PL 10.1 - Server Patch - November 2019
Hutch_Katie
Posts: 259 admin
Resolving Late Joining Events
Late joining in events to try to win high tier rewards while racing as few races as possible has been an emergent aspect of the game and long requested for us to fix. In this server-only update, which will not need a download from the store, we resolve this issue. The changes will be deployed this afternoon (6th November).
We didn’t want to add a separate registration period to events. Instead we looked for a solution where players could still join whenever they wanted, while encouraging joining early and racing against other players.
In The Final Hours...
A number of hours before events end, we will stop creating new leaderboards. Players will still be able to join the event, however, they will be distributed across existing leaderboards at random, overfilling these leaderboards.
The lowest prize tier already automatically adjusts to the bottom of the leaderboard, so this will ensure all players are still eligible to receive rewards.
This period applies to all events, and the length of time before events end is configurable on a per event basis. In general, we expect longer events to have a longer ‘final hours’ period of no new leaderboards.
There are certain types of events that repeat on a timed schedule. These are the Evergreen events for players below 100RQ, and Daily events for Players 149-150 RQ. The changes may take a few weeks to fully roll out for these repeated events.
Scoring Changes
In the past, we increased the number of points earned from active match victories by 3 points. Active meaning victories from races you are present for, not for races that happen from other players. We are increasing this by a further 3 points.
Some of this benefit is still felt by players joining late in an event’s run, so we’re also reducing the points loses in all match losses by 3 points. A player who joins early will face more races from other players and will accumulate more losses, slightly reducing the impact of losses will benefit those players who join events early.
Scoring changes will affect all events effective immediately.
Increasing Prize Cars Awarded
Making last second joining less lucrative should lead to players with weaker garages more likely to join earlier. With these players likely to be more spread out across the different leaderboards, earlier brackets will be easier to compete in.
However, we want to go further than this, this change will not occur immediately, but once we have rolled out these changes to Tri Series events, we will increase the number of prize cars awarded in Tri Series Finals from 8 to 10, so a 25% increase in the size of the top tier.
Known Issues:
The leaderboard size as shown in the last prize tier will not adjust its number, as this is a server only release. We will change this number to update dynamically if the leaderboard size grows in a future client update.
Summary
Players are still able to join events at any time, however, in the final hours of an event, new players who join an event will overfill existing leaderboards. Scoring changes are rolling out to benefit early joiners, and the top prize tier in Tri Series Finals will be expanded once changes are rolled out to those events.
Comments
Now can you guys prioritize having server-specific event end times so that the Asia guys can actually not have to choose between sleep and a decent prize?
However will prizes be scaled according to bracket size? Lets say the bracket i am in ends up with 600 instead of usual 500, theoretically a player in 10th could now be knocked out by a player coming from the 'overfill'... That is surely not fair. In this situation you have inadvertently penalized the early joiner. How does Hutch propose to deal with that situation?
a) wake up insanely early for those in other AS countries where events finish at stupid o'clock (3-4AM).
b) or the other AS countries where everyone is literally walking into business hours during the crescendo.
Please look into this next, it's absurd.
Looking forward to events having different end times and all as well.
- players must be notified when final hours begin for particular event
- as already mentioned, prize tiers should be changed proportionally to the size of bracket increase, cause otherwise it still makes different leaderboards differ from each other
Good intention to fix, but realization does not fix the root cause. The problem is in scoring and number of races you can potentially be involved. Late join still gives you chance to race more, but loose less. So still, if you have strong hand and join late - you can do climb in last hours of event, not being be able to get many losses versus the same player fighting in top of leaderboard for a few days.
I don't want to race in finals against players with 40k trophies who have spent entire paycheques on this game. That's not a fair competition. Create a matchmaking system which lets players "spike" their garage for specific events by buying CF's but then increase their matchmaking score respectively. I have friends in countries where a carbon fibre pack represents 1/10th of their monthly wage, all for a **** B car 95% of the time. These poor players shouldn't have to be competing with "parent's credit card" Timmy.
Let people race against their equals and earn fair rewards for it!
A side effect is that it makes ticket spam stronger so we may see more of those tier 1 players with a couple of hundred matches played. If that happens there may need to be rule changes to make it impossible to buy tickets in the top 3-4%.
You're not, but what's the motivation to join that late and ticket spam? If you're going to ticket spam it seems like it'd be better to join before the cut-off so you go into a day 3 bracket where tier 1 has less points.
Otherwise I know that I'll get overtaken by some latejoiners after fighting two and a half day for my position in T2 or T3.
Will be frustrating for the other players.
PLEASE BAN TICKETBUYING FOR LATEJOINERS DISTRIBUTED TO LONGER EXISTING LEADERBOARDS!
As far as I'm aware losses don't count against you in any way once you start buying tickets other than potentially having a starting score that's a negative number instead of 0 - and there's a good chance a tier 2 hand entered and left to 1 hour before finish is going to end up with more than 0 points.
There are people who can't join earlier because they've just come back off holiday or something but I'd expect them to be few and far between.
Didn't think that means in halftime! What happened and why isn't anybody there to take action? Why making experiments with a final for that so many players spend real money? Don't you guys care about your paying customers?
The T1 pool changed from 8 to 10 top players. (25% growth)
I'm finished in 12 from almost a thousand players. (almost 100% growth)
@Hutch_Katie
Can you tell us what Hutch is planning for this? The prize pool have information just for 1-500 players. It's completely unfair if we look for two things:
1. The % of players that have get good stuff do not change.. Keep 10 - 40 - 80. And the % of competitive players have doubled.
2. My hand was able to get T1 in ANY other bracket this event. Some brackets were closed with 500 players and re-opened just for late joiners.
Last, most people that joined in final hours get fresh new brackets, with 50 - 100 players.
But i hope you fix the old car too... Bmw318i for example, with 18RQ he cant beat anything in his class... And there is lot old lame car like that.
You upgrade the Overpower car like renault dezir, so downgrade the other as well!
- So anyone joining in the final hours wont go into a new bucket as no new buckets are being created. They can only go into existing buckets.
The bracket has been running for 15 hours of a 3 day event so nothing to do with late joining either.