Thank you to everyone who participated in the fourth championship, and congrats to Spec Racer Z, -randy-, and ClassyClassic for top 3! I believe it was an enjoyable selection of stages. Feedback How did you feel about the stages this time around? They were shorter than last time, and also on the whole probably easier. Is that good or bad? The 4 drop 1 structure is still serving well so I see no reason to mix that up. Next Championship Last championship we learned that we can get overwhelmed with outside factors and it can delay the championship a good bit. With that in mind, should we aim to start the championship sometime in the start of October, or maybe later? Seeing as car balancing requires the stages to be available, maybe we should push to have stages drafted early and then Spec Racer Z or anyone who feels up to the not-especially simple task of car balancing can begin to do that. Spec Racer Z, do you believe you'll have the time to balance cars to stages this time around? If not, sticking with what we have should be fine. As for stages, what are things people would like to see? If you give me a good route that people like, I can turn it into a time trials. Alternatively, I could make a tutorial for making time trials and other people could start making them, but that would take some additional time on my part so let me know if you think that's worth it. If we want to put more time in between championships, we could do the alternative championship thing I've been talking about for a bit where we run an experimental style like a team tournament with stages we've already used while we spend time creating stages or balancing cars for the next championship. It all depends on how soon people want another main championship and if there's interest in the alternative style, so share your thoughts. Other event style I was thinking it would be fun, if we could pull it off, to do an event that prevents people from learning the course too much before they submit their time, like a real rally. The problem with this is that it requires the time from event start to event end to be very short which means it's difficult to manage the schedule across time zones. Also it's something that would benefit a lot from a co-driver. What would be really cool would be to get a bunch of people to live-stream it and have run orders and stuff like an actual event, but I don't think enough of our members have the resources for that and it makes the scheduling problem even worse. I figured I'd bring it up for people to discuss anyway, so what are your thoughts? Any interest? Feasible ways to carry it out? Pardon my unorganized thoughts this time, I'm in a bit of a rush. Thanks everyone for continuing to participate and making this championship what it is.
First of all: as always a big thank you for all, who work hard to make this championship possible! Tracks, schedules, car-tuning ... excellent! It was a pleasure to race. Tracks: I enjoyed all of the tracks, though I have to say, that the 4th stage had some checkpoints that tended to be missed by certain race lines (checkpoint-width was a little to small, I think). The length and the mixture of paved and gravel roads were just right on all in my opinion. While we already had 4 championships: why not recycle some tracks by just racing them in the opposite direction? Would reduce work for the championship-managers ... @Spec Racer Z : I'm not sure, what the real reason is, that lead to closing the time gap to you this time around. Were you busy, as you stated, so you had less time to improve your times? Or did my old and rusty butt learn from the past, so I improved my driving? :-D
BRC4 Tracks: First thing I noticed about the track list, I appreciated having courses with more opportunities to reach higher speeds. BRC3 never got you much over 80 mph, while this had two tracks with 100 mph segments. It's a nice variety in driving technique to manage higher speed braking zones. I agree these are easier to finish, but still have lots of challenges once you start pushing limits. Only issues were some checkpoint placements that allowed valid tight lines to miss them, and slightly inconsistent barriers. Car Balance: I can definitely put more time into car balancing this time around, though I still doubt I can do much for the suspension tuning on the non-rally models. You're correct that it's much easier to ensure balance with a finalized course roster, or at least one guaranteed track that strikes a reasonable middle point between speed and technicality for the championship. I can also work on the asphalt and dirt rally tires for each car as was suggested in BRC3 (I-Series would probably be the only complicated part), but we would need a way to indicate the percentage of unpaved-to-paved roads or something similar for that to not turn into a "test both tires on every mixed track" situation. One thing I might try is using the locked fuel as a way to adjust power-to-weight for some obviously underperforming cars (non-rally, classic Pessima). @-randy- : I'd say most of my runs were as optimized as I usually try to get them, though it's taking me less time to figure out and execute my optimal rally lines now which helps with time issues. All the regular racing certainly helps improve race pace even though we keep switching car styles. Although, regarding old results, the Classic Pessima (your car in BRC2) underperformed more than I've wanted since after BRC1. It was already strictly well suited to more technical tracks there, and the 0.9 update altered performance in a way that was even less kind to Classic Pessima balancing, giving us three cars (I-Series, Covet, Sunburst) that are guaranteed contenders compared to the underdogs. If car balance is improved a bit further and we catch everyone at a good time, I imagine the championship podium would be just as intense, but between up to 6 or more people. One thing I noticed was that there was a real possibility of a points tie due to the even number of events, so just curious, do we have tie breaker procedures for that situation? Time Trial Tutorial: If we confirm a few other people are interested in time trial creation, I'd try to contribute or edit a track as well if you made a tutorial @SouthernPotato. In either case, I'm always open for giving feedback on barrier placement or reducing ambiguity on track direction and potential shortcuts, as I've (unfortunately) seen enough track cutting ingenuity from people in online racing to recognize and combat it better than most I'd think. I agree that using reversed tracks with a unique feel every other championship is a nice way to reduce championship work as we continue hosting these. Other Event: I really like the concept, but livestreaming is a whole other can of beans compared to video recording, and it's still easy to have technical difficulties with recording only if you aren't careful. Co-driver on top of that would be even more of a logistics issue unless there's some way to use environment triggered audio files to mod them directly into a track somehow so it doesn't need to be live, and the current cockpit muffling filter implementation wouldn't work correctly with it if people prefer that camera. Unless someone knows a feasible way to put that sort of mod together, I'd say a closely related but different style of racing is still a better bet, or the team idea. A mixed surface hill climb would be an example if we want more aggressive vehicles with a similar race style (and an easy pre-existing template for car balancing), and can find a couple routes that work. I'd say start of October is good to aim for, as it gives us a cushion from holiday season stuff when people might be a bit more busy. That period during the holidays might be a good time to try out unique events that don't require as much time investment.
I noticed that too. I thought about a solution: if there is a tie at the end of the championship, we could use the relative gap between the times of the racers. E.g. racer 1: stage 1: 3:00.000 min, stage 2: 2:00.000 min, stage 3: 2:31.000 min, stage 4: 4:01.000 min. racer 2: stage 1: 3:01.000 min, stage 2: 2:05.000 min, stage 3: 2:30.000 min, stage 4: 4:00.000 min. So both cut of one stage, whith 2 wins and 1 second place. Points would be equal. By dividing the absolute gap of the stage with the best time on that stage, we can calculate how much faster the best time was. Stage 1: racer 1 was ~ 0.6 % ( = 1 / 180 ) faster than racer 2 stage 2: racer 1 was ~ 4.2 % ( = 5 / 120 ) faster than racer 2 stage 3: racer 2 was ~ 0.7 % ( = 1 / 150 ) faster than racer 1 stage 4: racer 2 was ~ 0.4 % ( = 1 / 240 ) faster than racer 1 Racer 1 would win the championship, because sum of relative gaps on all stages is 0.6 + 4.2 - 0.7 - 0.4 = 3.7. Racer 2 would have a sum of -0.6 - 4.2 + 0.7 + 0.4 = - 3.7. In other words: building bigger gaps on shorter tracks is harder than winning long stages with a small gap.
Hi, I've been busier than I expected to be, which is probably always going to be true. Sorry for my absence, things should be slowing down a little bit for me and I should be able to put in more work on BRC. It's unfortunate that some of the tracks always suffer from checkpoint issues. While I believe I'm getting getting better at placing checkpoints the more we do this, it's not uncommon to get one or two wrong. I really would like to make a tutorial for time trial creation at some point so others could create tracks and fix each other's tracks if there's something wrong. That way we could get tracks out quicker. Speaking of getting tracks out, I'd like to do that but I haven't had time to set down and make any routes. Using reverse tracks is a fine idea, so I'll look through and find some good reverse routes that we haven't used. If anyone has any routes that they think would be fun in reverse, please recommend. Also, if anyone would has a fun set of roads they like to drive and can combine into a route of their own, feel free to upload a video of that and I can make a time trial for it if it seems like it would work for the championship. @Spec Racer Z I imagine livestreams would be a whole other beast entirely, and are nothing I have experience with, but I thought it would be good to through the idea out there. Maybe in the distant future. As for the alternative event styles, the holiday teams or hillclimb championship sounds like a great idea. Although now that I've inadvertently delayed the stage work on the next full championship, we'll realistically start that in mid November which places an alternative championship in January at the earliest. Does that still seem like it would work? @-randy- I don't believe there was any policy in place on ties, but what you suggest is a fine idea and I see no reason not to use that if no one else protests. So, anyone got any route ideas? --- Post updated --- Also, @Spec Racer Z since we don't have stages yet I imagine car balancing for this championship would be stressful. What are your thoughts on it? If somehow we had rough routes by say next week, do you think you'd have the time to balance cars in a week or two?
I would love to get this going again, it saddens me every day that I haven't found the time to sit down and sort it out. Making courses is the main time sink, should we just re-use some old ones since it's been so long? There are also a fair number of new members so old courses wouldn't be so bad.
I would be in of course. And I suggest to use old tracks again. We could spice things up by reversing them. That results in a totally different experience.
