What I would do...

[Xosé Estrada]

At this point, I would choose one of this two alternatives:

A.- CONTINUE AS UNTIL NOW

B.- MAKE A RADICAL CHANGE

What this means for me?, well, option a is obvious, try to deal with the problems as we did until now till the end of the season, and then make the big changes, but we are in less than mid season now.

B. MAKE A RADICAL CHANGE

Basically:

• Delay the Daytona race until 29th
• Drop the MOD content and use the Radical SR3 205hp as unique car for all teams (Can-Am like)
• Drop the 30 slots server patch

To do this, the B teams should merge with the A teams, keeping the best 2 results of the 4 cars in this previous races.

Why the radicals? Because at this point I think is more interesting have a unique car championship with good looking and easy to skin cars, than go back to the boring GT Sport class with all Corvette field and teams concerned on pick the best car in this two weeks instead of train to get used to the new one.


Why not an intermediate solution?

Because loosing the MOD, we will loose several hours of work and many interesting features that made STC special, such as:

• Exclusive car models for EVO
• Custom physics
• 4 tyre compounds

Then, if we do this sacrifice and we find that in next race a huge lag spike disconnect two people, or we loose two cars in a lag accident, we will be in same/worse situation than now (yesterday we lost 2 cars from 26) but with a way more standard and less interesting competition and with months of work in the trash bin.

So, as a personal opinion, this is the possibilities I see for STC until a better platform comes.

Thanks.

 

[Grégory Cogotti]

I think the Radical solution is the best, but the time to do a new good skin is short and not sure B teams want to merge....

 

[David Garcia]

Well, do not worry about skins, we can readapt the schedule if neede so this is not important.

I agree with Xosé and if we change, WE CHANGE.

 

[Ben Tusting]

I wouldn't like to use the Radicals, would loose all motivation from the series.

Would prefer to use the Pro cars, then use no GT Cars at all.

We had 2 dumps yesterday, but that was down to the server lagging really.
We should just carry on with the mod, as the field is balanced, yes the mod isn't perfect, yes it caused us to loose a victory last night, but it's still the best option.

The MMG mod had problems at the start, but they were ironed out, Can we not get somebody new to look at the mod in a different direction/angle if Gunthar isn't well?

What about loosing some of the psrtv cars/Safety car and commentator cars?

 

[Grégory Cogotti]

From my point of vue, Simracing it's a real hobbies and doing a championship it's very important. Some people say "it's just a game", but game or not, a championship is a championship. Loosing a race due to technical problem when you take a lot of time in training is very boring. That's why i prefer to choose a stable solution. Actually all drivers have a Damocles sword at the top of their heads.

Edit: For a GT pro series, we have already a Project D skin, so we gain time to deliver livery.

 

[Neil Gault]

if you are going to make changes then please at least keep the dates as they are and not start farting around with them as some of us have plans for other leagues apart from this one

 

[Xosé Estrada]

if you are going to make changes then please at least keep the dates as they are and not start farting around with them as some of us have plans for other leagues apart from this one

Yes, I don't agree in change the dates at all, I only proposed the change on next one to win one more week, but change all the calendar wouldn't be a good idea for me neither, I also have more things to do.

 

[Ross Balfour]

Why change so dramaticly in the middle of a season? I say keep it the same untill the end of the season and we will see what we can change from there. There are no massive issues concerning the mod, just the odd minidump, which is far from a big enough issue from completely changing the format. Keep everything the same, two junior teams also untill the seasons out and listen to the suggestions that are being brought forward (Like halving the skin template size) and see what goes from there. I think we can't let all this hard work drop now.

 

[Ivo Simons]

I must say i agree with Ross. Indeed there are some problems we can't ignore but a massive change to the league is not the answer i think. Espaccialy when the solution is the Radicals.
2 people crashed out yesterday wich isn't bad really (i wish it was none offcourse) but we all agreed to run with GTR Evo when we knew its buggy like hell.
I say continue the season.

 

[Ross Balfour]

+1, look to the future guys, we've GTR3 and RFactor 2 on the horizon, just stick out this game till then and we will be hopefully in bugfree-land soon.

 

[Grégory Cogotti]

Just a question, have we made a race without someone was ejected from the game during an official race (with a minidump i mean)?

@Ross: When i will buy rFactor 2, Race probaly go directly to my trash.

 

[Damian Henderson]

Well the problems have cost us a chance of retaining our title for the 3rd time in a row which is hardly fair, but whats done is done, nothing can change it now. So even with radical changes it won't really help us at all as the issue's for us have already happened and cost us. So, that's really killed our motivation for this season, and if am honest our morale for STC is at a all time low, however we will still fight to the end no matter what, and we still have the best record in terms of statistics and amount of winners in STC, so we don't really have anything to prove, but it is frustrating as the championship is tamed for some by the issue's.

So I don't think a radical change to the radicals is a very good option.. The radicals are a tottatly different car with a very arcade feel (I know some real radical drivers who say this) to what we are driving now and I know most of our team won't really be up for driving them, if a change was to be made it would be much more sensible to change to the stock GT Sport or GT Pro cars, or even just back to the old STC mod from the past season which had no issue's. Or you can just hope for the best that things will get better, however their needs to be some solution with the strange issue's Flatout has when trying to test together before a race event.

 

[Neil Gault]

what i would do is:
1st) fix the naming of the flatout cars
2nd) use standard size skins for ALL cars
3rd) to address the lag problem i would scrap the pace car and just run with the minimum race cars we can plus camera car.
4th) not sure if it makes a difference but it should cause less hickups for the server and the racers but maybe force all cars to stay on the server until the race is over.

 

[Ross Balfour]

Hmm, Neil good of hit something there. Maybe it is the safety car causing the issue? We could try a round without a safety car and see what happens.

 

[Xosé Estrada]

Well, the problem is still there because the minimum amount of racers we have is 26, plus camera, plus spotter (which is same as SC, but we need him to do a decent broadcast), plus commentator, so this leads us to 29 cars.

The lag problem is not because usual "server overload", is because we force the server to have 30 slots instead of 25. We knew this before but we accepted it (we used it for 3 seasons now) because the benefit of having 5 more slots is evident.

The SC can't be the issue because is the car that was less present from all of them, and FO has minidumps without it, as well as there were no dumps when SC was on track and all cars were around...

 

[Grégory Cogotti]

Not my intention to be negative, but at Hockenheim i was minidumped when David Garcia joined the game. Impossible for me to rejoin after that.

 

[David Garcia]

Remember it is not the first seasson with the safety car, it is already the second, so maybe the safety car is not the reasson but maybe one of the files in the other 18 new cars... just my opinion.

what i would do is:
1st) fix the naming of the flatout cars
2nd) use standard size skins for ALL cars
3rd) to address the lag problem i would scrap the pace car and just run with the minimum race cars we can plus camera car.
4th) not sure if it makes a difference but it should cause less hickups for the server and the racers but maybe force all cars to stay on the server until the race is over.

That would be a really good idea if FO could rename and set the proper size to their skins and make a test on their server and see what happens, if it works and minidumps stops problem will be fixed.

About 3 (lag), to me it is clear it is the 30 slots patch causing the probleem.

 

[Flavio Borgna]

That would be a really good idea if FO could rename and set the proper size to their skins and make a test on their server and see what happens, if it works and minidumps stops problem will be fixed.

I quote David.
COR agrees with Ross and others, to finish the season without radical changes. If after having done what suggestied by David to FO the problem is not solved for them, we could think to let them change their car, only after testing well that this solves the problem.

 

[Mike Simian]

Remember it is not the first seasson with the safety car, it is already the second, so maybe the safety car is not the reasson but maybe one of the files in the other 18 new cars... just my opinion.



That would be a really good idea if FO could rename and set the proper size to their skins and make a test on their server and see what happens, if it works and minidumps stops problem will be fixed.

About 3 (lag), to me it is clear it is the 30 slots patch causing the probleem.

Yea I can do that, but what is the proper size? I didn't make them larger, they were the same as the templates.

I agree with everyone, Radical change is too radical. In my view stay the same or use GT Sport.

I'll try and fix our skins before the next race.

 

[John Westerlund]

I also agree with the previous speakers (writers?) who propose not making any big changes but to see i FOs problems can be solved thru other means.
In the debate about "B"-teams for me that question was settled with the new licensing model. There is no discount for "B" teams, hence there are NO "B" teams only teams.