Admin team: @Flamebadger, @krunch, @SteveDrivingSlowly, @nanlatt
Hello everyone,
As hinted a few times over the last week or so, the admin team has been working hard to improve the way we allocate driver classes in ACC.
The reason to have driver classes at all is to give all drivers in each league season something to fight for and other drivers to closely compete with. It should really mean something when you win your class and the rivalries (hopefully friendly) that exist on track should be enhanced by the league table not somehow disconnected from it.
With correctly balanced classes, there are a decent number of drivers in each class that are close together in terms of their general pace and race-craft. Each driver will feel like they are competitive with the other drivers in their class and can look at the other classes and understand the difference between their own pace/skill and that of drivers in the other classes.
It is quite hard to set this up, especially with new drivers, but the good news is we have collected a lot of data (as of today around 115,000 laps worth) we can analyse and use to help us do that. Therefore, we have come up with the following general process:
- All drivers will be given an 'Overall Pace' rating based on all the data we collect from the Rooz servers.
- A detailed explanation can be found at the below link.
- This rating will be tracked and updated with every lap run on the Rooz servers.
- Driver classes for a new season will initially be set based on this rating after the season sign up but before the season begins.
- In long seasons, such as the Monday night league, we will re-run this analysis and review classes again after 4 rounds of the season have been run.
- There may be no need to change anyone's class at all during the review.
- We will only change your class if you are very obviously in the wrong class - i.e. your pace/skill if very obviously different from the other drivers in your initially assigned class
- We will discuss with you if you are a borderline case, where you are 'just over the line' into the next class. The ultimate decision in this case will be yours.
- The first 4 rounds should allow new drivers for whom we do not have data to get some laps in the database and generate a proper rating that we can use to assign them a class
- Any drivers that have really improved between seasons, have very old data in the database or for some other reason have a big change in pace can be moved to a more appropriate class where it makes sense
- There will be a maximum of one review after the season has started. After this there will be no further changes to driver classes for the rest of the season.
The method for giving each driver a rating is a bit complicated. There is an explanation at the results site page which is embedded below. You can read if you like, or ignore it and just trust that we are doing our best to make a reasonable assessment of all drivers. This is a fairly early prototype and we will be improving it as we go, but we will make our very best effort to be transparent about all changes that we make so there are no major surprises. Take a look and please feel free to ask any questions that you may have here, or PM one of the admin team if you are uncomfortable asking in public.
edit: accidental 'dong"
Last edited: Sep 27, 2020
