Condor - cheating issue

[witor]

Hmmm... I think I can sense some rivalry in this discussion

Maybe we should do Europe vs rest of the world team competition? That could be fun...

If anyone thinks this is a good idea we could come up with some rules and make it happen.

Maybe something like 10 vs 10? each team could have unlimited number of pilots but only 10 could fly in a given race. This would ensure that teams are not losing points just because one of the pilots is unavailable. Each team could elect a captain who would decide who will fly in a given race.

Just an idea...

Event like this has never happened before. What do you think?

[JBlyth]

I'd be very interested in that, Witor......

I was sad to miss the last two races as I was having surgery at that time, but good, healthy rivalry is always a good thing.

We folk in the "new world" admire just how good you in the "old world" fly, both in real life and in Condor.

Maybe we could trade some of your speed for some of our brilliant Australian weather?

But we are getting better.....

Cheers,
John in Sunny Carnarvon - Western Australia

[Fingers]

Last time I was gliding IRL I could not leap out the glider hover round and take a look around. I also never found an auto pilot button.

[Bre901]

Last time I was gliding IRL I could not leap out the glider hover round and take a look around. I also never found an auto pilot button.

Slightly off topic IMHO:

It's possible to disable all external views in the flight plans, it's up to the competition task setters to do so

When you fly a long time IRL, you bring along an empty bottle or a plastic bag
The C3 autopilot is way less stable than the C2 one, I wouldn't leave it on for more than a couple of minutes
Therefore it's no longer a competing advantage

If you dislike it, please feel free to use an empty bottle or a plastic bag instead in order to enhance realism, but be aware that we can't be held responsible for what may happen to your furniture or floor, not to mention the indecent exposure charges you may face

[janjansen]

Yeah the new autopilot is rather terrible, it flies even worse than me. Which is awesome, excellent compromise!

[witor]

I always advocated for no external view in competitions. I also wanted autopilot time limit that could be set by the task setter, so we could nip to the loo for few minutes but would not be available to fly most of the task.

I am not a fan of an unstable autopilot (autopilot not keeping direction) as going to the toilet could sometimes be difficult. I would much prefer a stable autopilot with a time limit, but we have what we have.

Apart from that I am totally against auto-ruder as rudder control is one of the fundamental aspects of flying a glider.

Maybe one day we will get an option for the task setters to disallow autoruder and limit the autopilot time.

By the way with C3 released I think it would be a good time to discuss preferred settings for competitions. There are many competitions that I do not participate in because I don't like the settings...

[Bre901]

Apart from that I am totally against auto-ruder as rudder control is one of the fundamental aspects of flying a glider.

I beg to differ, how about disabled people or even older people with rheumatism or similar leg ailments who may want to take a rest from time to time during a flight ?
And don't even get me started on the twist control on the joystick: that is highly unrealistic

[6266]

I beg to differ, how about disabled people or even older people with rheumatism or similar leg ailments who may want to take a rest from time to time during a flight ?

Very good point, +1 from me!

Getting 60 myself soon I had to use Autorudder some days ago, because I needed a short rest after a day with hard work in the garden ...

[witor]

I beg to differ, how about disabled people or even older people with rheumatism or similar leg ailments who may want to take a rest from time to time during a flight ?
And don't even get me started on the twist control on the joystick: that is highly unrealistic

We will have to disagree on this one. I have seen disabled people flying gliders many times as we have adapted K21 in our club. But I have never seen a disabled person flying a real glider with an autoruder.

Any manual control is better than the autoruder. You are using a mouse? fine, use the second one to have manual control over your rudder. You have one hand? Fine, use a scroll wheel or set up Windows voice commands or whatever, but control it manually.

Twisted joystick unrealistic? I guess autoruder is more realistic in your view... I just don't see any convincing arguments for flying a glider in competition with an autoruder.

By the way, I am not against the idea of autoruder in Condor. I am against autoruder in competitions and I wish it was up to task setters and competition organisers to decide if they want to allow autoruder or not.

[Jannes]

I beg to differ, how about disabled people or even older people with rheumatism or similar leg ailments who may want to take a rest from time to time during a flight ?
And don't even get me started on the twist control on the joystick: that is highly unrealistic

We will have to disagree on this one. I have seen disabled people flying gliders many times as we have adapted K21 in our club. But I have never seen a disabled person flying a real glider with an autoruder.

Any manual control is better than the autoruder. You are using a mouse? fine, use the second one to have manual control over your rudder. You have one hand? Fine, use a scroll wheel or set up Windows voice commands or whatever, but control it manually.

Twisted joystick unrealistic? I guess autoruder is more realistic in your view... I just don't see any convincing arguments for flying a glider in competition with an autoruder.

By the way, I am not against the idea of autoruder in Condor. I am against autoruder in competitions and I wish it was up to task setters and competition organisers to decide if they want to allow autoruder or not.

I get your point. I think the best solution is to make it optional for tasksetters. But I think most people prefer the auto rudder (myself included) because we don't have proper pedals. Twisting the stick for hours would really suck.

What I don't agree on is making the debate about realism. There are other well established features in many competitions that are much more unrealistic. Like pin point accurate real time scoring, task helpers or super long range plane icons. Yes they are all editable by tasksetters. But there are almost no competitions out there not using either one of those. I guess there won't be much competitions without auto-rudder, but who knows...

As I said, I think this debate is doing better being about gameplay reasons than realism reasons. And yes, the auto-rudder would introduce another gameplay layer, making it more difficult to maximize thermal gain. This is the main reason I think this should be considered as a optional feature for tasksetters.

Another idea: Make auto rudder like 80-90% efficient, so it stays a totally viable option. Everyone who wants to really max out his speed should use manual rudder then with the risk of loosing energy when not applying rudder properly. This would be more of a compromise and not potentially split up players across competition settings.

[Tom]

Folks,

This topic is going way off it's original theme, Auto Rudder isn't a cheat it's an inbuilt feature in condor. Open a different thread to discuss this and lets keep this one on topic please.

Cheers!

[timbaeyens]

Another idea: Make auto rudder like 80-90% efficient, so it stays a totally viable option. Everyone who wants to really max out his speed should use manual rudder then with the risk of loosing energy when not applying rudder properly. This would be more of a compromise and not potentially split up players across competition settings.

Upvote for this idea. Similar to the now not-so-perfect Autopliot

[wickid]

It already flies not completely slip free.

[witor]

I think that there is pretty much no real cheating in condor. I mean I don't think there are people who actually interfere with the sim in a malicious way. Rather than pure cheating we sometimes have a possibility for competitors to have unfair advantage because of how organisers set up the competition.

Some examples causing my concern are servers at different times, and watching streams and live streams. It is hard to blame people for watching videos of races on earlier servers if they can. It is not Cheating, but not great sportsmanship in my opinion. That's why I plee to the organisers of serious competitions to have just one race time and to all competitors to refrain from having a live stream. Different time zones might be necessary in a big global competition to allow everyone to participate and it is difficult to avoid, but streaming is something that competitors have to keep in mind

The problem arises when we want to popularise condor as an e-sport by doing live streams of events like VSGP. Those events, streams and commentary are great but everyone can have a VR window with Twitch and watch the stream to fish for information. This is not ideal, but I don't really see a way to prevent this from happening. I guess we will have to live with this...

I thought that for a big global competition last CWC was well organised. People who usually stream were not streaming and if someone logged into an early server had to fly there. Of course, if someone was really desperate they would find a way to not play perfectly fair, but unsportsmanship was difficult enough to achieve and I don't think anyone was desperate enough to bother...

It would be suspicious if the task setter won a CCrated or any other competition with prizes. For casual events just for fun practice and with no rating I think it doesn't matter.