More explanations for different modes needed to keep esp newbies motivated

[pacman84 0]

Hi everybody,
Am I the only one who feels like with Dirt Rally we have a really steep learning curve? It's hard to find any information about all that Rally jargon, how rallies are organizied (only servicable cars after two races rather than after every single race, ...) and how tuning your car works (even thought there seems to be an excellent Steam guide).
But what makes it even harder for me is how the Dirt Rally peculiarities work: leagues, dailies, weeklies, monthlies, etc. I played my first rounds ever on Sunday, spent a lot of time driving -to be honest really really bad- and then was told that I needed to reach at least 6 points and could start all over again. After I finished the first championship (3rd) I must say I hardly felt like I accomplished anything so I tried the daily track. Needless to say, I sucked even more and finished 3 minutes later than the leader. But rather than getting any reward at all, I was just taken back to the main screen. 
So since there seems to be no red line to follow "through" this game what would you suggest to make this game most enjoyable and especially keep a newbie like me motivated.

I now feel like I must add that I am not new to gaming in general and even played Dirt 3 and Showdown.
-pac

[RyuMakkuro 6]

pacman84 said:
how tuning your car works (even thought there seems to be an excellent Steam guide).

Last time I checked each setting had a description of what it does.

Also, this game is catered towards the rally enthusiast, so naturally you're expected to understand that the "race" is the entire event, which is comprised of 12 stages and so on and so forth.
As to online's, it's rather self explanatory. Your reward depends on the position you have. So naturally you won't get the reward the moment you finish, because it can get worse. You are being rewarded when the online events get reset.

I do agree though that the Leagues should have some proper description as it is rather confusing on how that works at all.

Generally speaking this game is all about the driving experience. If you don't like driving at a break neck pace through tight stages in your favourite rally car then I would say this game is simply not for you. Though you could also try Rallycross, maybe that will suit you more.

Again, this game is for rally enthusiast, not those that are only familiar with the existence of rally as a part of motorsport (no offence intended).

[KevM 44]

I would agree to an extent with @pacman84 .  I really enjoy the game for the driving aspect, but it lacks a competitive element or structure at this point.  I would love it if Custom rally showed you your global ranking, I would like it if the Championship had more of a 'career theme' etc, to walk you through the different car classes etc.  At the minute, I just jump on, pick from the same few cars and drive the stages aimlessly, for my own personal challenge and enjoyment!  I haven't touched on so many parts of the game as yet, because nothing directs me to it.  Dailies and Weeklies are ok, but unless you own the car and have the upgrades, its just a waste of an entry! 

[OzoreXS 0]

KevM said:

I would agree to an extent with @pacman84 .  I really enjoy the game for the driving aspect, but it lacks a competitive element or structure at this point.  I would love it if Custom rally showed you your global ranking, I would like it if the Championship had more of a 'career theme' etc, to walk you through the different car classes etc.  At the minute, I just jump on, pick from the same few cars and drive the stages aimlessly, for my own personal challenge and enjoyment!  I haven't touched on so many parts of the game as yet, because nothing directs me to it.  Dailies and Weeklies are ok, but unless you own the car and have the upgrades, its just a waste of an entry! 

Oh no man! Entering weeklies and monthlies brings you the possibility to evolve the car at least. I do this, so the entry is never useless... even if you have no possibilities to win, you can practice and anyway youll get a bunch of credits. Of course you have to own it, but its the easier part.
Wich is not worthy is spending to much time on single offline events, worse if you dont have any progress on career mode. Obviously, is the mode for the people who wants start and got a go.

I find the game quite atractive and addictive. Maybe is not the most intuitive to follow but the mechanic of the game is clear.

You must start with a championship with easy difficuly and an affordable car. You will get a few credits enough to buy a new car and even hire an engineer (a cheap one).

I folowed this dynamic and I was be able to jump into the next difficulty level and the next car class, always, I repeat, the one thats affordable for you. Step by step, little by little. Its a long way to travel.

No doubt, to get involved in online events you need to play offline A LOT. The more you play, the more chances to buy a car due to the credict profit and the possibility of own an specific car.

Not gonna lie on this, the engineers part with its perks and stuff its not easy to manage. Better said, its not easy to take the better decissions. For example, I would never recommend to buy the 3 perks to a basic engineer, because if you want to hire a better one you loose that perks resulting a waste of credits. Its prefferible to save credits and get a better engineer.

The strategy to follow is hard to decide, you can gain lots of credits "easely" in RX champs. But the rally mode brings you an exceptional experience and the possibility to upgrade your cars quickly due to its lenght.

I dont know... this is too complex to explain in a few paragraphs

[KevM 44]

I get the addictive part, I love the game, but i did a few Championships and just found them to be confusing.  Did I win?  Did I get a bonus?  Did I have to start over again?  I was 14 secs ahead of the AI at the last split, went even faster and now I'm 3 seconds slower than him, dunno...  I got my car upgraded though, so I suppose that's something of a reward.  I now just do RX to harvest credits to buy cars to drive for upgrades, but Id like more challenge or something.  Am I fast compared to the world?  I dont have a way of checking.  The number beside my name in Friends comparison is meant to be the position, but is it??  I cant believe that I can be 12th fastest on a stage overall, but guys here can be literally 19 seconds faster???  Wats the craic?? lol

[RyuMakkuro 6]

KevM said:
I dont have a way of checking.  The number beside my name in Friends comparison is meant to be the position, but is it??  I cant believe that I can be 12th fastest on a stage overall, but guys here can be literally 19 seconds faster???  Wats the craic?? lol

You do. The number on the friend leaderboards next to your name shows your worldwide rank on that track. It's that simple so believe it. The biggest issue is to get into Top 3 times or sometimes Top 5 on a stage, Top 20 requires a clean relatively fast run, far away from a really fast run.

Would be nice if Codies implemented a leaderboards for all the tracks here, so we can check who is the fastest on which track with which car ;)

[KevM 44]

Yes, we need at least that to add an element of challenge/banter etc

i know what you are saying about the positioning, but normally, top ten is within a second, with tenths separating everyone, but lying 12th & 21 seconds off the pace is peculiar 

[RyuMakkuro 6]

KevM said:

but normally, top ten is within a second, with tenths separating everyone, but lying 12th & 21 seconds off the pace is peculiar 

No, that's not normally. Usually the first 10 positions are each separated by a second, so 11th position is about 10 seconds behind the 1st position. The smallest differences are in the middle of the leaderboard, with biggest at the end. So 21 seconds off the pace and 12th position... sounds about right on some stages. Let me guess, Ampelonas Ormi? AI on that track is few seconds behind the WR.

[pacman84 0]

Hi guys and thanks for your thoughts on this. It seems like there are a couple of people here who agree with me. And after playing a little more, I myself have some more thoughts about this whole "keep newbies motivated" issue. So today I played the daily race, Mini Cooper through rainy Wales, finishing 1:45 later than the first. There were a couple of things I noticed, but I strongly feel that these information should be all over the game so I know what I am in to.

1. Even with being 1:45 at the finish line later than the first, I still received a small reward, I think 5000 credits. It would have been great to have known this before I raced. So now that I know it, I WILL indeed try my luck at the daily race from now on, because I know now, even if I suck big time, there is some kind of reward.

2. I did realize that for the normal 1960s Rally Championship, the Lancia was a terrible choice. This league is the beginner's league and that car steers terribly compared to the Mini. Maybe I wouldn't even have started this thread when I would have known that I should not have taken the Lancia in the first league. Just driving the Mini was a more rewarding experience as it didn't feel like steering a tank on air balloons. Makes me wonder why the Lancia is in the game in the first place. I bet noone ever plays the 60s cars after having tried anything else. So all of the cars in that league should be beginner-friendly.

3. Engineers are interesting. I have to slots now. What I did is fire the first engineer I had (who I hired just because of his name) and from now on I will keep on "using" top tier engineers. Anything else seems pointless. After just five or six races, any engineer except the real good ones seem to be not worth having in the game.

4. The hardcore Rally fans in here might tar and feather me for this, but one thing that made Dirt3, 2 and Showdown more addictive and especially accessible was the fact that I always knew what I got into. I knew how many tracks there were in the upcoming event, I knew how many more leagues I needed to finish to get to the next stage, etc. I am not asking for the explosion of colours that Showdown or Dirt2 were, but a little more of this "sense of accomplishment" would definitely be appreciated.

-pac

[OzoreXS 0]

pacman84 said:

Hi guys and thanks for your thoughts on this. It seems like there are a couple of people here who agree with me. And after playing a little more, I myself have some more thoughts about this whole "keep newbies motivated" issue. So today I played the daily race, Mini Cooper through rainy Wales, finishing 1:45 later than the first. There were a couple of things I noticed, but I strongly feel that these information should be all over the game so I know what I am in to.

1. Even with being 1:45 at the finish line later than the first, I still received a small reward, I think 5000 credits. It would have been great to have known this before I raced. So now that I know it, I WILL indeed try my luck at the daily race from now on, because I know now, even if I suck big time, there is some kind of reward.

2. I did realize that for the normal 1960s Rally Championship, the Lancia was a terrible choice. This league is the beginner's league and that car steers terribly compared to the Mini. Maybe I wouldn't even have started this thread when I would have known that I should not have taken the Lancia in the first league. Just driving the Mini was a more rewarding experience as it didn't feel like steering a tank on air balloons. Makes me wonder why the Lancia is in the game in the first place. I bet noone ever plays the 60s cars after having tried anything else. So all of the cars in that league should be beginner-friendly.

3. Engineers are interesting. I have to slots now. What I did is fire the first engineer I had (who I hired just because of his name) and from now on I will keep on "using" top tier engineers. Anything else seems pointless. After just five or six races, any engineer except the real good ones seem to be not worth having in the game.

4. The hardcore Rally fans in here might tar and feather me for this, but one thing that made Dirt3, 2 and Showdown more addictive and especially accessible was the fact that I always knew what I got into. I knew how many tracks there were in the upcoming event, I knew how many more leagues I needed to finish to get to the next stage, etc. I am not asking for the explosion of colours that Showdown or Dirt2 were, but a little more of this "sense of accomplishment" would definitely be appreciated.

-pac

1. Thats what I said before. Running daylies, weeklies and monthlies is always worthy. You get credits and a bit of development for the car (if you own it and its not maxed out already)

2. Lancia Fulvia is a faster car than the Mini. I am one of those guys that enjoy to drive a 4x4 Gr. B car and an old 60´s car. Reason is simple, its same challenging driving both cars. Gr,B demands control, quicker reactions. The 60´s car wants you to be precise and technical in order to get a very very slight advantage from the rest of drivers, since power is too low.
This means: mantain high speed has much as possible, brake as late as possible,... tech driving. No margin for mistakes.
In Gr. B, if you made a little mistake you risk a bit more, run over your limits, and if you are lucky and masterful enough you will recover lost time.

Notice that both Fulvia and mini are FWD cars, so you will be under heavy understeer conditions in you are not gentle with throttle. I reccomend you to open a bit differential in order to help you until you get better feeling and skills.

3. You need to hire enginners according on your champs status. If you are doing rookies championships you will get low rewards. Lets say 50.000 credits. Its just stupid hiring an engineer that cost 40.000 every 32 stages...
You need to hire expensive engineers as long as you can earn bigger rewards. Otherwise you will be in bankrupt due to the costs of maintaining such expensive engineers .. and worse... you will never save credits in order to buy new cars.
So, hire engineers according to.
Open = 3.200cr (1 or none)
Clubman= +- 8.000 (1 with 1 perk if possible)
Proffesional = +- 15.000 (2 or 3 with fuundamental generic perks: "4x4 cars, "RWD cars"... as much as possible)
At this point you will be buying cars like crazy; I reccomend you to start buying 1 per car class.
Elite = +-25.000 (3 or 4 engineers with all perks you can afford)
Masters = >=40,000 (4 with all perks each)

The more engineers, the lesser the time you need to repair cars.
The more perks assigned, the more quickly your cars will get upgraded (according to perk definition, of course). The ammount of enginners doesnt affert to the speed the car gets upgrades unless they have perks.

Its good to focus on expensive engineers because when you replace engineers your perks you will lost his perks. So its prefferible to take a better one (but affordable) and put perks into him in anticipation of using him a long time.

4. Do a good work in the points 1, 2 and 3 and you will be safisfied. That feeling of accomplishment you miss is there, but its hard to reach it. Drive, drive and drive. Then drive a bit more. Are you tired? (yes , no , i dont care) then try driving another champ. xD

There you go.

Trust me. The more you play , the more you learn to manage the game. And the more you will love it.
You need to experimient and commit errors to learn from them.
One of my rookie errors was, precisely, hiring a 32.000cr engineer when I was on clubman. It cost me a lot of time, efforts, and money for nothing.

[Dytut 89]

1. The dailies are a great way to measure your own driving skills while trying out (usually) fully upgraded cars. And the first time you get close to the top 50 times will be awesome :-)

2. The Fulvia is competitive, but it's heavier than the mini which makes it feel much less manouverable. Both 60s cars that are in game now are quite beginner friendly from my perspective. They are slow enough that you don't need lightning reflexes and quite forgiving for mistakes. Each class isn't really a step up in difficulty either. The 2010s are probably the most easy class to drive, while 70's are quite a challenge.

3. I don't hurt my car that much, so I just got the cheapest engineers and spent some cash on perks for faster upgrades :-)

4. Dirt Rally isn't really built for that kind of progression though. More focused on getting better is an accomplishment in itself. But trust me, when you manage to win your first Masters championship, you WILL feel like you've accomplished something. According to steam just 1% of the DR players has managed that.

[foppaldo 0]

pacman84 said:

2. I bet noone ever plays the 60s cars after having tried anything else. So all of the cars in that league should be beginner-friendly.

The Mini Cooper is the car I've driven the most by far. It's a great challenge to drive, as just a small mistake into a corner will cost you heaps of time down the next straight.
At the other extreme I'd say that the Group B cars are my second favourite, for the sheer terrifying experience of keeping all that power in check.

The modern cars is the ones I find the most boring. The near endless amount of grip makes it feel like the cars might as well drive themselves. As such they would probably be most beginner friendly, but it wouldn't fit with the financial model of the career mode.

[RallyDriven 398]

If you are struggling with speed at all, best thing to do is slow down and focus on getting through stages cleanly. Once you can do that then try and push for speed where appropriate. I always found it so rewarding the first time I was getting good results!

I would agree that maybe not everything is explained that well for a completely new player, but if you don't understand anything just ask and someone will explain!

[KevM 44]

It needs to be made more clear that the game works hand-in-hand with the Dirt:Game web page, where your results are transferred to and viewable at the stage end.  The facility isn't there in-game yet and the challenge seems to just end abruptly, but maybe a message at the event end would at least point you in that direction?

[Dytut 89]

Aye, you should at least get sent to the in-game leaderboard once you've finished an event.

[pacman84 0]

Oh wow, now some nice suggestions are coming in.
I am now thinking about writing up a beginner's guide if I find time. Just to clarify, there are 5 Rallies you have to master when playing D:R?
Open 
Clubman
Proffesional 
Elite
Masters 

And each one of them is subdivided into 5 races? And in every event you can repair you car after two stages?
Is that how it goes?

-pac

[Dytut 89]

Basically, yes. 

You start in open, and if you get in the top 3 you advance to clubman. For each level, each rally gets longer (more stages), and the AI gets harder to beat. 
There's a service area between every two stages, where you can repair and change settings on your car. On the first stage on an event you can do up to 10 shakedowns to get a feel for your car on the specific event and fiddle with your car settings.

Open is very beginner friendly. Don't expect to win, but it should be quite possible for most players to get a top 3 place fairly quickly. Then it progresses to get harder, and beating Masters will require you to be quite good at the game. 

After having driven a car for a few stages you get upgrades, which are added after the event is over.

[RallyDriven 398]

One suggestion I'd also make is turn off some of interface, particularly the progress bar and the split times, they can be a bit distracting. With them turned off you can focus just on the stage you are on

[OzoreXS 0]

Just to add some more info to the @Dytut :smile: 

- Easier champs, are shorter and always worse paid than longer, harder champs.

[pacman84 0]

Interesting. I advanced to Professional and spent all my money on a new car, a Peugeot 206 4WD. Driving this beast requires me to virtually learn the whole game again
For me it is almost impossible to keep the car under control on dirt & gravel roads but super easy to keep it in check on tarmac. My first race in Professional was in Greece, I made it as last. Next one was Baumholder, Germany, I made it first! Now I am in Finland, and am around 6th place in the standings, 3 games in. It's kind of strange that there is such a huge difference between the two. Is this just me or is this a general rule?

I also saw that there is no fixed sequence for countries in each Rally. When I restart the Professional series, it could very well be that I start in Wales instead of Greece, right?

It's good that one gets more money once he's in the higher Rallies. Money is really scarce for me right now, I think I spent too much on Mechanics.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion about the HUD. In this game you need so much focus that everything that allows you to concentrate on the driving helps.

If you've got more suggestions for beginners, let me know!

-pac

[OzoreXS 0]

pacman84 said:

Interesting. I advanced to Professional and spent all my money on a new car, a Peugeot 206 4WD. Driving this beast requires me to virtually learn the whole game again
For me it is almost impossible to keep the car under control on dirt & gravel roads but super easy to keep it in check on tarmac. My first race in Professional was in Greece, I made it as last. Next one was Baumholder, Germany, I made it first! Now I am in Finland, and am around 6th place in the standings, 3 games in. It's kind of strange that there is such a huge difference between the two. Is this just me or is this a general rule?

I also saw that there is no fixed sequence for countries in each Rally. When I restart the Professional series, it could very well be that I start in Wales instead of Greece, right?

It's good that one gets more money once he's in the higher Rallies. Money is really scarce for me right now, I think I spent too much on Mechanics.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion about the HUD. In this game you need so much focus that everything that allows you to concentrate on the driving helps.

If you've got more suggestions for beginners, let me know!

-pac

hehehe you just found "the pug". 
The 205, indeed a car you should not drive until you get confortable and dominate, Group A, 2010´s, 2000´s.

The Group B are bigger words. Be brave! xD (you cant sell it now LOL)

[RallyDriven 398]

You are correct that there is no fixed order, the countries appear in a random order, but you will always do each country once in a season.

As for AI times, you might just be finding that you are faster on Tarmac? Finland is not an easy place to master, especially in the car you are in, which is probably most suited to Tarmac! Take each country as a different challenge, as they are all unique. For some reason I seem to be fastest in Monte, even though it's my least favourite event!

[F2CMaDMaXX 505]

I find that the old V1 physics on taarmac with the Grp B cars is very easy, it looks like you do as well.

This week, possibly as early as tomorrow, we should be getting the next patch, including more cars and V2 physics applied to the Grp B and Grp A cars.  This will make it much more difficult to control the Pug i'm afraid.  Having said that, you might gel really quickly with the updated handling.

Just as a quick aside, if you didn't already know, the game is currently in a two part transition stage; Last patch saw most classes get the new V2 physics model on the cars, except Grp B, Grp A, hill climb and F2 - the latter two have a hybrid of somewhere between V1 and V2.

This weeks patch will, as i said, update those first two classes, Grp B & A.


I too had many issues with earning money when i started, probably because i filled all my engineer slots with the most expensive people and then added perks...  I didn't do the maths and hadn't realised it was taking nearly all my winnings just to keep the crew employed :(


I do have a question for the others though; Better to have more monkeys or to have fewer real engineers?

[RallyDriven 398]

Ignore me, I thought you meant the kit cars, not the group B! Still, not an easy car to master!

[dgeesi0 305]

a tuning guide that explains everything should be done for the game by the devs.then linked in game or to website