of these represent an entirely perfect system, and I kindly appreciate the comments from @gtpierre and @Sven Jurgens highlighting potential issues with the suggestions I made. No matter what our thoughts are on the system, it is still important that we constructively discuss ways in which it could potentially be made better than it is right now.

 

[CBH]

For the umpteenth time, not every race without ghosting is a demolition derby. There are plenty of players out there in GT Sport who race properly and don't ram other cars at every opportunity; I have done enough races in lobbies and Sport Mode to understand this. Likewise, there are certain racing drivers in real life who, from time to time, are content with stretching the concept of 'fair racing' to its absolute limits. Permanent ghosting would only eliminate the immersion and challenge of passing and defending from other cars, and would almost certainly prevent players from battling in the same way that Cook and Sutton did in the video above. If ghosting was permanently enabled in a future Gran Turismo game - or any other racing game, period - could you imagine how many complaints it would receive from players wanting a genuine racing experience?

There are going to be some be some good clean Racing, but not all the time. Myself and you and many others want clean racing all the time, but you are never going to get that in a computer game are you, and there is a only one solution to that is Ghosting when contact comes between 2 cars.

Is this a Joke when you said this ?. Permanent ghosting would only eliminate the immersion and challenge of passing and defending from other cars, and would almost certainly prevent players from battling in the same way that Cook and Sutton did in the video. Don't you know the difference between real life Racing and a computer game ?. I can tell you this is you can not compare real life racing with a computer game can you, you just can't.
To have fair Racing and good racing in a computer game you have to have Ghosting or you are going to have unfair Racing in a game.

 

[VulcanSpirit]

There are going to be some be some good clean Racing, but not all the time. Myself and you and many others want clean racing all the time, but you are never going to get that in a computer game are you, and there is a only one solution to that is Ghosting when contact comes between 2 cars.

Is this a Joke when you said this ?. Permanent ghosting would only eliminate the immersion and challenge of passing and defending from other cars, and would almost certainly prevent players from battling in the same way that Cook and Sutton did in the video. Don't you know the difference between real life Racing and a computer game ?. I can tell you this is you can not compare real life racing with a computer game can you, you just can't.
To have fair Racing and good racing in a computer game you have to have Ghosting or you are going to have unfair Racing in a game.

That was not a joke. I know very well the difference between racing in real-life and in video games, but have come to accept that any scenario I face in GT Sport or other games like it, no matter if they are perfect simulations or not, is very similar to what real racing drivers face on a regular basis. I will say it once more: it is not impossible to have clean racing in games like GT Sport without resorting to permanent ghosting. We understand that ghosting is your preferred method of ensuring clean racing, but please accept that not everyone wants to see it as the be-all and end-all solution to the problem.

 

[gtpierre]

After racing a bit this week, and thinking about how would apply the various propositions here, I actually think @VulcanSpirit @Sven Jurgens and @ROCKET JOE are making the best points/propositions.

What we want is to race with people that have the same "racing philosophy" and that eventual incidents get punished.

A SR system based on the number of contacts per hours/distance driven would put together people that race in a similar way.
Averaging the score over a certain period (this can be tweaked easily) would prevent that you drop too easily if you have a very disputed/agitated race (imagine a race where everyone has a very similar pace, even if clean, it's likely there are few contacts).

Race incidents :
A tiny mistake (4 wheels on curbs, light contact) would be forgiven and you would get a warning, but repeated mistakes would get you a penalty.
Too many contacts/shortcuts and the games kicks you out of the race (this would particularly help to clean the lower SR races).

In case of contacts :
The contacts could be ranked as light or strong, and they would be considered accordingly by the SR system.
In case of light contacts, both players get a warning (or penalty if they exceeded the contact quota that are tolerated)
In case of strong contacts, the fault goes to the car that is behind, if faster at the time of contact and only this drivers gets the penalty if he exceeded the contact quota).

During each loading screen, you are reminded of the rules and/or given advice for good sportmanship (and not something as obvious as "if you crash into the car in front of you , it makes you look baaad")