I think the Elo system in iRacing is fine. You have qualifying, if you're as good or better than your elo, you go up the front and all the problems are behind you. It also escalates depending on who you beat and who beat you, win a 10k sof as a 2k driver and you'll probably jump an entire 1k, so if you did take a break and come back worse/better, it wont be long before you're at your true elo again. The way lobbies are filled is top-down anyway, it can suck to be car #30 in a race but there will still be people at your pace, just you'll be fighting for not-last rather than 1st, the enjoyment is all still there and if it is too hard you'll be dropped a split for the next one. Safety rating on the other hand. I think this is the cause of all the crashes, especially in the higher splits. It's far too generous, even with an A license you can crash once every race and it'll take like 20 to actually lose the license. So what's happening is that if a car ahead makes a tiny mistake, the car behind won't half-throttle for 0.5 seconds to resolve the issue, they'll keep it pinned and dump you, because the punishment to them for doing so is minimal, and they get a free position out of it. "Legal wrecking" is a huge problem in the topsplits ever since covid.
On the topic of safety rating. The main reason for why I got iracing in 2021 was to race the Nürburgring 24h and the spa 24h. 6h into the n24 I crash the car while trying to catch P2 and an hour later my teammate loses 2 laps due to connection issues. By then both my teammates decided that it's not worth it to continue racing. I then got the idea to just continue driving to boost my safety rating, the server was GT3 only and the field quite spread. I jumped from a C to an A license that night
@Darlexis the point is that I had next to no interactions with other cars. I got my A license for the fact that I was able to keep my car on track for a few hours
I believe if you’re good you’ll eventually progress past the noob lobbies even if you can only race once a week. However, sim racing elo is hard to fine tune because there’s so many cars, so someone can wreck and still end up in 10th and gain a hefty amount of rating. I think the bigger issue is people being ranked too high due to many lower level races just being crap shoots. Also safety rating is just silly 😅
The ones who tried to change this were Kunos here, in ACC, SR is gained mostly by being clean while being next to another player, you gain a tiny bit of SR by being clean by yourself but you loose a lot if you crash, the way to gain it correctly is to be clean while you're next to another player/AI. In fact in LFM, in order to get your ACC license you needed a SR of 85 I believe, but then LFM doesn't use the SR in game and prefers to use its own ranking. So Kunos had a good system going on, but a shit implementation of online ranking matches.
When it comes to safety rating even bad driving isn’t classified correctly. Going off track to avoid a wreck is in many games almost the same as cutting the track for an advantage, let alone when the game misjudges time gained from a cut. The other day I was doing a bit of TC in Raceroom and got a load of penalties for contact for racing these cars the way they are raced in real life, it was a nice close race and we all finished with no mechanical or aero damage. But then the noob who killed some on T1 and grannied around the track for the rest of the race got a nice safety rating boost for being such a clean good little driver. I know that calculating the magnitude of these penalties isn’t easy, but there must be some factors to these incidents that could help giving the correct penalties to the correct drivers. I also would like to believe it would be possible to have a system that penalizes drivers differently at different stages of the race, like having harsher penalties for collisions but more lenient penalties for track cuts at the start of lap 1.
Ai is coming to iracing through the works with Microsoft. The Ai could take 3-5 minutes after each race and pass judgement on all incidents. Not a big fan of Ai but this would be nice.
Furthermore, the ONLY reason why Chess Organizations developed the Elo system was specifically to distance itself from other 1v1 sports such as Tennis, Badminton, Speed Skating, et al, and specifically full-combat sports (read: Boxing, Wrestling, Fencing, Sumo, Karate, Taekwondo, etc, etc) for the sole purpose of making Chess appear as more of a "Thinking Man's Game", particularly during its peak in the mid-20th Century at the height of the Cold War. It is USELESS in other sports that require more than one opponent to partake in, not only due to the "lucked-in" problem but also because team games such as Motor Racing and Association Football are not multi-tiered in terms of their ruleset. Chess only works as a "Thinking Man's Game" because you have to think in terms of multiple turns ahead of both yourself and your opponent as it is turn-based. Sports such as Association Football, Motor Racing, (most)Fighting Games, MOBAs, First-Person Shooters, Boxing, Wrestling, Rugby, Gridiron Football, etc, etc, are real-time, meaning that you have to simplify the ruleset for anyone to learn them properly, this means you can't seed people and teams based on ranking alone, you have to seed them based on either geographical proximity or a previous qualifying round. Even Baseball is a hybrid of real-time and turn-based play. The same applies to Cricket, which also relies on Real-time play. The ONLY way to rate skill in real-time is to aggregate both win percentages and consistency rates via a points system that resets to nought per year. It's also why I avoid reading Elo ratings for sports other than Chess because they made zero sense to begin with when applied elsewhere. They possess as much value and worth to a team's/player's performance as the meaningless stats in Baseball and Association Football (xG, or "Expected Goals" is an example of a meaningless metric that was only introduced because the Bookmakers want to make even more money from their bets with the advent of UK Laws surrounding gambling being relaxed post-Lottery legalisation in 1993/94)
Tha's a very naïve approach....Racing drivers are continuously thinking ahead and planning there laps relative to their opponents looking for weakness's, looking after tyres, engines, fuel consumption...Chess had no thoughts towards other sports when using ELO...that's ridiculous.
@@awakeandwatching953 'the ONLY reason why Chess Organizations developed the Elo system was specifically to distance itself from other 1v1 sports'....that's the point you can't remember making....
You also forgot about project cars 2 which is legit the screenshot in the background for the video, the safety rating for pc2 is even mote stupid, if you dont do a race for a while it slowly decreases your rating which is so stupid
You can run million laps in isolation in ACC and you won't gain a single Saftey rating. The only way you can get it by driving close and fast next to some one cleanly. However you can farm it against AI which is not great but it does kinda help people get good.
yeah but ACCs system is not used in LFM other than to qualify you for taking the license test which is a bit annoying cause i only race AC in lfm.. id like to do ACC but dont have the time to grind kunos sr just so i cant take the test to get in to lfm
I think that's fair. The chess comparison is apt. With chess, you're playing chess against the best chess player and the worst chess player. With racing games, you're likely doing that in a HyperCar, IndyCar or NASCAR Cup against the best and in a Mazda Cup, Formula Vee or Street Stock against the worst. It doesn't really value how good you are and you can farm it by avoiding what you're bad at but like and running what others are likely weaker. iRacing has reduced that with splitting Road, Formula, Oval and the various others they do. Annoyingly, it's also not something with a solution because of the various points you mention on race length, having to no-life and everything else. Safety Rating is also fair. If people are pissed off at you for smashing half the field up at Turn 1, they're likely not going to change their mind because you drove around on a clean track because you wiped half of them out. With the current system, you'd pretty much have to reduce the incident gain from driving on your own. The only solution I've seen to this is in ACC where they have numbers in-game on how you race other people separate to your ability to drive on a track. The problem with that is how you can farm that system offline.
"Safety Rating" means nothing when the netcode of the game itself cannot handle more than 12 players in a race without it bugging out with incorrect times, things happening on screen that aren't real, and incompetent moderator teams that don't bother questioning things. Sure, it's important in Sim Racing for none of the players in the lobby to be CrashCows who will just spin out the poor soul in front of them and fuck things up for everyone, but something has to change, because clearly what's going on isn't working.
I think the ACC SA is almost decent enough. Running clean laps and being fast and consistent have their own rating in CN, CC. You only gain SA by racing closely with other cars without incidents. Sadly ACC allows you to gain SA from running with AI and of course there are drivers who farm SA by running with slow AI. If you think ELO rank is unfair only to the fastest players, you are definitely wrong. I think drivers with intermediate skill are also disadvantaged. You are too fast for the rookies and too slow to keep up with the big boys. You end up having the most dead "races" where you might as well be in a lone test session. It becomes a vicious cycle where you ping pong between slower and faster splits. You gain some elo in the slower splits, only to get thrown into the deep end and finish in the lower third, losing elo in the process. And the cycle repeats. In a field of 22 cars, not having anyone close to your skill level is extremely frustrating. Running laps alone in 20 minute sprint races where there is no strategy is not exactly racing IMO.
Spot on about everything. I would love to hear a rant from you about people who start from the pits and run a lap down all race just to inflate their SR rating 😂
Safety rating is an odd thing, especially when it comes to iRacing. Sometimes that rating feels more like an indication of how others are racing you with the no fault system. I also think it's down to player mindset in how you drive and how often people only see a finishing position and the points from it instead of the people they're racing around.
While I believe that the Elo and SR system is better than NOTHING, there are glaring issues that can be frustrating or discouraging from the driver's standpoint: as you said, there's a threshold where you are put into the higher split, even when you're not ready. Mostly because of there being a lack of drivers. I have no idea what would be better though. Even changing to another rating system instead of Elo (Glicko maybe?), that will still have the same issue. So all in all, I'm pretty mixed on the rating system(s). It needs to be there, such that without it, it would be MUCH worse. I mentioned Glicko, and for those who don't know, it has a separate "rating" that tells the system what its "confidence" of having an accurate rating is. So if you don't play for a while, its confidence drops off and becomes more inaccurate until you play again and more often. This could be useful for iRacing if they could implement it properly. Maybe top split is only drivers its confident are actually "top split material". As for safety rating, that's a more tough one. Yeah it doesn't make much sense, the "corners per incident," but is there really a better way to do it? I know its stupid, and its easily taken advantage of, but what else do we have? I sincerely have no idea.
7:40 THAT type of scenario is what i tell everyone - you do NOT become better by just driving by yourself grinding out whatever "Safety Rating", you get better by actually RACING against others, whether online or the AI. It is also why i never do any hotlaps because it will not teach me how to maintain race-pace and focus over the course of a 30 minute or even 2 hour long race. Sure i end up qualifying 9.th but i will end up in the Top 5 or even Top 3 by the end because i will keep focused on the whole race session and i know how to overtake and defend. Unfortunately bad drivers will still crash into you because they got no idea how to drive side-by-side through any corners.
There is something to be learned by driving alone. For example trying to stay on one side of the track for an entire lap builds the confidence and judgment to race door to door
@@littlerhino2006 But people do not learn how to stay on the side of a track when hotlapping, they will only learn to take the ideal line and nothing else. Suddenly when a car drives next to them they will either smash into them because "oh i need to take the ideal lane now opponent be damned" and crash them out, or they will panic and go too fast into the corner and fly through it into the wall.
The game that probably substantiates your theory the most is forza motorsport, it has the largest sample size I would think for the amount of cars trying to start a race on average, but the fact I have a A-S safety rating (depending on how stupid people act in proximity to my front bumper) and the lobbies are still mayhem. The nascar lobbies may be the best example as people trying to complete weekly missions had to run 6 races I think, along with the general popularity the re-adding of the Cup cars brought. The lobbies still were complete messes and at the time have/ had a 3,800 of 4000 skill rating and S safety rating and turn 1 was a melee on road courses and people were driving around in the back like the swaybar was broken they were so off pace/erratic on ovals, and god forbid you had to pass a lapped car.
8:25 exactly my position that ive been in for over a year. i'm as quick as a 3k-5k irating in F4 but due to my irating (2k) i cant even pass some 1.5k bc they cant race side by side in a corner. i barely race so my irating rarely goes up much and my safety rating tanks each race so im stuck in D class. i just wanna race C class cars
Its also how the industry as a whole is becoming ill. How many new drivers pull shitty unsportsmanlike moves but are given a good light despite that because 90% the time theyre winning or not doing that?
In iRacing, in Ringmeister races and other series with Nordschleife involved in schedule, you have to qualify before a race session even starts. I think qualifying in a seperate session for any track and being placed in a split according to that time would solve the issue with Elo. On the safety rating issue, they could implement an algorithm that is a function of finishing place and places gained alongside the incident per RACE DURATION instead of corners turned. Monza is notoriously dirty but it has such few corners that it is a safety hell.
To add something to the SR portion. Doesn't ACC do something different with SA where it can give you more SA from racing super close to another car but not having contact? i know this somewhat because of an ai cheese people do to get high SA very quickly so they can race LFM.
Yes, and if the conditions are wet it's multiplied too. It does still broadly work on the same premise though, I think it calculates your average incidents per corner over a 750km span of driving... Something like that.
Hit the nail with the head there, absolutely spot on analysis. I just wish there was a faultless way to have competitive ranked racing that is devoid of these flaws...
I prefer the SRS-way without SR. If you make contact, you basically loose a place in points, so it's not worth it to gain a position if it doesn't count. Otherwise the ELO-ranking make the grids very competitive between players the more splits there are and every position counts, unlike IRL. There is also other differences: IRL you can only gain points, not lose them just by participation. Also pros and amateurs are usually in one grid separated by classes, so not every car is your opponent.
SRS had a good idea but was *too* strict. There is natural contact in real racing, whereas SRS discouraged contact at all and made you overly paranoid of racing people. Especially nonsensical in categories like touring cars.
@@AustinOgonoski I guess that's not SRS fault. AC just doesn't differentiate between soft contacts and severe ones and that's a point that goes to iRacing. But you have that problem with any SR-system and especially iRacing would benefit from the SRS-way. Many people would be even more aggressive if there isn't a protest-system that can ban those intentional hitters, but because SR is just not that important anymore, the 'racing' can be quite aggressive because iRating is so much more important. If a 4x contact is the same as loosing a position (or better two) instead of equivalent with 4 off-tracks, the racing would be more fair.
Basically my experience with LFM. Was going up and up until I was getting Twitch-aliens in lobbies doing last-to-first, then it was downhill while also racing less with other stuff going on. Pitskill seemed to be better because they could at least explain their system a little better, but lost-track too somewhere when lowering minimum ranking requirements for bigger series, inviting the noobs into multi-hour fun events just to watch them kill everyone at T1.
There is a good video What happens to iRating if the same people race together and finish in the same position. The first goes to infinity, the last one to zero. Does this make sense?
As flawed as the systems may be, there's not really a whole lot that I can think of that can be done, overall, in the long term. I think for the most part, higher ELO drivers will definitely know how to drive and you just hope that those drivers also adopt some sort of a safe driving mindset. I think for the intended purpose the systems as they are tend to sort themselves out fairly well.
I think there's a fundamental problem with starting out higher than zero for ELO but that may be a minor point. A steeper multiplier for consecutive high or low place finishes might balance out people who don't play a lot with those that run every day for hours. More so when finishing several laps down from the rest of the field and less so with a wider margin in strength of field where there are less splits. I would think a 5k Miata driver might be more skilled than someone who reached the same level in a series with less participation. I honestly think there should be a per car ranking, I consistently see people who might be fine with the GR86 on iRacing but wreck half the field in a prototype. I guess that might be an issue more associated with the safety rating system though. The obvious issue here is attributing fault for penalties but as far as I know no real life series is awarding championship points to drivers who are wrecked out by other competitors, it's just bad luck.
Safety rating means nothing to most high rating iracers now. You’ll see a high % 5k + higher with a 2.2 SR. All they care about is the IR. If they get below 2.0 they’ll do TT to bump it above to not lose their A license. I’ve been with iracing since 08 and about 2010 when leagues came out I stopped official racing. I’d only have time for 2 races a week maybe 3. And if you get taken out by a jackal in one, the 2nd race you hope it’s great to get the IR back even! So you really need to race 10 official races a week to our run the shit shows. And leagues don’t have IR/SR so for this last 14 years my ir/sr has never changed. Well I have ran 10-15 races from 2018-20, and shit show. But I get out in low splits because I haven’t official raced. It would take a huge amount of time to build up where I should be. Also I like to prepare for an event, like a rl race. Not race 10 races at one track each week. And to do that in multiple cars/classes you have to live in mamas basement to have the time. LMU has their new build dropping on the 10th so will see how their new system works.
I am one of those people that hovers around 5k and is currently sub 3.0 sr 😅 I would like to consider myself to be a clean racer. Sometimes you get caught up in an accident or two, but that's just racing. The majority of my sr loss is because of offtracks, which I would personally consider somebody with a 4x from offtracms much more safe than somebody with a 4x from collisions.
I know it hurts sometimes to get punished by accidents of others, but i would really like you start at 110% SR in a race and a contact with another car that leads to off-track, actual damage or a significant bigger delta compared to the pack, should reduce this by 50%. Every now known incident will still eat from this 110%, but much less. So a perfect race gets you a bonus, and small incidents not involving others just bring you down to 100% or less. 1 crash, thats it, no chance for positive SR, 2 crashes -> even more loss 1-3 minor errors -> youre good, 100% is still possible more minor errors -> no big hit, but no positive SR also This way you climb the SR ladder much slower and can be assured that hard work was involved to gain it. Surely we have to reelaborate the way content is locked behind this progress, but there has to be still an incentive to keep this high. And when the time trial SR grinding is out of the game, the stakes are even higher.
You make some good points, but do you have a solution for this? I totally agree with your ideas but myself can't see a solution. Maybe, at least for iracing, they could split off tracks(1x) and contacts (4x) into two different categories of rating, idk what about 2x though.
To my experience I think DR and SR should be calculated together and be instead represented by one value only. This way you could be slow but safe or fast and dangerous and have the same value. This is probably very difficult to calculate though, and SR should have more influence on the rating. I think this way fast but dangerous people would end up in lower splits.
@@AustinOgonoski Only good way to enjoy AMS2 online is in leagues. At least until they fix the freezing lobby when ending Practice and Qualifying, and server showing completely wrong results after a race finishes.
Simply put the rating systems of modern simracing titles are made not for the benefit of simracers but the platform it self. They just want you to race in their platform as much as possible..
8:43 The opposite happens as well; the elo systems don't reward consistent, good finishes because - due to the nature of racing - random circumstance can lead to you finishing last due to factors outside of your control. It can easily take me 5-6-7 - maybe more - good finishes to make up for one single DNF. So not only are poor, "lucky" drivers driving around with too high elo -- there are decent drivers who are also ranked much lower than they should be, trapped in "elo hell".
Elo does not work in a racing game. It is purely based on the better player winning based on skill, because it was created for Chess. This is not true in racing. You can get crashed out and lose points, or luck into a good finish and gain points. That makes it both an extremely frustrating experience and mostly meaningless as a measure of actual skill.
In isolation I might agree, but statistically it averages out. Faster drivers will always end up higher in the long term, this is not like a real life championship where there's maybe 20 races every year and a couple of unlucky races ruin your chances to win the championship. You can do hundreds of races a year, is it possible that one driver never gets punted and another gets punted every time? And the larger the player base the less likely it is that you find the same people ramming you into the wall
Im only 2 minutes in and this is simply not true. A brand new player, who is not passionate and can barley make it a few laps before spinning is not finishing top 10 in any series besides rookies.
Austin your voice and mic with that faint warm crackling sound reminds me of John Frankenheimer narrating on the album “the exciting racing sounds of Grand Prix”. I’m your biggest fan girl LOOOOOOL so fkn good man you nail it everytime meatball sub
Im only 2 minutes in and this is simply not true. A brand new player, who is not passionate and can barley make it a few laps before spinning is not finishing top 10 in any series besides rookies.
Think about Daytona races on iRacing, in which there is no driving skill needed, and a player lucks into a top 5 by not being involved in the big wreck at the end. Think about GT3 at Spa or Monza, in which the first turn always destroys 5 or 6 cars. By proxy of not being involved in the turn 1 crash (or the eau rouge crash after), you can pick up free spots. A handful of those races and you're gucci.
I think the Elo system in iRacing is fine. You have qualifying, if you're as good or better than your elo, you go up the front and all the problems are behind you. It also escalates depending on who you beat and who beat you, win a 10k sof as a 2k driver and you'll probably jump an entire 1k, so if you did take a break and come back worse/better, it wont be long before you're at your true elo again. The way lobbies are filled is top-down anyway, it can suck to be car #30 in a race but there will still be people at your pace, just you'll be fighting for not-last rather than 1st, the enjoyment is all still there and if it is too hard you'll be dropped a split for the next one.
Safety rating on the other hand. I think this is the cause of all the crashes, especially in the higher splits. It's far too generous, even with an A license you can crash once every race and it'll take like 20 to actually lose the license. So what's happening is that if a car ahead makes a tiny mistake, the car behind won't half-throttle for 0.5 seconds to resolve the issue, they'll keep it pinned and dump you, because the punishment to them for doing so is minimal, and they get a free position out of it. "Legal wrecking" is a huge problem in the topsplits ever since covid.
On the topic of safety rating.
The main reason for why I got iracing in 2021 was to race the Nürburgring 24h and the spa 24h.
6h into the n24 I crash the car while trying to catch P2 and an hour later my teammate loses 2 laps due to connection issues.
By then both my teammates decided that it's not worth it to continue racing. I then got the idea to just continue driving to boost my safety rating, the server was GT3 only and the field quite spread.
I jumped from a C to an A license that night
LOL yeah SR is totally easy to farm just do like 6-8 hours of competitive laps on the Nurburgring or at the Spa track. Totally normal
@Darlexis the point is that I had next to no interactions with other cars.
I got my A license for the fact that I was able to keep my car on track for a few hours
Everything you said does make sense. However, until someone figures out a better way to do it, this is basically all we got.
I believe if you’re good you’ll eventually progress past the noob lobbies even if you can only race once a week. However, sim racing elo is hard to fine tune because there’s so many cars, so someone can wreck and still end up in 10th and gain a hefty amount of rating. I think the bigger issue is people being ranked too high due to many lower level races just being crap shoots. Also safety rating is just silly 😅
Fr I’ve seen people get crazy rating for for poking high and placing low meanwhile I climbed the board surging every wreck in front and I get cucked
The ones who tried to change this were Kunos here, in ACC, SR is gained mostly by being clean while being next to another player, you gain a tiny bit of SR by being clean by yourself but you loose a lot if you crash, the way to gain it correctly is to be clean while you're next to another player/AI. In fact in LFM, in order to get your ACC license you needed a SR of 85 I believe, but then LFM doesn't use the SR in game and prefers to use its own ranking.
So Kunos had a good system going on, but a shit implementation of online ranking matches.
The go kart metaphor is so me at my local k1😂
When it comes to safety rating even bad driving isn’t classified correctly.
Going off track to avoid a wreck is in many games almost the same as cutting the track for an advantage, let alone when the game misjudges time gained from a cut.
The other day I was doing a bit of TC in Raceroom and got a load of penalties for contact for racing these cars the way they are raced in real life, it was a nice close race and we all finished with no mechanical or aero damage. But then the noob who killed some on T1 and grannied around the track for the rest of the race got a nice safety rating boost for being such a clean good little driver.
I know that calculating the magnitude of these penalties isn’t easy, but there must be some factors to these incidents that could help giving the correct penalties to the correct drivers.
I also would like to believe it would be possible to have a system that penalizes drivers differently at different stages of the race, like having harsher penalties for collisions but more lenient penalties for track cuts at the start of lap 1.
Ai is coming to iracing through the works with Microsoft. The Ai could take 3-5 minutes after each race and pass judgement on all incidents. Not a big fan of Ai but this would be nice.
Furthermore, the ONLY reason why Chess Organizations developed the Elo system was specifically to distance itself from other 1v1 sports such as Tennis, Badminton, Speed Skating, et al, and specifically full-combat sports (read: Boxing, Wrestling, Fencing, Sumo, Karate, Taekwondo, etc, etc) for the sole purpose of making Chess appear as more of a "Thinking Man's Game", particularly during its peak in the mid-20th Century at the height of the Cold War. It is USELESS in other sports that require more than one opponent to partake in, not only due to the "lucked-in" problem but also because team games such as Motor Racing and Association Football are not multi-tiered in terms of their ruleset. Chess only works as a "Thinking Man's Game" because you have to think in terms of multiple turns ahead of both yourself and your opponent as it is turn-based.
Sports such as Association Football, Motor Racing, (most)Fighting Games, MOBAs, First-Person Shooters, Boxing, Wrestling, Rugby, Gridiron Football, etc, etc, are real-time, meaning that you have to simplify the ruleset for anyone to learn them properly, this means you can't seed people and teams based on ranking alone, you have to seed them based on either geographical proximity or a previous qualifying round. Even Baseball is a hybrid of real-time and turn-based play. The same applies to Cricket, which also relies on Real-time play. The ONLY way to rate skill in real-time is to aggregate both win percentages and consistency rates via a points system that resets to nought per year. It's also why I avoid reading Elo ratings for sports other than Chess because they made zero sense to begin with when applied elsewhere. They possess as much value and worth to a team's/player's performance as the meaningless stats in Baseball and Association Football (xG, or "Expected Goals" is an example of a meaningless metric that was only introduced because the Bookmakers want to make even more money from their bets with the advent of UK Laws surrounding gambling being relaxed post-Lottery legalisation in 1993/94)
Tha's a very naïve approach....Racing drivers are continuously thinking ahead and planning there laps relative to their opponents looking for weakness's, looking after tyres, engines, fuel consumption...Chess had no thoughts towards other sports when using ELO...that's ridiculous.
@@porthmeor1 you completely missed the point
@@awakeandwatching953 'the ONLY reason why Chess Organizations developed the Elo system was specifically to distance itself from other 1v1 sports'....that's the point you can't remember making....
You also forgot about project cars 2 which is legit the screenshot in the background for the video, the safety rating for pc2 is even mote stupid, if you dont do a race for a while it slowly decreases your rating which is so stupid
Your safety trading shouldn't change but Maybe your driver rating should go down if you don't race for a month
yupp
You can run million laps in isolation in ACC and you won't gain a single Saftey rating.
The only way you can get it by driving close and fast next to some one cleanly.
However you can farm it against AI which is not great but it does kinda help people get good.
yeah but ACCs system is not used in LFM other than to qualify you for taking the license test which is a bit annoying cause i only race AC in lfm.. id like to do ACC but dont have the time to grind kunos sr just so i cant take the test to get in to lfm
I think that's fair. The chess comparison is apt. With chess, you're playing chess against the best chess player and the worst chess player. With racing games, you're likely doing that in a HyperCar, IndyCar or NASCAR Cup against the best and in a Mazda Cup, Formula Vee or Street Stock against the worst. It doesn't really value how good you are and you can farm it by avoiding what you're bad at but like and running what others are likely weaker. iRacing has reduced that with splitting Road, Formula, Oval and the various others they do. Annoyingly, it's also not something with a solution because of the various points you mention on race length, having to no-life and everything else.
Safety Rating is also fair. If people are pissed off at you for smashing half the field up at Turn 1, they're likely not going to change their mind because you drove around on a clean track because you wiped half of them out. With the current system, you'd pretty much have to reduce the incident gain from driving on your own. The only solution I've seen to this is in ACC where they have numbers in-game on how you race other people separate to your ability to drive on a track. The problem with that is how you can farm that system offline.
"Safety Rating" means nothing when the netcode of the game itself cannot handle more than 12 players in a race without it bugging out with incorrect times, things happening on screen that aren't real, and incompetent moderator teams that don't bother questioning things.
Sure, it's important in Sim Racing for none of the players in the lobby to be CrashCows who will just spin out the poor soul in front of them and fuck things up for everyone, but something has to change, because clearly what's going on isn't working.
Yeah it really sucks when bad netcode causes phantom contact collisions, it seems like it’s getting worse too.
So maybe we should need a system based on lap time+consistency for "elo" and close racing cleanliness for safety, right?
I think the ACC SA is almost decent enough. Running clean laps and being fast and consistent have their own rating in CN, CC. You only gain SA by racing closely with other cars without incidents. Sadly ACC allows you to gain SA from running with AI and of course there are drivers who farm SA by running with slow AI.
If you think ELO rank is unfair only to the fastest players, you are definitely wrong. I think drivers with intermediate skill are also disadvantaged. You are too fast for the rookies and too slow to keep up with the big boys. You end up having the most dead "races" where you might as well be in a lone test session. It becomes a vicious cycle where you ping pong between slower and faster splits. You gain some elo in the slower splits, only to get thrown into the deep end and finish in the lower third, losing elo in the process. And the cycle repeats. In a field of 22 cars, not having anyone close to your skill level is extremely frustrating. Running laps alone in 20 minute sprint races where there is no strategy is not exactly racing IMO.
Spot on about everything. I would love to hear a rant from you about people who start from the pits and run a lap down all race just to inflate their SR rating 😂
Safety rating is an odd thing, especially when it comes to iRacing. Sometimes that rating feels more like an indication of how others are racing you with the no fault system. I also think it's down to player mindset in how you drive and how often people only see a finishing position and the points from it instead of the people they're racing around.
Well, its better than open lobbies tbh. This kind of Ranked racing is cleaner than open lobbies and easier to run, compared to a league.
There's no need to take down another video.
While I believe that the Elo and SR system is better than NOTHING, there are glaring issues that can be frustrating or discouraging from the driver's standpoint: as you said, there's a threshold where you are put into the higher split, even when you're not ready. Mostly because of there being a lack of drivers. I have no idea what would be better though. Even changing to another rating system instead of Elo (Glicko maybe?), that will still have the same issue. So all in all, I'm pretty mixed on the rating system(s). It needs to be there, such that without it, it would be MUCH worse.
I mentioned Glicko, and for those who don't know, it has a separate "rating" that tells the system what its "confidence" of having an accurate rating is. So if you don't play for a while, its confidence drops off and becomes more inaccurate until you play again and more often. This could be useful for iRacing if they could implement it properly. Maybe top split is only drivers its confident are actually "top split material".
As for safety rating, that's a more tough one. Yeah it doesn't make much sense, the "corners per incident," but is there really a better way to do it? I know its stupid, and its easily taken advantage of, but what else do we have? I sincerely have no idea.
7:40 THAT type of scenario is what i tell everyone - you do NOT become better by just driving by yourself grinding out whatever "Safety Rating", you get better by actually RACING against others, whether online or the AI. It is also why i never do any hotlaps because it will not teach me how to maintain race-pace and focus over the course of a 30 minute or even 2 hour long race. Sure i end up qualifying 9.th but i will end up in the Top 5 or even Top 3 by the end because i will keep focused on the whole race session and i know how to overtake and defend. Unfortunately bad drivers will still crash into you because they got no idea how to drive side-by-side through any corners.
There is something to be learned by driving alone. For example trying to stay on one side of the track for an entire lap builds the confidence and judgment to race door to door
@@littlerhino2006 But people do not learn how to stay on the side of a track when hotlapping, they will only learn to take the ideal line and nothing else. Suddenly when a car drives next to them they will either smash into them because "oh i need to take the ideal lane now opponent be damned" and crash them out, or they will panic and go too fast into the corner and fly through it into the wall.
The game that probably substantiates your theory the most is forza motorsport, it has the largest sample size I would think for the amount of cars trying to start a race on average, but the fact I have a A-S safety rating (depending on how stupid people act in proximity to my front bumper) and the lobbies are still mayhem.
The nascar lobbies may be the best example as people trying to complete weekly missions had to run 6 races I think, along with the general popularity the re-adding of the Cup cars brought. The lobbies still were complete messes and at the time have/ had a 3,800 of 4000 skill rating and S safety rating and turn 1 was a melee on road courses and people were driving around in the back like the swaybar was broken they were so off pace/erratic on ovals, and god forbid you had to pass a lapped car.
8:25 exactly my position that ive been in for over a year. i'm as quick as a 3k-5k irating in F4 but due to my irating (2k) i cant even pass some 1.5k bc they cant race side by side in a corner. i barely race so my irating rarely goes up much and my safety rating tanks each race so im stuck in D class. i just wanna race C class cars
Its also how the industry as a whole is becoming ill. How many new drivers pull shitty unsportsmanlike moves but are given a good light despite that because 90% the time theyre winning or not doing that?
In iRacing, in Ringmeister races and other series with Nordschleife involved in schedule, you have to qualify before a race session even starts. I think qualifying in a seperate session for any track and being placed in a split according to that time would solve the issue with Elo. On the safety rating issue, they could implement an algorithm that is a function of finishing place and places gained alongside the incident per RACE DURATION instead of corners turned. Monza is notoriously dirty but it has such few corners that it is a safety hell.
How would you combat drivers sandbagging their “placement” laps? Breakout rules like drag racing maybe?
What happened to the two LFM AMS2 videos?
I appear to have OCD.
To add something to the SR portion. Doesn't ACC do something different with SA where it can give you more SA from racing super close to another car but not having contact? i know this somewhat because of an ai cheese people do to get high SA very quickly so they can race LFM.
Yes, and if the conditions are wet it's multiplied too. It does still broadly work on the same premise though, I think it calculates your average incidents per corner over a 750km span of driving... Something like that.
Hit the nail with the head there, absolutely spot on analysis. I just wish there was a faultless way to have competitive ranked racing that is devoid of these flaws...
I prefer the SRS-way without SR. If you make contact, you basically loose a place in points, so it's not worth it to gain a position if it doesn't count. Otherwise the ELO-ranking make the grids very competitive between players the more splits there are and every position counts, unlike IRL. There is also other differences: IRL you can only gain points, not lose them just by participation. Also pros and amateurs are usually in one grid separated by classes, so not every car is your opponent.
SRS had a good idea but was *too* strict. There is natural contact in real racing, whereas SRS discouraged contact at all and made you overly paranoid of racing people. Especially nonsensical in categories like touring cars.
@@AustinOgonoski I guess that's not SRS fault. AC just doesn't differentiate between soft contacts and severe ones and that's a point that goes to iRacing. But you have that problem with any SR-system and especially iRacing would benefit from the SRS-way. Many people would be even more aggressive if there isn't a protest-system that can ban those intentional hitters, but because SR is just not that important anymore, the 'racing' can be quite aggressive because iRating is so much more important. If a 4x contact is the same as loosing a position (or better two) instead of equivalent with 4 off-tracks, the racing would be more fair.
Basically my experience with LFM. Was going up and up until I was getting Twitch-aliens in lobbies doing last-to-first, then it was downhill while also racing less with other stuff going on. Pitskill seemed to be better because they could at least explain their system a little better, but lost-track too somewhere when lowering minimum ranking requirements for bigger series, inviting the noobs into multi-hour fun events just to watch them kill everyone at T1.
Yeah you're pretty spot on
It's people playing video games without repercussions in real life, what do you expect?
There is a good video What happens to iRating if the same people race together and finish in the same position. The first goes to infinity, the last one to zero. Does this make sense?
What would be a better system then? You just complain, but bring nothing to the table.
Some solutions will come in an upcoming game I'm working on.
It's frustrating as someone who can do clean laps but is slow or off the pace as well. I end up in the bottom of splits I have no hope of competing in
As flawed as the systems may be, there's not really a whole lot that I can think of that can be done, overall, in the long term. I think for the most part, higher ELO drivers will definitely know how to drive and you just hope that those drivers also adopt some sort of a safe driving mindset. I think for the intended purpose the systems as they are tend to sort themselves out fairly well.
I think there's a fundamental problem with starting out higher than zero for ELO but that may be a minor point.
A steeper multiplier for consecutive high or low place finishes might balance out people who don't play a lot with those that run every day for hours. More so when finishing several laps down from the rest of the field and less so with a wider margin in strength of field where there are less splits. I would think a 5k Miata driver might be more skilled than someone who reached the same level in a series with less participation.
I honestly think there should be a per car ranking, I consistently see people who might be fine with the GR86 on iRacing but wreck half the field in a prototype. I guess that might be an issue more associated with the safety rating system though.
The obvious issue here is attributing fault for penalties but as far as I know no real life series is awarding championship points to drivers who are wrecked out by other competitors, it's just bad luck.
Safety rating means nothing to most high rating iracers now. You’ll see a high % 5k + higher with a 2.2 SR. All they care about is the IR. If they get below 2.0 they’ll do TT to bump it above to not lose their A license. I’ve been with iracing since 08 and about 2010 when leagues came out I stopped official racing. I’d only have time for 2 races a week maybe 3. And if you get taken out by a jackal in one, the 2nd race you hope it’s great to get the IR back even! So you really need to race 10 official races a week to our run the shit shows. And leagues don’t have IR/SR so for this last 14 years my ir/sr has never changed. Well I have ran 10-15 races from 2018-20, and shit show. But I get out in low splits because I haven’t official raced. It would take a huge amount of time to build up where I should be. Also I like to prepare for an event, like a rl race. Not race 10 races at one track each week. And to do that in multiple cars/classes you have to live in mamas basement to have the time. LMU has their new build dropping on the 10th so will see how their new system works.
I am one of those people that hovers around 5k and is currently sub 3.0 sr 😅
I would like to consider myself to be a clean racer. Sometimes you get caught up in an accident or two, but that's just racing. The majority of my sr loss is because of offtracks, which I would personally consider somebody with a 4x from offtracms much more safe than somebody with a 4x from collisions.
I know it hurts sometimes to get punished by accidents of others, but i would really like you start at 110% SR in a race and a contact with another car that leads to off-track, actual damage or a significant bigger delta compared to the pack, should reduce this by 50%. Every now known incident will still eat from this 110%, but much less. So a perfect race gets you a bonus, and small incidents not involving others just bring you down to 100% or less.
1 crash, thats it, no chance for positive SR, 2 crashes -> even more loss
1-3 minor errors -> youre good, 100% is still possible
more minor errors -> no big hit, but no positive SR also
This way you climb the SR ladder much slower and can be assured that hard work was involved to gain it. Surely we have to reelaborate the way content is locked behind this progress, but there has to be still an incentive to keep this high. And when the time trial SR grinding is out of the game, the stakes are even higher.
An accident happens in front of you, you avoid safely by going off track. You get an SR penalty. That doesn’t work.
I see your point. These are growing pains for a s sport that use to be a niche.
You make some good points, but do you have a solution for this? I totally agree with your ideas but myself can't see a solution. Maybe, at least for iracing, they could split off tracks(1x) and contacts (4x) into two different categories of rating, idk what about 2x though.
It's not just sim racing. Look at the Snowflake 100 and Snowball Derby or the Gateway Nationals. All demolition derbies.
That’s why years ago I gave up on trying to improve my rating in iRacing
To my experience I think DR and SR should be calculated together and be instead represented by one value only. This way you could be slow but safe or fast and dangerous and have the same value. This is probably very difficult to calculate though, and SR should have more influence on the rating. I think this way fast but dangerous people would end up in lower splits.
Unrelated - did you kill your lfm account? We were in a race together but when I click on your acc it says deleted
Yeah. Deleted acct as AMS2 fucked up my stats too much.
@@AustinOgonoski Only good way to enjoy AMS2 online is in leagues. At least until they fix the freezing lobby when ending Practice and Qualifying, and server showing completely wrong results after a race finishes.
Simply put the rating systems of modern simracing titles are made not for the benefit of simracers but the platform it self. They just want you to race in their platform as much as possible..
That's why, although I could be somewhat competent online, I only play offline against AI and do not have these problems
I'll be waiting... 🤓
Good video
8:43
The opposite happens as well; the elo systems don't reward consistent, good finishes because - due to the nature of racing - random circumstance can lead to you finishing last due to factors outside of your control. It can easily take me 5-6-7 - maybe more - good finishes to make up for one single DNF. So not only are poor, "lucky" drivers driving around with too high elo -- there are decent drivers who are also ranked much lower than they should be, trapped in "elo hell".
...same for everyone....
Elo does not work in a racing game. It is purely based on the better player winning based on skill, because it was created for Chess. This is not true in racing. You can get crashed out and lose points, or luck into a good finish and gain points. That makes it both an extremely frustrating experience and mostly meaningless as a measure of actual skill.
In isolation I might agree, but statistically it averages out. Faster drivers will always end up higher in the long term, this is not like a real life championship where there's maybe 20 races every year and a couple of unlucky races ruin your chances to win the championship. You can do hundreds of races a year, is it possible that one driver never gets punted and another gets punted every time? And the larger the player base the less likely it is that you find the same people ramming you into the wall
same for everyone...averages out eventually
Im only 2 minutes in and this is simply not true. A brand new player, who is not passionate and can barley make it a few laps before spinning is not finishing top 10 in any series besides rookies.
Austin your voice and mic with that faint warm crackling sound reminds me of John Frankenheimer narrating on the album “the exciting racing sounds of Grand Prix”. I’m your biggest fan girl LOOOOOOL so fkn good man you nail it everytime meatball sub
Im only 2 minutes in and this is simply not true. A brand new player, who is not passionate and can barley make it a few laps before spinning is not finishing top 10 in any series besides rookies.
Think about Daytona races on iRacing, in which there is no driving skill needed, and a player lucks into a top 5 by not being involved in the big wreck at the end. Think about GT3 at Spa or Monza, in which the first turn always destroys 5 or 6 cars. By proxy of not being involved in the turn 1 crash (or the eau rouge crash after), you can pick up free spots.
A handful of those races and you're gucci.