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Mike Dee

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Posts posted by Mike Dee

  1. Posted · Edited by Mike Dee

    40 minutes ago, kombajnkoszoncy said:

    I hope that they will add Kenya. It is one of missing locations for 10 years.

    I've honestly been ok with not having Kenya just because I don't think the current games can do it justice. Kenya is brutal. It is long, hot as hell, and just destroys cars. Let's put it into perspective:

    Quote

    From that edition until 2002, it featured over 1000 km of timed stages, with stages well over 60 kilometres (37 mi) long, unlike most rallies which had under 500 kilometres (310 mi) of total timed distance. This meant that the winner's total time was above 12 hours in 1996 and decreased to two seconds shy of 8 hours in 2002

    60km stages. That is the equivalent of driving the entirety of New England is a single go. That is goddamn insane. AND I LOVE THE THOUGHT OF IT. The roads were also extremely punishing, and I don't think our current damage models really can let us appreciate it. Not just damaging the car more overall, but I think we need to see a lot more granular damage too. I want to see specific cars being prone to front end spring damage due to design, I want to see gearboxes getting stuck from abuse and thrashing them, I want component malfunctions due to the stress and heat of Africa. You can't appreciate how daunting of a task the Safari Rally is without these things.

    ---

    wanted to add on @Yaggings idea for a ladder system is exactly what we need and I know some people have touched on it before. It's not hard, you have your 5 major "tiers" like any normal MMR system - Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Masters, and a special top 100 "Legendary" or something if you really want it but you also include minor-tiers; 1-5 so you end up with people being ranked "Gold 3" or "Silver 2". The key though is to then subdivide these groups somewhat arbitrarily; you want to make groupings of 50 or 100 drivers all within that same tier. So you end up a "mini league" essentially of drivers all ranked (as an example) between Silver 5 and Silver 1.

    To get promoted into the next major-tier, you need to finish in the top % of your Silver 1 tier or something; we can figure out the exact details later for cutoffs. If you finish in that top % you become Gold 5 and in the next ingame "season" you are grouped with Gold drivers instead of silver.

    Boom, you have created rivalries and most importantly, tangible goals and achievements for drivers.

    • Like 1

  2. Posted

    Just now, RookieOne said:

    You know, I would be ok with fictional stages you know, as long as they are made like what we have IRL

    New England is technically a fictional stage. It is based on roads around DirtFish, but the real roads do not link up like they do in game. And you know what? NE is one of my favorite locations of DR2. Fictional stages based on real life locations to get the "feel" correct could potentially be the best stages in the entire game.

    • Like 2
    • Agree 7

  3. Posted

    10 hours ago, RallyDriven said:

    I’m not sure if there is a way. Long winded but you could keep buying and selling R5 cars? You would eventually burn through a lot of it

    This is what we normally suggest. You normally recoup ~75% of the cost if I remember correctly so just spamming through buy-sell of R5 cars will get you down to 500,000cr in like 20 transactions give or take? After that, spam the Group A cars next and you should be able to cycle that 500,000cr down to about 50,000cr pretty quick. Once you are below 100,000cr though I'd probably just say good enough at that point.

    Alternatively you could just go and buy all of the R5 cars and leave them in your garage and refuse to drive them until you get back to Master tier in My Team. You'll have burned the money so it won't impact your climb to Master, and by the time you get to Master the 4 million credits you are trying to get rid of will seem like nothing compared to what you've earned so having a few cars in the garage won't even feel like getting a "freebie"

  4. Posted

    4 hours ago, watzcoc said:

    Full game from launch, with proper full on dlc, not being drip fed the full game like DR 2.0.

    I'll be honest, I liked the drip fed DLC. It wasn't like it was painfully spread out, it was only 2 weeks between content drops right? I can understand wanting all content day 1 of DLC, but doing it the slow way definitely helped keep people coming back as well as helped stir up media attention during each release. That and it gave me a chance to actually drive some of the cars I would normally just leave in the garage. Just my 2 cents though

    ---

    Let's get to what I really want to see in DR3 or future titles though, and something I haven't seen discussed nearly enough, a proper driver social experience included.

    What do I mean by this?

    • Currently Dirt Rally has a pathetic in-game social interaction between players
    • We have zero ways to compare with other drivers
    • We have zero context about other drivers
    • The social aspect of the game feels like nothing more than a leaderboard
    • We have zero ways to continue interaction with other players we meet/see
    • We have no way to get invested into the community or game

    Think about a normal interaction with someone; I'll pick on @caerphoto for my example. Here is how an interaction currently plays out

    1. Join a random MP custom championship Caer is hosting
    2. Race with some fun drivers who are equal speed to myself
    3. "Hey these drivers are pretty cool, I wonder who they all are". Can I learn more? Click on driver and select "Profile"
    4. Takes me to the Steam Profile page...
    5. ...
    6. All interaction is basically dead in the water. I have to friend request him to even start building any kind of in-game interactions.

    What should this interaction be?

    1. Join a random MP custom championship Caer is hosting
    2. Have fun races, decide I want to learn more about some of these drivers
    3. Click on driver name -> profile -> it takes me to an in-game profile page about the driver
    4. The in-game page shows me a ton of fun, useful stats about Caer; it shows me his most driven car and his favorite class; we can see total distance driven; it lists top class completed in My Team; we find stupid stats like # of rolls, repairs, dnf's, etc; 
    5. Holy ****, this Caer guy is actually pretty cool! He even drives the E30 (best car) more than anything else!!! I should totally add this guy to my...
    6. IN-GAME RIVALS LIST. I shouldn't even need to say this, why are rivalries not a thing? Imagine being able to tag up to 5 drivers you run across on leaderboards or MP lobbies as your rival; they are highlighted in result screens after races for you, maybe you get in-game notifications when they beat a time trial record you had set, maybe the game even suggests events to you based on things like "your rival Caer just finished 27th in today's Sweden Daily Event - can you beat him??"; we can even let the game suggest rivals to you when it notices you finish within 5% deviation of some driver consistently.
    7. We even can notice Caer joined a team (in-game teams/driver clubs would be amazing) which is active in team-based Weekly/Monthly/Club events. Now we even have more people to compete with on a personal level since we are fighting against Caer's teammates!
    8. Oh ****, look this in-game profile page even lists what clubs Caer is active in! Now I'm learning of even more communities and people to engage with, finding even more personal reasons to keep coming back day after day.

     

    Do you see where I'm going with all of this? We need better ways to interact with our fellow players. Driving is not something like CoD or other FPS games where you only care about dropping in to a quick one-off match and then forgetting everything about that match when you queue for the next. We thrive on little details, stats, made up drama and battles between drivers. I get tons of random posts on my profile page of Steam by people I never have met before with things like "kicked your ass in the Kadett at El Rodeo/Wet in Time Trials! Cheers from Sweden 😜" and it's stupid things like that which keep me constantly active in the game. Friends on Discord or the forums posting "challenges" where we see who can set the fastest times in a car/stage combo.

    It's things like this which give incredibly long legs to a game, they are the things which build your dedicated playerbase that will keep returning for years. We will find our own fun, challenges, goals, and inspirations to keep playing but we need access to these details. We need stuff to get invested into. Why do you think all of these driving teams/websites exist and have diehard drivers within them? They help foster communities and player interaction with each other. We need to foster better player interactions in-game. As it stands now there is none, and it kills me because of how amazing it could be.

    • Like 2
    • Agree 2

  5. Posted

    5 hours ago, Ialyrn said:

    It takes time and practice to get used to a clutch and shifter in racing games, they dont feel like they do in a real car. My advise would be to slow down, not just with yout gear shifts, but your driving. Allow yourself some thinking time till you get into the swing of things. I use a TH8A myself, without any mods to it. Dont worry about heel and toe till you get used to shifting.

    I think this is some pretty good advice. Even learning to drive a manual in real life can give people some issues when they are learning to shift going into corners/through a turn. One thing they teach you IRL is to be in gear before going into the turn and that applies to racing games as well until you are very comfortable shifting and using heel-toe.

    Give yourself a personal goal for this weekend - focus on building muscle memory for your shifting. Turn off all race timers, you are not trying to be faster than your old pace or even fast. You just want to focus on building good habits and removing the need to think about shifting gears. After enough time you should just be able to "feel" what gear the cars wants to be in. 

    I can't really help with the long gates, that might just be something to deal with =/ 

  6. Posted

    6 hours ago, WestHam66 said:

    How does this compare to Dirt Rally? I was much better at it than DR2, so could that be a factor?

    It is similar, but DR1 "master" class was probably equal to only about 90% AI in my experience. Back in DR1 I could easily beat the Master championships once I had the upgrades and was finishing stages 10-20 seconds ahead of 2nd place. Those exact same stages in DR2 with 100% AI has me only finishing 3-8 seconds ahead of 2nd place and I can't really afford to mess up or I fall back quick.

     

    @ianism it is very possible the ranges are actually closer to something like:

    • Open: 10-30% AI
    • Clubman: 30-50% AI
    • Pro: 50-70% AI
    • Elite: 70-90% AI
    • Master: 90-100+% AI

    It has been a loooong time since I did Open or Clubman, hell it's been forever since I've done My Team in general, so my judgement might be skewed. I also tend to be a bit faster than a lot of drivers so that definitely isn't helping since all of my guesses for the AI-to-tier %'s are based on how big of a lead I had from 2nd place. Open and Clubman I remember finishing almost a minute ahead of the AI on some stages so I had to try and estimate where that falls compared to the custom champ MP lobbies I've hosted (I leave AI on until the lobby fills up, and normally set it to 70% [medium] so people don't have to race Master AI with me).

    If someone can get me some AI times from an Open and Clubman championship for any stage (let's try and get 3+ stages/times to reference) I'll do the leg work to figure out what % we need to get the same pace out of the AI in customs.

    • Like 1

  7. Posted · Edited by Mike Dee

    I think we've done some experimenting in the past and came up with these results - 

    • Open: 50-60% AI
    • Clubman: 60-70% AI
    • Pro: 70-80% AI
    • Elite: 80-90% AI
    • Master: 90-100+% AI

    There is a range for each tier because, as anyone who has done My Team knows, there are always a few drivers who are much faster than the rest of the pack while the other 90% of the championship drivers are drastically slower than the leaders.

    Is it actually above 100% in Masters? Probably not, but holy hell does it feel like one driver in My Team gets some kind of boost in Masters and is setting blistering times that is even ahead of the 100% AI in customs. Decent rule of thumb to test yourself is just 10% difficulty bumps in custom events and you should be at least competitive in the next tier.

    • Like 1
    • Agree 1

  8. Posted

    11 hours ago, BPUltimate said:

    Ive had an H pattern shifter for a few weeks now (TH8A) and im struggling to get in gear doing rapid downshifts ie,  one, square, hairpin, acute. I s there a way i can make my downshifting fast but consistent with the shifter or should i order the ricmotech mod?

    ( I am heel and toe downshifting, im still not as confident as id like to be)

    Are you skipping gears or are you trying to row down through each individual gear? Don't be afraid to jump from 5th to 2nd gear if the corner requires it, just be smart about when you actually put it into 2nd so that the engine doesn't try to scream up to 13k RPMs

  9. Posted

    If all goes well, I'd expect to see a DR3 type title in 2021 Q4. We've got next gen consoles dropping at the end of this year, give devs about another year to really flesh out their games on the new platforms and we'll hopefully be getting a new engine in that timeframe too. The purchase of SMS by CM is perfect timing to get that team working on a new engine. They need to drop all support for current gen though, trying to even shoehorn it in will ruin anything they could achieve without it.

    • Like 1

  11. Posted

    2 minutes ago, LutzM said:

    Do you really think they will create/use an other engine than current EGO ??

    Yes, it'd be a complete overhaul of the current EGO engine. They did just buy a pretty massive racing sim studio... No reason not to think they'd retool it since they've publicly said they couldn't do the full Monte route due to the engine.

    • Agree 1

  12. Posted

    5 minutes ago, LutzM said:

    Why not continue to add new locations & cars and earning money that way...

    Why keep making content for a game that was limited by the old generation to begin with? We've gotten tons of great content from DR2.0, and I've gotten hundreds and hundreds of hours of gametime that I don't see ending any time soon. But if they keep focusing on the current game, they won't be able to put the best resources towards a new game targeting the next-gen consoles. Once we can target better hardware, we get a bigger and better game.

    Right now DR2.0 has too many limitations that are just inherent with last-gen and the current EGO engine. Don't you want Kenya rally with 40km+ stages??? Don't you want more time of day options? What about dynamic weather? Any of these things would require CM to publish a new game, they aren't really things you can back-port into DR2.0 so why keep the dev's hands tied when they could start making us the next great installment?

    • Agree 1
    • Disagree 1

  15. Posted

    Could easily be reused Finnish assets, I don't think Scotland and Finland are so different there couldn't be some reuse.

    Just saying... it adds up too perfectly

    1988     Vauxhall Nova, Nissan 240 RS, Peugeot 205 R.W.D. , Ford Sierra RS Cosworth

  25. Posted

    19 minutes ago, somethingthing said:

    Most(?) players only do single player and dont even bother to watch on the dailys id imagine.

    Really? I figured it'd be the opposite with most people only logging on for the Dailies and not having touched My Team in months. Definitely would be curious about the numbers too, but I think most dailies can see upwards of 10,000 entries if it is a good car/location combo

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