My first thought when I went through this thread was that it is great that we have so many people who care about condor competitions and fairness and that everyone is being constructive and tries to solve problems. My thought on issues mentioned so far are as follows:
1) One time zone - yes this would be ideal and we all all seem to agree on that, but unfortunately it would exclude people from different time zones. We can't expect people to fly condor when they are at work or slipping, so if we still want to call it a WORLD cup we just must have the zones and unfortunately there is no way around it.
2) Randomise weather- Firstly we need to know for sure what this setting actually does The manual says this: 'On every flight, the weather will be randomized within the weather preset limits.' So if I understand correctly positioning and strength of thermals is a bit like rolling a set of dice. If we roll 4 dice we might get 2,2,3,5. On another server without weather randomised we get the same 2,2,3,5, but on the one where all weather settings are the same, but randomisation was on we might get 3,1,2,6 . each digit gas the same probability of 1/6. Of course the sample size condor is much bigger and it is like rolling thousands of dice not just 4. If that's how 'randomise weather' works then it doesn't really matter on which server you fly and I would vote for weather to be randomised on each server. I know that this is not ideal, but I think it is the best we could do to prevent potential cheating (or at least make it more difficult). I say that it doesn't mater on which server you fly because in a non regatta race pilots start tasks at different times anyway. One can start straight away and be lucky and get a thermal in a key moment, or one can start half an hour later and get lucky. Starting tasks at different times on the same server (of course if the time difference is not big enough for general conditions to change) effectively just randomises the weather! On first CWC tasks top ten flew on different servers, not on the same one, which shows that randomise weather had nothing to do with winning or loosing. Randomise weather should not be used for regatta races because everyone starts at the same time, but that is not a problem for CWC because CWC does not have any regatta races.
It looks like, although not ideal, randomise weather would solve most of the issues we are concerned about (it it works the way I think it works) Condor is a bit like poker. It is a probability game. It is not about just one race. Once you get lucky once you get unlucky, who generally makes best decisions wins!
Pit_R wrote: ↑Tue Jan 10, 2023 2:45 pm
Hello!
Good recipe for nice races:
- 1 km icons [No 30 km or 5 km. Short icons are needed to stop people following each other; pilots just flying their own, no gaggles, no leech, no visual crowd.]
BTW Why not to allow thermal helpers? Are very similar to 5-30 km icons. During such big events as CWC or GP, gliders are visible for long and are many of them. Same time there is still possibility to escape, to hide, to make important/key decision etc - this is also part of soaring races.
- no cargo tasks [Start and finish on same airfield]
- no outside view
- no time zones (or with randseed)
- no spectato mode [or for the pleasure of those just watching - Spectato / YT / Twitch - with obligatory 10 mins delay, I bet it will be implemented in C3 soon.
]
- realistic tasks [no obstacles on route, too high TPs, TPs in clouds etc]
- reasonable speeds
- weather more or less, but
realistic
- no RT scoring
- no padlock view (will be better implemented in C3 I expect)
*)
1km icons - horrible idea. If I wanted to fly offline I could do that without signing in for a live online competition. This is a reason I stopped flying Condorworld competition and I will just let the guys play in their own sandpit. at the end of the day it is beautiful that condor allows everyone to do what they want. If someone wants 1km icons great, there are competitions which have that, but let's not change CWC into offline racing....
no outside view - I agree, but I do not have strong feelings about this. At the end of the day external view is available to all, so it is not unfair.
realistic tasks - we do condor for fun, lets keep it that way. Maybe we will start running with buckets of water around the house to simulate reality? Or maybe we should polish some wooden planks to simulate our gliders being nice smooth and ready? Just because we can't afford going to New Zealand in real world and must fly over flat and boring terrain of our countries doesn't mean that we should do the same in condor. We need some balance between fun an realism and I think CWC has it almost right.
'cargo tasks' - I don't see why this matters. Nobody will ask anybody to drive to retrieve a glider...
No spectator - if weather is randomised I don't think this really matters, and watching others after you crash can be quite fun, so why not.
No RT scoring - agree, but there is already no RT scoring on CWC