Online Competitions - Things to Consider

[Vertigo]

What you are proposing requires too much manual work and is not sustainable in the long run. Competitions need to be easier to organise not more difficult. What Condor Club offers is fine. Record or stream flights? My PC already struggles to just run the game... Sorry but jur proposals are just not practical which makes them unrealistic to achieve. Outlanding already is enough penalty for someone who wants to do well in a competition and we really don't need to make it any more complicated.

I beg to differ. No one would be forced to adopt LLC style scoring, but we made it work 20 years ago with 300 competitors, 50+ racedays and zero tools, it should be easily doable today with CC support. Manual judging is the exception, it was rare even back then, its only needed when something atypical happens that cant/doesnt/shouldnt happen IRL, like computer crashing on FG or something. Which doesnt matter TOO much in current CC competitions, but would be completely unreasonable in LLC if that flight would be scored as zero and actually count like all other race starts. We need to have the option, even if its only actually needed a handful times per season.

I also disagree outlanding is enough penalty now. Except maybe for those few who fly primarily for CCrating, it almost never even is a penalty at all, as your outlanding (or crash) flight is just ignored by best X out of Y results. There is zero incentive to land out safely or finish slowly in any current competition unless you land out ~1/3 of your flights. And there is no chance of tumbling down the ranking on your last flight no matter how big of a blunder you make. When it comes to realism, it doesnt get much further from real when you are able to crash 3x in to a mountain and still win a competition. You see no problem with that, but you do with external views on a tiny laptop monitor?

If you cant stream or record your flight (*), you still have the FTR, that is saved even if condor bluescreens; it means a bit more work for judging, and potentially less certainty, so I would expect to impose a higher penalty to score based on FTR only, but its certainly possible, we have done it before.

(*really, recording locally takes ~0% FPS with any half modern videocard, all videocards have dedicated video encoding units that arent used while gaming, unless you actually record the game; if you have any less than 10 year old nvidia card, just hit alt+F9. Or dont, and just save your FTR. Or accept zero points if your computer crashes. No one is forced in to anything)

[witor]

Looks like we are just living in different realities

(*really, recording locally takes ~0% FPS with any half modern videocard,

Yes, really. I had to pause my youtube channel after I started flying in C3 because Quest 3 at full resolution, with image stabilisation on and my RTX2080TI gives a very unpleasant flying experience. I would be happy to buy your 10-year-old GPU if it can run C3 VR at 5408 x 2736 resolution stable 72 fps while recording. Beside that what if I forget to start the recording? Am I going to be disqualified? Of course, I am playing devil's advocate on purpose to show how many potential problems organisers could face if they try to run a competition the way you sugested.

you still have the FTR, that is saved even if condor bluescreens;

Not always. I had crashes in the past where I didn't get a valid ftr file. If the pilot claims that are you going to accuse them of lying? What if they are lying... Do you have any reasonable means to prove it without causing lots of tension and turning what is supposed to be fun into toxic exchanges?

It is not that I think that your ideas are not valid I just think they are not practical and introduce a level of complexity that is not really needed as gains are minimal compared to the added complexity and the additional efforts required.

If there are 10 races in a competition and 8 of them count (80%) I would personally treat any result below 950 points pretty much as outlanding. It doesn't matter if I score 850 or 350 points, both results if counted mean that someone else will win the competition. So, spending lots of time and putting manual work to give me 600 points for safe out landing vs 300 points for less safe outstanding is meaningless to me. Like Arne said I think that ccRating already achieves enough in terms of motivation to fly safe. I totally agree with him as I also had races that I would simply disconnect before the ccRating era while with the rating at stake, I spent ages just to reach the finish line and minimise my losses...

Of course, there is nothing wrong with super hardcore ultra-realistic races with zero icon visibility, super difficult weather, disqualifications for crashes, all races counting so everyone flies six days in a row. But how much satisfaction are you going to have after winning a competition like this by beating another 5 pilots who participated and with very few or zero top pilots participating?

I want to reiterate that the crisis we are having is caused by a lack of participants. My whole point from the beginning of this thread is that we should keep the realism where it really matters and loosen it a bit in areas that do not really matter for a competitive outcome. external view fundamentally changes the way race is flown, so should not be allowed. Aerotow is just time-consuming and has no effect on the race result, so is a waste of time and should be avoided. those are just 2 examples that I want to use to illustrate my main point.

[timbaeyens]

Maybe get this discussion in the beta team? I like to read this, but ...

[6266]

I would like to add one thought to the external view. I agree that this is an unrealistic advantage. There is one reason why I like it: to check the plane. If you hit by accident a wrong key and you are not sure, if f.x. the gear is up or down, external view needs max 2 seconds to check that. Not all handles and decals are good visible that you can check that onboard, especially if you don't use a headtracker or VR. And it's only a wrong key to hit, the mistake will not happen IRL, I guess.

If the external view wouldn't allow to zoom, I wouldn't see a reason to prohibit it, but with zoom it has ofcourse cons too

[witor]

Maybe get this discussion in the beta team? I like to read this, but ...

I don't think our discussion has anything to do with beta testing... we are just discussing the best course of action for future competitions and I hope we will establish some practices that will help the community enjoy large numbers of participants and fun, but competitive events. I don't see a good reason of taking it off the public forum...

[witor]

I agree that this is an unrealistic advantage.

Thats exactly my point...

If the external view wouldn't allow to zoom, I wouldn't see a reason to prohibit it, but with zoom it has ofcourse cons too

This would need changes in condor which I don't think we need. Uros and team are already busy. They don't need more work to add features that are not actually needed. Just disallow the external view. Done!

You can hear the difference between your gear being down or up, so an external view is not needed for that purpose. Put it up and down a few times and settle for the quieter one...

[6266]

Do you hear the water running you hit by accident. How much time have you to fix that before your flight is lost?

Maybe it's really edge case, but IMHO a valid thought

[timbaeyens]

Do you hear the water running you hit by accident. How much time have you to fix that before your flight is lost?

Maybe it's really edge case, but IMHO a valid thought

You definitely hear the water tap being opened. Water is gone in a matter of minutes, so a quick open-close mistake makes you loose a couple of liters - nothing too bad.

[timbaeyens]

I agree that this is an unrealistic advantage.

Thats exactly my point...

Regarding god-like view from the outside; this comes close to having live-satellite imagery.
I don't know if that is illegal to use in RL comps though.

[6266]

Ok, then I see no reason for external view in a competition any longer

[Vertigo]

I had to pause my youtube channel after I started flying in C3 because Quest 3 at full resolution, with image stabilisation on and my RTX2080TI gives a very unpleasant flying experience. I would be happy to buy your 10-year-old GPU if it can run C3 VR at 5408 x 2736 resolution stable 72 fps while recording.

Live streaming means recoding to a format and bitrate youtube will ingest, that can be resource intensive. Recording locally isnt, just try it. Not sure how it works with VR, but on a flat panel literally just hit Alt+F9 and feel free to reduce the resolution (alt+z / settings) to limit file size and IO. I have literally zero measurable impact, I record every flight just in case something weird happens.

Beside that what if I forget to start the recording? Am I going to be disqualified?

Of course not. But if you want to contest a zero point (or worse) result that you feel is unfair/unrealistic, and not because of anything you did wrong as a pilot, then anything you CAN provide would bolster your case. A live recording would be excellent evidence and fairly easy to verify if you want to claim you could have finished or landed out safely if only.. whatever your excuse. An FTR is usually good enough too. in LLC we even used witness reports if that is all that was available. But you dont have to, you can just accept zero points or whatever penalty there is foreseen.

I just want to make sure we can use common sense and available tools to prevent people from losing over things that have nothing to do with their piloting, and distinguish it from bad outcomes that are 100% due to piloting error or excessive risk taking.

Of course, I am playing devil's advocate on purpose to show how many potential problems organisers could face if they try to run a competition the way you sugested.

Look, I mean no disrespect, but i KNOW about the potential issues. Ive been there, Ive done it before and in much more difficult circumstances. No Condor Club, no Condor IGC, no Soaringlabs. We couldnt even distinguish mid air collision recovery from flutter recovery without manually checking server log files. Any weird situation you can think off, we probably encountered it. How do you judge or score someone crashing because a USB joystick cable supposedly became unplugged in flight, or a cat jumped on the keyboard. Im not making those up. With a bit of common sense and good will, its not that difficult, especially when there is very little harm in being lenient as long as people feel enough pressure to at least care about flying or landing out safely. And if you do come across someone trying to cheat (we had 1 in LLC), you simply ban him.

But besides the challenges, I also know what it can result in. Not to tooth my own horn, but current competitions are nothing like LLC was. There is simply not the same level of stress/commitment/engagement. Its not possible today to be happy after finishing 2 hours after the day winner, or getting satisfaction from landing out a bit further than most, or safely. Those things are irrelevant now. Have a bad day? just disconnect and try again next race. In LLC that was completely different.

If there are 10 races in a competition and 8 of them count (80%)

In LLC every race you start in counts. Be it 8 or 10. They dont count equally though, see above.

It doesn't matter if I score 850 or 350 points

Because of the current best X out of Y scoring system. In what RL race would it not matter to score 850 or 350 points? Or not matter if you crash in to a mountain once in a while?

I totally agree with him as I also had races that I would simply disconnect before the ccRating era while with the rating at stake, I spent ages just to reach the finish line and minimise my losses...

Good. Now lets also bring that feeling back to people who dont fly for CCrating. And at the same time, give safe/slow pilots a fighting chance by just being consistent instead of fast, as everyone ranked above them can faulter at some point. Like IRL.

I want to reiterate that the crisis we are having is caused by a lack of participants. My whole point from the beginning of this thread is that we should keep the realism where it really matters and loosen it a bit in areas that do not really matter for a competitive outcome. external view fundamentally changes the way race is flown, so should not be allowed.

But crashing in to mountains with no actual penalty should be allowed, as that is realistic? I think we will have to agree to disagree on this. You dont have to believe me or agree with me, but if there is to be another LLC, these basic guiding principles, that bad piloting or stupid risk taking should be penalized, not bad luck or things that dont/cant happen IRL, is a hill I will die on. And Ill do the work, with some help if anyone is willing, but its really not gonna be that bad, at least if Thierry is able and willing to implement it.

[wickid]

I had to pause my youtube channel after I started flying in C3 because Quest 3 at full resolution, with image stabilisation on and my RTX2080TI gives a very unpleasant flying experience. I would be happy to buy your 10-year-old GPU if it can run C3 VR at 5408 x 2736 resolution stable 72 fps while recording.

Live streaming means recoding to a format and bitrate youtube will ingest, that can be resource intensive. Recording locally isnt, just try it. Not sure how it works with VR, but on a flat panel literally just hit Alt+F9 and feel free to reduce the resolution (alt+z / settings) to limit file size and IO. I have literally zero measurable impact, I record every flight just in case something weird happens.

Recording VR locally requires mirror rendering which causes a big FPS hit. It is not a feasable solution for VR users.

[Tom]

I stream DCS and use VR and thats an even bigger hit than condor, that also uses a mirror. Condor is no where near as resource heavy as DCS, and as It not fully Muti threaded you can use other cores for the encoding or had it over to the CUDA cores also.

[witor]

In LLC every race you start in counts. Be it 8 or 10. They dont count equally though, see above.

So if I can't fly the second race because of 'life' and this race happens to be worth a lot of points and you win it. And then I win race number 5 you can not fly because of 'life' which by chance was worth fewer points how is that fair? Let's say we have the same number of total points in other races and we flew the same number of races, but because of the difference in the maximal number of points in those 2 races you win and I don't. Please help me understand how this would be fair.

I absolutely believe that you have faced a plethora of cases in the past, but I still don't see what you are going to do as an organiser if I get stuck and spend 4 minutes to finally climb away and after reaching the cloud base I will just switch my PC off knowing that I have no chances for a good result. Then I will email you and say that I just had a power shortage because my daughter dropped a toaster to a sink (or some other nonsense) and will claim that my ftr did not get saved and I don't want my flight to count. Being 95% certain that I am lying are you really going to say that to my face? I am just curious because I can not imagine being ever confident enough to acause someone of lying in a situation like that even if I am fairly certain that I am right.

There is simply not the same level of stress/commitment/engagement.

Please believe me I felt plenty of stress in many competitions. At some point, I did limit my competition flying because of that and in general, I participate in fewer competitions than I used to. I personally am not looking for more stress as what I already get is more than I need. There was a funny (or maybe not so funny if you think about it) case of SOL flying with a heart monitor with readings reaching something like 160 when he was going toe to toe with Arne during the last Virtual SGP world finals. I don't think that Arne flew cool as a cucumber either I mean no offence to Arne as all I have for him is tremendous respect but I have raced enough times to know what it feels like when a win is on the line.

Because of the current best X out of Y scoring system. In what RL race would it not matter to score 850 or 350 points? Or not matter if you crash in to a mountain once in a while?

I thought we already established that counting all races is not a practical solution for condor competitions, but maybe I misunderstood something...

Good thing about Condor and the flexibility of Condor Club and other resources is that we have the freedom to organise events according to our visions and I sincerely wish you all the best in organising your competition.

By the way.. out of curiosity what features of CC do you think we need that are not already there?

[Vertigo]

So if I can't fly the second race because of 'life' and this race happens to be worth a lot of points and you win it

All days were normalized to 1000 points. in the original LLC that didnt matter so much as we had a stupid large number of flying days (51)

I absolutely believe that you have faced a plethora of cases in the past, but I still don't see what you are going to do as an organiser if I get stuck and spend 4 minutes to finally climb away and after reaching the cloud base I will just switch my PC off knowing that I have no chances for a good result. Then I will email you and say that I just had a power shortage because my daughter dropped a toaster to a sink (or some other nonsense) and will claim that my ftr did not get saved and I don't want my flight to count. Being 95% certain that I am lying are you really going to say that to my face? I am just curious because I can not imagine being ever confident enough to acause someone of lying in a situation like that even if I am fairly certain that I am right.

The best you could hope for is distance points to about the point where you disconnected. Why would you do that deliberately when you have every chance of completing the race and doubling or tripling your score? And without FTR or any other supporting evidence (like video), or even nearby players vouching for the fact you where not low or in trouble, you would more likely be scored as if crashed. And again why risk that when you could have easily landed out, or finish the race (even if slowly)?

Note this doesnt imply I think or determined you are a liar, its up to you to provide some evidence that you did not crash or deliberately disconnect. And if there is only just circumstantial reason to believe you; say you vanished after 10 minutes for no apparent reason, without being in trouble without others having seen you struggle to climb that 4 min thermal; the organizer could still decide to be lenient, take you on your word, and instead of giving a miniscule amount of distance points, pretend you didnt start. Worst that can happen is that someone gets an undeserved free pass. Thats no worse than today when everyone always gets multiple free passes.

You can come up with theoretical corner cases, at the limits of every rule, at some point discretion kicks in. In LLC we had a panel of judges, I believe OXO was one of them. If someone wasnt happy with my or any of my co organizers ad hoc rulings, they could appeal there. Im not sure that even happened one single time. On many thousands of race flights and many 100s of bluescreens (extremely common on final glide in the early days of condor), disconnections or keyboard jumping cats. Of all the issues and problems we encountered, this just wasnt one of them.

I thought we already established that counting all races is not a practical solution for condor competitions, but maybe I misunderstood something...

Please read again what Ive written a few times. Counting all STARTED races is very feasible.

By the way.. out of curiosity what features of CC do you think we need that are not already there?

The ones I listed a few times now: manually adjusting day results. Averaging X out of X started tasks + Y zero (or low) initial day scores. requiring safe (out)landing after the use of FES/Turbo. Ideally differentiating outlanding in actual and known outlanding fields from a CUP file, from "landing" on mountain tops or lakes