CueBall:
If you haven't got much logical or rational to say about balancing car classes, could you please stay out of this discussion. You are almost trolling at the moment and this discussion has gone on pretty civil to this point, thanks!
As pointed out by linsen - i started this thread and poll - shuld the classes be evened out - not made the same just more even. Take GTR class the FZR dominates all the time everytime - im not sayin make it so the XRR and FXR are completely equal - i was asking do poeple think they should be more even so that it comes down to drivers driving style of which car they use and then the driver him/her selfs skill.
That was really my point - as again not making them even but more even so that at least drivers have a choice which car. Sticking to the GTR reference above - a half decent driver could in the FZR could beat a fast FXR driver. I was seeing if poeple wanted it this way still or so that the driver makes a difference so hat the better driver is in the FXR and so wins. for emphisis - not sayin should be EVEN but cars should be BETTER MATCHED.
Nothing is wrong with that if it could actually be done. The problem is, this game is now years old and on it's second "release" and this same debate is still going on.
People have been complaining about the car balancing for as long as I've been playing this game. If it were a simple matter of "give this car more power and give this car less weight" then there would be no problem. But that's not the case. The cars were changed for the last patch and the complaining about balancing got WORSE, not better. The cars will never run equal enough to make everyone happy. Let's say a miracle happens and the devs are able to get all three GTR cars to run within a tenth of a second of one another on, say, Westhill. What happens when you go to Aston? Or to Kyoto? One of the cars is going to be faster than the others and the bitching begins all over again!
With very few exceptions, most race series run all cars with the same powertrain layout. The race series that DO allow cars with different layouts to compete level the field with ballast. If LFS added ballast, that would address the balancing issue, but only for league races. Pick-up races would still end up being uneven.
I think it's unlikely that the cars will ever be even. And if they WERE, instead of people complaining that car X is faster they'd be complaining that Car Y is just as fast, but easier to drive, or that car Z is just as fast, but uses less fuel or less tires or, or, or. There's always something to complain about and you'll never please all the people, so why bother?
As noted above, the FXR is slower by design, which I think it should be.
Either you're right and it can't be done to have the XR & FZ match a little more or that's also by design. Personally, I should see things reversed because the turbo car is more difficult to extract full potential out of. I like the idea of making the FZR a turbo car, I bet that would do a lot to even things up. Like you said above, certain cars would be faster in certain situations. That's what we want though, since right now, one car is fastest in ALL situations. It would be better to have to wonder which car would best suit your style when you join a track. Right the only decision is whether or not you want to win.
That being said, a Trans Am type car and a WRC car would be cool, so that's something to think about also. Good idea too I think.
It's not about making all cars exactly equally fast on any given track. That's just BS and furthermore impossible if they have different characteristics.
It's about making the cars more even so that not a single car dominates under all circumstances. For example let the FZR dominate on tracks with long straights and fast bends and let the FXR dominate the city tracks with tight corners. The same goes for a wet track (which I really hope we will have at some time in the future). An AWD car should just own the RWD cars on a wet track.
A good example is again WTCC. Or even better the ETCC in 2003/2004. In these years it was mainly the Alfas and BMWs fighting for victory with Seat being close behind. The Alfas and BMWs were very different in characteristics. FWD vs. RWD, massive overweight at the front vs. nearly evenly balanced, 6-gear sequential vs. 5-gear H-pattern and the list goes on. The Alfas with slightly faster engines were mostly a bit faster on a single lap, but over the distance their bad weight distribution and the FWD wore out their front-tyres much faster and traction was also always a problem with the FWD cars compared to the BMWs.
But still most of the races were very close between them and in the end the championship in 2003 was decided by a single point between a BMW and an Alfa.
This is what people mean with evening out classes.
Isn't that what I just said about three posts ago?
And WHY were those races so close? BECAUSE OF BALLAST! Without ballast the cars would not be even at all.
You need to make up your mind. Your second sentence says "making all cars exactly equally fast on any given track" is "just BS and furthermore impossible if they have different characteristics.". Then at the bottom you say that two totally different cars (BMW and Alfa) are running equally throughout a whole season despite being completely different. So which one is it?
The ONLY reason that WTCC runs so closely is because of ballast. Without ballast LFS cannot achieve this. And even if ballast is added, it will only work in cases like leagues where the ballast can be adjusted from race to race throughout a series.
I totally agree with you here. The FZR is too dominant in all situations right now. I feel that the only solution is to either A) make the FZR the only GTR car and make the other two cars represent other classes or B) Make the FZ GTR more of a torquey, tight track car, make the XR GTR more of a top-end, fast track, horsepower car, and make the FXR the alternative for poor road conditions (which, we really don't have in LFS yet). In either case you're going to end up with one car that's the only car to drive for a particular situation. You'll almost never see all three cars on the track at the same time because two of the three will be uncompetitive depending on the track and number of laps.
Perhaps Scawen can put the Patch U physics back in, darken the tarmac texture, and call it wet track.
Obviously I wasn't 100% exact in my posting - or maybe you were just trying to read something out of it to prove your own point.
The different cars in ETCC were by no means completely equally competetive on every track (and I didn't say that). For example Monza was absolute Alfa-country, mainly because of their power advantage and the few corners that don't wear tyres as fast as many corners. But even there the difference between Alfa and BMW was not over 1 second (IIRC). But the difference at Monza was the worst of all and this is why racing was still very close most (not all) of the time even with one car having a slight advantage.
And if you say this was achieved by weight penalties (which is correct to some degree) then I don't see a reason why this can't be done in LFS. If the FZR outperforms the other GTRs under every circumstance than why not just make its power per weight worse? Or make it better on the other cars? Changing the mass of some cars doesn't seem to be some kind of mission impossible for the devs to me. Changing the power output is the same.
Surely this would be an update that has to reset the hotlaps and stuff. And if the devs overdid it and made the FZR too slow to have any chance at all on any track, well just make another update and reduce it a little. I don't see a problem here. Once you start such a process you will very quickly get an idea how much you must change to achieve the wanted effect.
Of course some people will always complain that their favourite car is not the fastest on their favourite track and at some point the devs need to stop the process of evening out. Otherwise it would become a neverending story. So just make a poll like this one to see what the majority thinks and the devs can see if the situation has improved. And at some point (for example when clearly more than 50% think the classes are evened out enough) they stop it.
I just don't get it why you think this is near impossible? This is just a sim in which everything can be changed to whatever the developer wants it to be. Just add some weight to the FZR and it will be slower in corners and on the straight and it will also wear its tyres faster. Very difficult, huh...??
And what you also don't seem to understand is the reason for this effort. It's just that a race with different cars that have different characteristics is way more interesting - not only to watch but also to race. Most people agree on this point - just live with it. You're quite alone here if you find multi-car-races not a big lot more interesting than single-car-races.
Just a small hint for the discussion:
"Even out" means 'comparable laptimes' in this context. No one is trying to suggest to make all cars behave equal. In a lot of replies some of you understood this wrong.
So please, when you use the term "even out" or "make equal" elaborate on what you exactly mean. I think everyone has agreed that comparable laptimes are good, but that equal behaviour of all cars in a league is bad.
edit- to elaborate- it is not about being completely equal, just evening out the "series".. making average lap times similar, and not having one car always dominate.
Here's where you run into a problem. In real world driving (ETCC, WTCC, etc) cars are chosen at the beginning of the season and the drivers are stuck with those cars until the season is through. In LFS this is not true EXCEPT in some leagues. The majority of racing is done in either pick-up races or semi-organized races where drivers are free to choose a new car for every track and every event. If I join a server and it's running a track that's no good for Car A, why in the world would I choose Car A? In real life, I get no choice. In LFS there is nothing stopping me from choosing the fastest car for each particular track combo. Don't you think that the BMW drivers at Monza were wishing they were in Alfas? Well, in LFS there's nothing stopping them from doing just that!
Weight penalties (ballast) could be done in LFS but, again, it would only work for leagues. If you make the cars run even on Westhill, they won't be even on Aston. If you make them run even on Aston, they won't be even on South City. No matter how you try to balance the cars so that they run equally, there will always be one car that's better on any given track.
You still run into the problem of the cars never being equal. Like I said in an earlier post, and reiterated again in this post, if you manage to balance the cars perfectly under certain conditions (track X running Y number of laps), as soon as you change the conditions the cars will be unequal again.
I just don't get it why you think this is near impossible? This is just a sim in which everything can be changed to whatever the developer wants it to be. Just add some weight to the FZR and it will be slower in corners and on the straight and it will also wear its tyres faster. Very difficult, huh...?? [quote]I think it's impossible because you can't have three cars that are so different running similar times on all of the tracks. There will always be someone who has an advantage....ALWAYS. Not to mention the fact that many of the people who've complained about one car being dominant have also said that the AWD car should NOT be as fast as the RWD cars since it's easier to drive. If that's the case, under what circumstances would anyone choose to drive the AWD car?
[quote]And what you also don't seem to understand is the reason for this effort. It's just that a race with different cars that have different characteristics is way more interesting - not only to watch but also to race. Most people agree on this point - just live with it. You're quite alone here if you find multi-car-races not a big lot more interesting than single-car-races.[/quote]You're right. I don't understand this reasoning. And I don't think a lot of other people do either. We've had several people say that they want to race the other driver, not the other car. The only way this is true is when the field is totally even with all drivers in the same car. This is also the reason that forced setups has been suggested so many times. And, like I said before, there are many race series where the cars are designed to run exactly equal and be exactly the same (or very nearly so). If it's so much more interesting to have ten different manufacturers represented in a race series, why are things like NASCAR, Australian V8 Supercar, Miata Series, etc so popular?
Average lap times on which track? Under how many lap races? Even if the cars were "equalized" the shorter tracks will favor one car, the longer tracks will favor another, etc. If this happens, and Car A is fastest on the short tracks, why would I ever not choose Car A in a race on a short track? Or, on the other hand, if the AWD car has an average lap time similar to the hard to handle XR GTR, why the heck would I drive the XR when I could get the same times in an easier to drive car?
No matter how much I'd like the classes to be evened out asap, it might still be too early to do it.
The physics in LFS are far from being finished - not that they are some kind of bad in any way now, but there are still some things missing. Ground effects for example are still missing and they will probably mess up all of it again when they are introduced.
So why waste time to even out unfinished physics? I'm not quite sure if it's worth it, but on the other hand it might still take a very long time until everything is implemented and in all that time we would have to live with sub-optimal balanced classes.
Sorry, but you are seeing and producing problems where none are present. It's absolutely pointless to discuss a topic with somebody who "invents" problems out of nowhere in the arguments of the others. Me at least is tired of this. I'm outta here, I made my point clear enough for everybody except one who seems to be just unwilling (or uncapable??? ) to understand it - that's got to be enough...
I'm not the one complaining that the car classes are unbalanced.
edit: And I'm not trying to be argumentative here. I just feel that balancing the cars won't work out and won't solve the "problem" that everyone is complaining about. And, if you look at the poll results, 25% of respondants (not counting "undecided") think that the cars should not be "evened out". So I'm not the only one.
Everyone relax, there's valid points on both sides here!
SIDE A:
Want the general gap between GTRs closed a bit to make car choices more interesting and relevant in different circumstances
SIDE B:
Even if SIDE A Gets what it wants, people will still drive certain cars on certain tracks, it just won't be the FZR 100% of the time anymore. Why not use the same principle to get MORE diversity in the car classes and split GTRs into individual classes like V8 supercars and WRC?
...
Even with the extra new classes, which would be cool, I would miss the other GTR cars. I don't know why, but I would. And without new classes, I would still like to see the cars "closer" to being balanced than they are now.
But now you got me wondering about the rumbly V8 solid axle and the 400HP AWD Rally beast.
You said: "Sorry, but you are seeing and producing problems where none are present". I'm not seeing problems or producing problems. I'm not the one who suggested that "balancing out" the cars would solve anything. I'm saying exactly the opposite - no amount of "balancing" will fix the core issue. I'm offering alternative solutions which I think could be of benefit here.
Perhaps you should chill out and calm down a bit. I'm not trolling and I've said nothing derogatory towards you or anyone else in this thread. I'm just stating my stance on the subject and doing so in, i thought, a polite manner.
Why to have a "GTR class" if the cars can't race together with each other?
Now I say "Just to have different cars on the grid screenshot?"
No one wants equal cars, this is bull****, we just want cars to be balanced.
A car will always be faster on some track? Yeah sure, there is always a faster car on each track, but it could at least be different cars on different tracks.
The problem is that actually the FZR is always the best on almost every track... just go around and see some online GTR races (with skilled drivers on both cars) and you'll understand what i'm talking about.
View Poll Results: Should the car classes be more even?
Yes, I want a mixed field of cars. ----------------------------110---66.67%
No, I want all cars to be different for bigger challenge -------- 37---22.42%
Undecided. --------------------------------------------------18---10.91%
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) to understand it - that's got to be enough... 