Opening Championship Feedback

Thanks to everyone who participated, the first championship has ended successfully. We had about twelve participants per event, and eight participants who went out for all three events.
So, what were your thoughts on the championship?
Some questions in no real order:

1. Is 3 events too few, or a good amount?
2. Were the rules in the opening championship too light or not light enough?
3. How were the events in the first championship?
4. Should we consider modded championships at the moment?
5. Should we consider other types of events at the moment?
6. Do we need car classes?
7. How should the scoring be changed?

Also, we should establish a date for a second championship (or some kind of event, if not actually a championship) so that we retain participants. I was thinking starting another one in a week or two would be ideal, do you think that's too short of a down time?
There's also the question of which events to use. I've been toying around with making my own quickraces and...I can only sort of do it effectively right now. Are there any good rally course mods that we could use (scenarios or quickraces)? Anyone else that wants to try their hand at course design/quickrace building?
There was talk of appointing someone as a 'race marshal' figure that acts as an unbiased rule enforcer, but I'm not quite ready to embrace this as I feel it removes that person from the fun of the competition, and it just plain isn't necessary at the moment. As long as our rules are straight forward enough, I feel this can safely be avoided.

I'm now quite late for posting the championship results, so I'll do that and give more of my thoughts later in this thread.

 

I think 3 or 5 events is a good number as it naturally reduces a chance of ties. Probably wouldn't go anymore than 5 so it's easier to make changes between the new seasons and doesn't require too much consistency for people with busy schedules. Although a drop race could be used for this instead, where your best 2 out of 3 races or 3 out of 4 etc. are taken for the final result and your worst result is dropped. This lets people miss one race and still be competitive. Maybe a bit much for 3 races, but 4 and up works well with that.

Open rules were nice to play around with, but we should probably do more car class balancing and make the options more firm and fairly competitive. Would be interesting to have the 3 rally cars power limited to match the Covet Rally, and possibly add onto that with more custom rally builds if anyone would be willing to get the suspension compliant enough to survive on par with the rally vehicles.

As for the events ... I will be very happy to see the sticky bush placeholder fixed in an update. Port Rally reversed is a no-go for now, and any other Jungle Rock stuff should be tested with the largest rally car in the roster to make sure it's not overly cruel before it's included. I think modded events, both on official maps or custom terrains could be great, but sticking to official content for at least one more season might be good as we have plenty of unique quality events to choose from still. As for additions, I think asphalt rallies like Small Island and Utah's Mixed Asphalt also work well, and reversing certain tracks can give them an entirely different feel. Going with enforced early morning or dusk (dark enough to make things slightly harder without requiring headlights) could be cool as well.

For car classes, I think we should stick to one car class for now and just try to give it as much variety as we can with balancing, and maybe go with 2 classes if we get much more participation later. As for the points system, it depends if we want a system where there's a cut-off to the points or not. If we just want to expand the WRC style, here's a system that puts 15 people into the points and one that puts 20 people into the points.

Spoiler: 15 points positions

1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 28, 32, 36, 40, 50 [+2 points from positions 15-11, +3 points for top 10-6, +4 points for top 5-1st with winner getting 50]

Spoiler: 20 points positions

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 16, 19, 22, 25, 29, 33, 37, 41, 50 [+1 point for positions 20-11, +3 points for top 10-6, +4 points for top 5-1st with winner getting 50]

And I think 2-3 weeks is usually a good downtime for these kinds of things (maybe the start of April), with about half of that spent promoting participation and ironing out any custom configurations and balancing we may perform. I also agree we shouldn't need a marshal for this style of racing as long as we test the tracks for excessive shortcut potential beforehand. If we have someone who can add hay bales or mesh walls to custom quickplay events, we can do that as well if they fail testing. Either way, I prefer golden era rally where cuts were only limited by their risk trade-offs and anything too egregious would simply be blocked off.

 

1. 3 events was fine, four might be better.
2. I enjoyed the freedom the rules provided. Certain things like corner cutting was possible, but carried a large risk/reward. If custom maps were to be created for this they could put barriers or put the checkpoints in such a way to avoid any complaints about corner cutting.
3. The events were very good, nice and challenging. The first one was definitely the worst and most aggravating due to the bushes.
4. Modded championships? Like mod cars? I like using the stock cars personally.
5. Any time-trial events with risk/reward are fine by me.
6. For car classes, I think I'd like a bit of variety. Perhaps allowing us to change car? Perhaps having each race be a different class of vehicle?
7. The scoring was fine by me.

 

Oh, one extra event idea I thought of, a rallycross event as a custom point-to-point quickplay scenario that makes you do a couple laps before switching to a longer joker lap route. I'm not sure if it's possible within the stock code to have a joker lap as a requirement to finish the event and only taken on the lap of your choosing, but I imagine a point-to-point version would be simpler to make regardless.

 

What's the methodology for making what we have more competitive? Is your suggestion to modify the engines of the non-covet cars? What other ways are there to change this?

I've been wondering how to promote participation without being annoying and spam-esque. How were you picturing promotion would be done?
On the subject of being annoying, this group has 41 member and I'm wondering if you think it's reasonable to send out announcements (as conversations) to them that new championships are starting. Unless they're watching the forum there's no way they'll know about anything we're doing.

3 is definitely the lower bound, but a fine number of events. Spec Racer Z is right about five being probably the max amount we should do, though drop races probably are a good idea. Perhaps for this upcoming event we should try 4 events with one dropped event.

I recall seeing a scenario some time ago where someone had included joker laps (the alternative checkpoint was green). I don't think the game enforced that you take the joker lap at least once, but we can verify that ourselves of course. Perhaps I could find the guy who made that and get him to make some an event for us...or I could just study his code.

I feel that using one car across events means you have to put some thought into your car choice. A Covet may do great on the first event and an SBR4 or something ridiculous might be the quickest on the second event, but if you have to pick one car then it's going to have to be more versatile. Although maybe there's some merit in going through several cars in a championship in some way I haven't considered. Spec Racer or anyone else, what are your thoughts on this?

I hope to find someway to gauge about how many members will be in the second championship so that we can tailor the scoring to that. If it's anything like the first championship, 15 scoring positions should do. I quite like the idea of starting in April, it gives enough downtime and if championships correspond to months they can be referred to easily. What did you think of the cutoff day of Friday this last championship? I was thinking Monday or Tuesday might be better because it puts the weekend right before the due date, but perhaps this wouldn't actually be better.

 

Scoring should be definitely improved because even "bad" drivers (with bad times) should get some satisfaction for participating. By quick look at results only bad drivers with zero or minimum points lost interest to continue in stage 3. My suggestion is to give some extra points for best saving situation, best drift, best crash or somethink like this because bad drivers have plenty situations like this.

Another suggestion is highlighting drivers in google sheets with their controlers. For example drivers with wheel have red cell background, orange for gamepad and so on. Or put little pictures behind their names.

About championship I think that it will be good to have some theme like Rally small island or JRI rally so every stage is in the same map/enviroment. And for promotion maybe making some promotion video like in real WRC or rally games? I mean video of the track from helicopter or run through stage (or some interesting parts of stage) with bumper camera and played 3 times quicker etc?

 

I think that would be a nice idea, although we could maybe set the power limit to 200PS, +/- 10PS. That would allow to run most stock vehicles and give more options for those who would like to do a custom rally build. We could also have a mandatory wheel/tire combination like the 15x8 Dried with rally tires, as to balance things out across the vehicles.

As for the rest I pretty much agree with @Spec Racer Z on everything. We could start the next championship the first week of april, 4 races with 1 dropped event and moving the due dates on Mondays could give a better chance for those who work/study full-time to take part competitively.

Edit: regarding points, having a 15-positions scoring system may motivate more people to keep going despite a lower finishing place in the first event.
Also yes, JRI's deadly bushes are a bit of a pain, especially as a keyboard user. Although the hillclimb quick race is quite a fun one and it would be a nice challenge to keep momentum in relatively low-powered cars.
ECUSA and Small Island have nice mixed stages that could prove to be quite fun.
I also think that so far marshalling is not needed, and reward-through-risk keeps things entertaining to me. I fear that too much oversight could be demotivating for some.
All in all I like that this thing is taking shape and people are motivated!

 

This type of thing isn't very objective, so in order to effectively judge this you'd need impartial members which isn't really feasible at this point. Also awarding championship points for that type of thing seems out of place. Of course, it's certainly entertaining to watch some extraordinary crashes that occur while trying to run a stage. Hopefully extending the points to allow more people motivates more people to participate in more events.

This might be a good idea, I'll see if I can't get that worked out on the spreadsheet this time around.

Themed/locational championships would be cool, but I don't know if it's feasible at the moment. Maybe in the future if we get a stage creation situation going. Promotional videos would be cool too, but I fear it's a lot of effort that may not necessarily draw any more members.

Are we going to try to use these balancing rules for this upcoming championship? How are they enforced? Also how can engine mods/tunes be made easily available to people that don't really know how to do that type of stuff in BeamNG? I think this is a good idea though, more competitive cars is definitely desirable.

So if everyone more or less thinks early April with a Monday due date is the way to go, I'm thinking I'll message everyone in the group about the upcoming championship and try to get an estimate of how many people will participate to see how many scoring positions we should have. If we do four events, the championship will go from April 3rd to May 1st. Since one event will be dropped, I was thinking two lapped events and two point-to-points would be a good set of courses. As for what the actual stages would be...not so sure. Any ideas? Maybe the JRI Machine Delivery Scenario (the one with the cement mixer)?

 

People may have to show in their submission (maybe before the run) the graph displaying the power to show they are within the limits, and have a shot of the wheels as well. Of course, everything could be edited if people really wanted to cheat, but I believe we are all doing this in a spirit of fair competition. We could also prepare mandatory configs, but that kinda seems a bit too strict and a potential turn off. Plus, it's more work, and it's not preventing cheating anyway.

I'm okay with the dates and the 4-run/1-dropped format, we could use the rally scenarios at Small Island, the rallycross scenarios at ECUSA, the hillclimbs quickplays at JRI, the mixed asphalt quickplay at Utah. There's plenty to choose from what is available in the game The machine delivery scenario is a good choice as well!

 

One possible track could be this one:

https://www.beamng.com/threads/bajarama-the-rigs-of-rods-classic.8754/

Someone would have to make it a quickplay.

 

Maybe sometime in the next couple of months we could do a modded stage championship sort of thing. There's quite a few stages that might have good roads to make courses out of like this and Beam Mountains among others.

For this championship I was thinking we could do use the paths from the Supercar Rally Scenario and the Machine Delivery Scenario. For a lapped stage I was thinking of Rallycross West Circuit. I'm not sure on the fourth stage yet. I put together this fairly simple circuit on East Coast USA:

Are the turns too tight? Is it too boring? If not, I was thinking we could do 3 laps of that.

Edit: if you think it could be improved by moving some of the checkpoints around, do let me know.

 

That looks like a fine circuit to race and checkpoints look exploit free. Though for Industrial, I think we should do Industrial Figure Eight Reverse for something entirely new. I also think Car Delivery would be a better route for quick play. Supercar Rally is a good course in theory, but it's very bush heavy as well. Might want to hold off on that until next season to see if the next update changes the bushes. Pessima introduction is a fun little route that takes somewhere under 1:30 to complete, Figure Eight Reverse takes a little over 30 seconds per running lap (so maybe 4 laps?), and Car Delivery would probably take ~1:40 or 1:50. It'd also meet the two circuits and two P2P events criteria, though it does lean heavy East Coast.

Also, to answer some questions I never got around to due to getting sick with a cold, "I'm wondering if you think it's reasonable to send out announcements (as conversations) to them that new championships are starting."
Definitely, a single announcement marking the start of each season should be helpful and gives the group more purpose than simply having a thread.

"Although maybe there's some merit in going through several cars in a championship in some way I haven't considered. Spec Racer or anyone else, what are your thoughts on this?"
I'm more for using a single car throughout a series. Adds more to the overall championship strategy and feels more authentic to me.

"Promotional videos would be cool too, but I fear it's a lot of effort that may not necessarily draw any more members."
Not sure about a full on promotional video for each specific season, but a general BeamNG rally showcase also highlighting the championship league could be cool. Unfortunately recording replays in quick play is a pain when all of the apps reset along with the scenario each retry, but if a handful of people were willing to make race pace replays of some sections and send it to me, I'd be willing to reciprocate that effort and make a sports cinematic/community highlights reel out of it. I can also make reconnaissance lap videos very easily.

Edit: Also, I imagine CreasingCurve could do a lot more than this, but converting the Pessima Rally to the Sport Intake, the Sunburst Rally to the Stock Intake, and the I-Series to the Stock Intake gets them reasonably matched to the Covet Rally in course testing. However, the the I-Series is slightly underpowered on the stock intake and the 1st stage turbo is overpowered, so it's hard to match that one with an unmodded config. Also, pretty sure you can use in-game tuning for many non-rally cars with race suspension so they behave much more like a rally car, but I'm not very good at suspension tuning.