Suggested

Future leagues! Please support

years ago I played a web based soccer manager game. The structure was simple concerning promotion/relegation.
League consisted of 20 teams. 4 was relegated and 2 teams was promoted. This way you would have a "pyramid" structure, meaning you wold have 1 1st division, 2 2nd divisions, 4 3rd divivisions, 8 4th division........you probably get the point.

I would recommend this structure in this game the same way. Then you have another challenge in this game concerning time of day. In the soccer game you had different leagues (USA, britain, Germany, etc. - quite a few). In this game you could make 24 leagues, meaning race time. So depending on your local time (when you are available) you could join 01-24 league - which would make no change concerning todays race.

This leaves one challenge....long races/short races, etc. Well this could either be 1) a provided standard, 2) A poll before each season, 3) a third level dividing the leagues OR 4) at lower levels you could have shorter races and at higher levels longer races.

Then you finally have a weird differentiation today, because each league may choose how often they have races. I don't think that should be an option - you should have races each day!

RESULT:
- This structure will provide that if you are active you will quickly reach a competitive level (within 2-3 weeks)
- If you stop racing you will be quickly relegated........and if you start again you will promote easy as well
- More relevant and fun competition....meaning more fun for active players

I hope you will support this idea!

Okay, I'm going to explain why this probably isn't a good idea using my experience in this game to back up my points...

First of all, one of your ideas that you could have multiple time zones in each pyramid is not currently possible in iGP. Once you get promoted up to the next tier, what time zone will that tier be? Yours, someone Else's or no one's? In iGP time zones are very important and directly affect whether players can race live. It wouldn't be good for iGP or league hosts if people who got promoted just became inactive to get demoted again (which may I add is easier to do with the pyramid system) At the end of the day the "multiple time zones in one pyramid" idea is impossible. If you really meant different time zones in different leagues, well iGP already has this so there's no need to make an "official" iGP league for each timezone and the pyramid idea will contribute nothing to what iGP already has...


Second of all, This pyramid idea does not make it easier to be promoted instead it can do the opposite, lets simplify the system to make it easier to understand...

Assume there are 16 cars per "group" in each tier. Elite has 1 group, Pro has 2 groups, Rookie has 4 groups etc. For this system to work the amount of people who get demoted has to be twice as much as the amount of people who get promoted. So if you had 2 people managers being promoted at the end of the season, 4 would have to demoted in pro and elite. In this case you will still have a 1/8 probability of being promoted still but of course a 1/4 probability of being demoted. This would be smart for quickly shifting inactive managers but would make elite frustrating to reach and stay in because with the current slight design deficit you get from being promoted, you'd be twice as likely to be demoted again in the next season. Increasing the amount per group will accentuate an issue that I will raise later and decreasing it increases the probability of getting demoted/promoted so that's a no go...

A third problem, which sort of continues from the previous point, is that rookies or people from the lowest tier may become less motivated to reach such elite. With so many other players being in the same league, "rookies" will feel a much higher disconnect to the top tier to the point where they could forget about trying to reach it. IMO elite is the best thing about racing in iGP and it should stay that way. With more people getting demoted rookies will have to deal with better players at the beginning of their careers which will also lead to a lower chance of them sticking around. You have to make elite reacheable, realistic but challenging for the average player... I know it's unrealistic but most players who show up to their first race in this game want to win!

Another problem would be the amount of players needed to fill up a whole 3 tier pyramid, (I mean I guess you could modify the size of each group but that would introduce a lot of new problems with it...) With 16 managers/32 cars per group you'll have 224 CARS PER PYRAMID... 112 managers per league, trying to completely fill that will literally be like trying to completely fill 2 leagues now one after the other. I don't think there are many players on this website who could do that, let alone the iGP team themselves for every single time zone...

Even if you keep the time zones the same in one pyramid, this increased amount players racing at the exact same time (two-hundred and twenty f*cking four cars lol) will most likely cause an immense amount of stress on iGP's servers and will introduce new bugs and glitches that will need even more time to sort out (there are still some important ones that need to be fixed now).

And finally, it will NOT take 2-3 weeks to get up to a competitive tier. 2 weeks is 14 days, 3 weeks is 21. Thats basically a season in a daily league; I wouldn't call getting promoted once getting into a "competitive environment" and even if it was this would not be an advantage to the pyramid system. This would be an advantage of allowing people to be promoted. Obviously the most competitive tier is elite, the shortest a season can be is 18 days. To get to elite in my simplified pyramid system and in the normal system it will take AT THE VERY LEAST 36 days to reach elite. 36 days is over 5 weeks which is easily over a month and that's in a daily league. 2-3 weeks is an understatement compared to the reality. I don't agree that the schedule shouldn't be an option

So anyway, it seems the pyramid system does not really add anything to iGP, apart from the possibility to demote more people than you promote per "group" and I suppose increase the aggression and desperation to do well in each "group" too, if you or anyone else has any other valid, logical advantages that I have totally missed I would definitely like to hear them

Just to specify. I am talking about 24 pyramids. 1 for each timezone. I agree that the weak point in my suggestions are how long should races be? How often (each day, etc.). Concerning server load I guess that is always an issue, but my idea will not generate that much more load. There are probably also peaks now. I agree that a race every day would probably tend to increase races.

Well my point is that I think there are too few active players. I have tried several leagues. Today I could only see 3-4 players. And all spots in the league are filled in in all three leagues. I would like to compete in leagues where most ppl are online and competitive.

Some sort of division system which provides competition would be nice!

The devs have often said they will eventually implement "casual races" which I assume could be done at any time against managers from anywhere. I'm not sure of the specifics, though.

There are just too many races where no one attends........that is just too bad :-/

And this could really increase that..............