Daily Race Discussion

I totally agree with you and we talked about this a lot on Discord. The real big problem is just one: that the person who play online to compete are a tiny part of all the playerbase so I don't know if PD is willing to completely rehaul the SR and DR system and to change the offline game so that it become a kind of "driving school" to teach people how to properly race.

Totally agree I love this track also and I don't have any assists on, but to be honest the driving standards this week has been pretty bad, I did manage to have a few good races but few and far in between, if I make a mistake and someone suffers I wait up but I have been punted left right and center and no one waits no one cares it's a shame really, I am BS trying to get to AS hopefully driving standards will improve there 

Anybody else wanna take a jackhammer to the first curb in the chicane?

Strong gives you both a speed boost on the straight and additional grip while sitting behind the car ahead. It's essentially a tow rope. There's no penalty for being in disturbed air. You go faster AND corner better behind another car. Completely unrealistic but it makes for close racing if you don't care about the physics being accurate.

Real gives you the straight line speed boost but it's dependent on your following distance and also reduces your grip because you're in dirty air. This is why real GT3 drivers step out of the tow before a braking zone. You gain on the straight but you'd lose in the corners if you stayed in the wake.

Weak just reduces the overall slipstream effect. Less tow on the straight, less of everything. It doesn't simulate dirty air the way Real does, it just turns the whole system down.

So Real doesn't sit between Strong and Weak on a sliding scale. It's a fundamentally different model. Strong is all benefit no penalty. Real is benefit on the straight, penalty in the corners. Weak is just less of everything.

"Custom" slipstream setting in daily races has some serious concerns about it. PD has actually acknowledged in their known issues list that daily races display slipstream strength as "Disabled" when a strength IS set in the event regulations. So the game is telling you there's no slipstream active when there is. What exactly the custom setting does, how strong it is, and whether it changes week to week is not disclosed. What some people have said from testing is that it feels stronger than Real and possibly stronger than what most people would consider balanced.

There's a reason you see cars getting slingshot passes on straights that shouldn't be physically possible given the speed differential, and it's because the slipstream effect in daily races is doing more work than the settings screen admits to.

Is all a little wishy washy, we like to think this is "the real driving simulator" but truth be told there's a lot of unbalanced aspects in this game that is about creating "balance" I.e player retention algorithms. They don't advertise these things I believe they should but the whole gaming industry is one of the least regulated industries. And it's bigger than the movie industry Worrying when it's core demographic is 7-19yr olds. 

i've only driven my alt-account for practice so far, but I find Wednesday nights to be clean in general. yesterday I went P16-P2 and P15-P4 and while the opening lap was a little chaotic in t1 and through the third sector, every lap after that was clean. 

I believe "real" takes a non-linear approach, so the closer you are to the car ahead, the stronger the tow, and as the gap grows larger - the effect diminishes. 

We can only hope PD tries to make this aspect of the game better. At the end of the day, car control is the basis of clean racing and currently SR does a poor job of tracking how well drivers can consistently remain in control of their car while the overall ranking system fails at incentivizing players to prioritize SR over results.

Its a tricky problem to solve no doubt. How can competitors be tought that sometimes falling back is in all probability the better outcome? That they can't take the start of every race and expect to win, or even finish near the front. In essence, how to tell players that in a race there are many competitors but only one winner? And that they'll do better once they accept the fact that more likely than not, at least statisticaly speaking, they're bound to loose the vast majority of their races. I'm not certain how PD could manage this but I suspect its not by having players start from last place in single player and engineering the unfolding of races to provide them with the means to fulfill their fantasy of being the heroic driver overcoming all adversity to clinch victory. Every. Time.

Its a tough pill to swallow, I know. But it has huge benefits to those who come to terms with this truth. In racing sims but also in every aspects of our lives. Thats why I find racing so interesting. If we look past the glaringly obvious aspects that define racing we find that its really about individuals that subject themselves to the pressure of competition and how they manage to cope. IMHO the racing environment excel's at releaving its participant's true character. In this respect racing shines a light on human nature that is as entertaining as it is enlightening.

Its obvious that strong is stronger than weak but do we know where real falls in relation?

As for the custom slipstream could it be tweaked on a per-car basis to balance the field as with BoP? In the real world there's a relationship between a car's coefficient of drag and the size and shape of its aerodynamic wake. In effect, the higher a car's CoD the harder it is for it to reach high speeds and the bigger the hole it punches through the air. Thats a significant disadvantage that should receive a correction to allow more cars to be competitive.

It's good isn't it? I exclusively raced the americas lobbies on monday. Gained nearly 2k DR by starting from the back and raking in the top 5 finishes. Was very much surprised at how well behaved everyone was in the lobbies I raced. For the last few races the matchmaking started putting me into B lobbies. At first I thought that was where I would start to struggle but I somehow managed to find my way near the front. 

How have the drinving standards been like mid-week? I'm asking because after taking tuesday off I raced my european account last night and I had horrible luck having to contend with stubborn drivers in front agrresively defending and punters behind driving as if my car wasn't even on track. 

i couldn't possibly love this race any more 🧡 

Correct 

Btw., does anyone know what "custom" slipstream means? I guess, it's neither weak nor strong, and not "real". So, in the dailies this is set to a value unknown to us? We can't replicate it for training purposes in a custom race?

How did you find out?
The lobbies I'm in are full of new 911s. An Audi, a Viper, a Beetle, or an old 911 here and there, but mainly the new 911.

I love how only 6% used the best car here lmao

This seems a great idea, I really like it. But I don't think that PD will never do something like this unfortunately. 

Para mi españa , junto spa y brasil lasmejores diarias sin dudas, mención especial a laguna seca  y a lago magiore

I rarely defend, I try to let them pass, and if they overshoot, I switch-a-roo them. That's the theory. Very often I'm punted from behind on the racing line, not the defending line. Since I believe in the good in everyone, I guess these things are not intended, they just brake at the qualy braking point, and that's it. Not giving back the position is the real crime here, IMHO.

I'm quite good with catching back up to people after I got punted (or made an own mistake). It happened a few times that I ended up on P14 or P16, and finished on P8 or P10, but normally in the B sprint races, there's not enough race time left to gain further positions.

Now my DR got so low, that my qualy time (1:52.990 with the Audi) is good for starting from within the top 5. Let's see how this one goes... 🤔

yeah that is good preparing i just hop straight to quali do a couple of laps and go most of the time sometimes i'm too lazy to do a quali lol

I wasn't sure if it was and couldn't find confirmation about this. I'm glad its the case, thanks for clearing that up.

I was under the impression that DR is calculated in a weighted way...

     80 +/- (DR difference / 500)

...for each driver you finish ahead of (usually for the top-8 finishers)

Gee... Imagine feeling like you need to apologize for being generally content with whatever it is that pleases you. Don't let this terminal outrage online culture get you down. Enjoy whatever you like, however you want to.

You're onto something, for sure.

I'd like to see DR progression be weighted in such a way as to reflect the rank of the competition in any given lobby. So doing better than a higher ranked driver is worth more than beating a lower ranked driver. Same principal should apply for DR loss.

For SR, I whish it concidered more than just penalties for collisions between drivers and track cutting. I'm in favor of tracking how well drivers stay in control of their car. So going off track anywhere or any contact with other cars and barriers should cost SR. Penalties aren't a strong enough deterent IMHO. And only taking penalties into account for SR(plus quitting lobbies) leaves way too much bad behavior unpunished. 

And finaly, SR should be a sort of modifier to the amount of DR gained or lost. So at the end of a race, DR and SR would first be calculated seperately. Then the amount of DR gained for the event would be multiplied by a value determined by your SR rank. Something like: S=1, A=.9, B=.8, C=.7, D=.6 E=.5. This way two drivers that are deemed initially to have earned the same amount of DR could in practice recieve different final DR gains due to their respective SR rank.

So imagine two drivers have scored an initial DR gain of say 100 points. The considerate driver that always prioritizes staying in control of his car and racing clean has an SR rank of S and so his final DR gain is calculated like so: 100*1=100. His DR is raised by 100 points. Our second driver, who might be a beginner or the dirtiest driver in GT7, with his SR rank of E would have his final DR gain calculated like this: 100*0.5=50. So his DR is raised by only 50 points.

That covers DR gain but what about DR loss? It should work more or less the same way but turn it on its head. In the case of DR loss, it should still be the high SR ranked drivers that enjoy an advantage. This way maintaining a high SR rank would reduce DR loss while a low SR rank would increase it.

I believe the impact of SR on DR progression like this could be a strong incentive for drivers to be more careful on track and urge them to prioritize SR all the time, at all cost. A driver's rate of progression would depend on it. Indeed, it just might trap the very worst drivers in the lower ranks for good. At least until they see the error in their ways and come around to what racing is truly meant to be.

This is already a problem related to the game's algorithm. The best score on a track can only be achieved with a single vehicle. Therefore, everyone chooses the same vehicle. No one chooses the other similar vehicles. This also spoils the fun of the game.

the best thing about social media/streaming are the little bits of advice i've been collecting along the way, and I know i'll be saying "drive like you're going to get bread" from now on when I get flustered, just like i have to constantly remind myself "do not engage with the group of cars in front of you" (thanks Luke)

Thanks Chris!!

Hate to brake it to you, but morons are everywhere. Always have been, always will be. And I'm not only talking about the game either. The best thing you can do is to learn how to spot them and develop ways to deal with them.

In the game they'll generally be the selfish, overconfident, agressive type. When I come across one of those drivers on track I try to find a way to turn their own attributes against them. Or rather to get them to do it for me. I think of it as a sort of matial art, motorsport judo if you will. Don't underestimate how many drivers will chose to drive over their abilities instead of simply conceding the position to a faster driver. But here's the catch, this can only be done from behind. Thats why I never defend against that kind of driver. Once I'm behind I can start applying pressure and, for lack of a better word, bully them into making a mistake. If I can't keep up with them or make them crack them well played to them, they deserve to beat me. Bottom line is I have more confidence in my ability to avoid causing an incident with them than if the roles were reversed.