Considering the caliber of teams that were put in last year I think it would work well like that. But I think you still should give a chance for some of the new teams to run in division A =) Maybe have the last slot or two up for an event race that the top two teams coming off the event have first dibs? Your league, not trying to push anyone into anything, just giving up ideas
I think pre quali would be a good idea here. Something like the ESCC had.
You could also have promotion & relegation at the end of each round. Say last & first 2 teams. Only works if points system straddles both divs.
thats a sweet idea ant.
i think we should do that pre quali thing too, like maybe have one driver per team, for eg. you might send bawbag to qualify, instead of being named bawbag hed be named 'mercury racing team' or send misko in for cyber named 'cyber racing'. server should be set private for this to work. so then instead of a million names and trying to figure who was the quickest, we can have the top half in div a and bottom in b. would be easier imo and itd be cool to represent your whole team in terms of what division u start it.
as for the promotion and relegation, what u said sounds great. would the point systems have to be exact same in div a and b for that to work or different?
Good idea, if a combo is set and the divisions are set up by driver, or maybe drivers, setting fastest time decides the division they race in. I personally would say that 2 divisions that are kept seperate for the whole league would be best, then at the end the top and bottom X amount of the divisions change for season 3.
I think that a pre-qualifying system would be best, and then have promotion/relegation at the end of the season.
Maybe hotlap qualification could be used, with 4 or 5 hotlap combos, all submitted by different drivers from each team? I think some rules regarding a minimum number of drivers to be used by each team throughout the season would be a good idea. Either that, or a maximum number of rounds in which each driver can participate. I don't really believe that a team's fastest 2 drivers are a very good measure of that team.
There is a problem with this, your team has four drivers while other teams have 10+ drivers available. Taking the lowest denominator then say no one driver can do more then one quater of the races. This would mean that in your team all your drivers would have to race while other teams could put forwards their four fastest. To me limiting the amount drivers can do isn't a good idea. In an individual league, or where a team enters only a couple of drivers those drivers represent the team and so have to race the season. BOTT though is a team league, it is a team effort and so the anyone from the team should be able to race as many races as they want.
so -1 for driver limitation.
I wouldn't want to see a hotlap prequali system. While it will give you the quickest drivers it will not automatically give you top quality racers. I could think of quiet a few racers that could put in some wicked hotlaps but suck at actually racing.
I think an event would have to be held before the begining of the season to choose the teams that would be in division A or who will be stuck in B for the season =)
Maybe having as much as 3 races with quali held on different configs to minimize actual practice time before the event which IMO will give you the best drivers out of the new teams coming in. Anyone can set near WR times with plenty of practice, just check the AS national GTR races, it takes a real driver to win across multiple tracks in one day. At least I feel that way. Keep it to two man teams, like BOTT is now, and let the track decide.
Qualification makes more sense than just having last years teams in Div1 and the new guys in Div2 as Cyber and SK are basically the key reasons Mercury are doing this season, if we just had the same as last year it'd be dull and just doesnt make sense to keep those 2 teams out of Div1, so yeah i definately agree with something better than the originally proposed idea.
I also agree it'd be nice to see some sort of minimum drivers taking part rather than always sending your fastest 2 to every round, I tried to push for this last time round because as a team series it made more sense to me that it involved/embraced the whole team rather than just 3-4 of its drivers, however that was decided against, we still fielded 13 different drivers, very rarely were they our fastest for the combo, myself and viper just pestered people who were available and encouraged them to enter into the spirit of things. It became more about fielding as many different drivers as it was about getting the best results. There was an element of trying to plan who to use and when, so people like Jonesy were only used once for the GTR round, i did the opener because it was the only one i was pretty good at, but for the most part it was a case of finding someone that hadnt raced and stick em in whatever combo was coming up.
Only thing is theres teams with <8 drivers and teams with >14 and saying X have to compete seems quite tricky i guess.
We have 16 'drivers' at Mercury, one is in Dubai and hasnt played LFS for about 2 years now, one has knackered peds, about 4 that occasionally 'tard' in our server if a few of us are online, and a few that dont race in comps. I count about 8 of our drivers who would race, and of them i dunno how many are able to... and thats from 16 drivers, so i have sympathy/understanding for teams of smaller numbers being expected to field numbers they'd struggle to manage.
Agreed with most of Paul's points. Qualification makes the most sense and would provide the best competition, and having a large spread of drivers per team will help determine overall team strength.
Wouldnt that basically be doing the same thing as a qualification round? difference being that you now have the difficult decision of figuring out who gets what points.
Additional to that, considering this season we will probably start with 32 teams, and last time round i think 7 teams finished, that would mean you'd need a 50 slot server for Division 2 and the bottom 7 of division 1 would be relegated to Division 2.... however the bottom 7 also happen to be the top 7 as theres only... yep, you guessed - seven
Suffice to say that just might not work too well this time round
f**k it, just ask the teams to pop along the week before the series starts, and have say 3x 20min qualifiers with different combos and combine the teams time and rank them by that. You cant get a fair balance with 1 track & car combo, and with 20min at each track theres enough time to get at least one reasonable lap in and it also would mean maybe its isnt too long (1hr 10min at most). If the series is spread over 2 servers, then maybe it'd be ideal to split the qual too, 16 cars per server, allocate teams to server A or B so there isnt uneven numbers etc.
Alternatively, 2x 30min quals, 32 drivers per server, 2 servers.
Teams have one driver in server A and one in server B, 4 different combos in total, bit more time to get that fast lap in (if people think 20min isnt enough), bit more of a mix of cars used.
It'll be pretty compact in there, but ultimately when round 1 comes along theres going to be 32 drivers on the track anyway, so get used to it!
maybe allow teams to swap drivers when changing qual combo, afterall it wouldnt be 1 driver doing all rounds, it'd be the fastest driver (2) at that combo typically.
.then sort something out after that.
. As it is a team event you should use all or most of your drivers not just the quick ones.
