Suggested

Inactivity issue

In many ways I agree with Paul, unfortunately I can't think of an alternative approach that let's newer managers enjoy the game without being trounced by some of the more experienced guys and girls.

Another issue is the high number of leagues diluting the number of teams per league. Some of this is because people obviously have an ideal time to race, but then there are options such as race length, speed, one or two cars which give many permutations on the basic game.

We are told by the developers that their intention is to introduce other host selectable options such as no refuelling, tyre rules, flags etc. This will greatly increase the number of permutations and my worry is the number of leagues will also grow making the situation even worse.

Currently there is a choice between one or two car leagues, 4 race distances and three speed options which give 24 permutations. To fully populate these leagues will require 12 x 16 (one car) + 12 x 32 (two car) = 576 teams to fully populate a tier or 1,728 teams for the entire league at each half hour time slot in the day.

Even to half populate them so that promotion and relegation is enabled requires nearly 900 teams for every half hour time slot. Then every time the devs introduce another binary choice (tyre rules on/off, no refuelling on/off, flags on/off) you double the problem.

Of course some leagues have local rules, some prefer to race every day and some have days off, some prefer short seasons, others prefer a full 22 race season. These additional local options add to the diversity.

I'm not trying to give a solution, I'm simply trying to quantify the scale of the problem in keeping leagues and tiers well populated.

By not kicking inactives you at least keep the tiers populated but the cars are very uncompetitive, they break down and ruin the racing for those who are active.

Maybe a better solution would be iGP Bot accounts. Every time a league is created it would be 50% populated in each tier by iGP Bots. These would be set at max level appropriate to the tier, they would never level up, would be exempt from promotion and relegation, they would not break down and would receive a mildly competitive strategy for each race to give the real accounts something to race against.

Every time a real manager joined the league, the highest placed Bot would be kicked and if the league dropped below the promotion/relegation threshold a new bot account would be inserted.

I'm not sure how feasible this would be for the developers to introduce or how much additional load it would place on the servers but it's a solution of sorts.

I also have about 20 accounts that I can insert into leagues as required to activate promotion but I don't have the time to log into them every day to repair and set up for the following race.

This means that the one or two active accounts in Rookie and Pro are not getting the chance to race against competitive opponents. Many soon get disillusioned by the experience and leave the game. The solution I suggest would mean the iGP bot accounts would automatically receive a competitive setup and strategy without anyone needing to spend hours setting them up. The active managers would have a challenge and would be more likely to remain active until they get to Elite where they would generally be racing against real people.

I appreciate there are some drawbacks, the biggest being the storage requirements for all of the bot accounts and the load on the servers to accommodate all of the additional races. To compensate for this the Devs would need to introduce some barriers to people creating dozens of secondary accounts and a restriction on the creation of new leagues.

TBH, I'm only throwing ideas out there to stimulate debate, I think the chances of the Devs picking up on this are pretty slim.

Anyone else wondering what changes this part of the latest blog will bring exactly?:


In general I think the biggest problems of the current tier system are that promotion is either on or off, no middle ground, and that demotion/relegation is only really active if a tier is completely full. I think promotion should enable in steps, so if the tier is less filled less teams are promoted. That means promotion can start a little bit sooner and if Pro is less populated than Rookie it still looses less teams than it gains. Also the last team in standing should relegating sooner than a nearly filled tier at 15/29 teams, more like at more than half filled the last relegates and full it's two like now (1 car could be 17, 22, 27, 32 teams enabling one more relegation slot). This would allow Pro to receive teams from Elite instead just bleeding them to Elite until that's filled up completely.

Yes, that could happen, but initially that would be those managers joining that are occupying those relegation places and an established team may just not getting out of the relegation zone with a team joining. Giving the design the established team must do really badly in a last race to loose out to the joining ones first race to switch places.

Edit: Also the only change would be when it happens. As at 14 and 28 teams respectively every joining team already unlocks a relegation place.