A controversial idea to help populate R3E ranked servers

BOTS!

Hear me out.

The most frequent sentiment about Raceroom I read online is that it's a great sim, but the ranked servers are often pretty empty, especially outside EU, while iRacing offers instant, tight grids 24/7. This is an opinion often stated by people who would prefer to drive in Raceroom instead, because they genuinely think it's a superior simulator. They go with the competition because they can be more quickly matched and have a great race more easily - whatever the class or time of day. They often add that iRacing offers leagues and seasons and other features that R3E simply lacks.

I usually respond that R3E's shortcomings come directly from the fact that even people who consider it to be a superior sim still stick with the competition out of the convenience it offers, and so the population doesn't allow for anything more. So it's a catch-22. They respond that everybody choses whatever they prefer the most and it's up to Raceroom to convince people to switch.

They're right. We can't expect racers to switch just because it will help Raceroom. It is up to Raceroom to come up with something that will make people stick with it. But obviously they cannot make racers appear on servers out of a sudden to make the races more challenging and interesting, offer more variety on servers and to allow to introduce more features, like leagues.

That's why Raceroom needs an "out of the box" idea. That's where the bots come in.

Ideally a bot should be as indistinguishable from a real player as possible. That's why bots that would drive on ranked servers should have their own profiles with their own name, nationality, ranking, reputation, preferrably some avatar. They should have a semi-fixed skill level and some preferences for whatever classes they drive. They should hop in whenever there's only few players and hop out once the grid is pretty filled to let other players join.

This way even if there's only two or three players on the server, they would still have a two-digit grid. Since bots would have their own profiles with their own ranking points, even against them you'd have a pretty good indication how you perform against other players, since the bot's ranking would be directly tied to how that bot performs against players. And ideally - you won't even notice it's a bot! (Sector3, if you agree, just do it and don't tell anybody!)

Of course it's not a perfect solution - when you race online, you want to race against other people. I understand that. That said, Raceroom doesn't need a perfect solution, it needs one that will work and make more people race in it. It's not uncommon that online games introduce AI adversaries to fill in the gaps caused by low population. War Thunder does that, PUBG does that. So if bots on ranked servers can make them at least a bit more enjoyable and help people stick with Raceroom, I'm all for it. And once the numbers are here and Raceroom gets the momentum, Sector3 can just... retire them.

 

Many of us have asked for AI controlled cars to be included on servers. Last I heard (read) they were looking into it but not committing to including it. I agree with you that it would be beneficial.

 

I think iRacing has just introduced exactly this.

 

And I thought I raised some serious taboo.

In that case let me join the maybe somewhat quiet choir encouraging the idea. Every voice counts, right?

 

I´m all for it as long as it is not on ranked servers.

 

That's the whole point. Why are you against?

 

Because the whole point of ranked servers is the rating you get from beating fellow humans and to a lesser extent building reputation from clean driving - something AI don´t care about. Otherwise you might as well stay in single player. And that´s before we consider the possibility to farm rating from racing against AI.

For normal multiplayer then, yes yes yes. Give them all a talent file and let rip.

 

Then I'm not sure you read my post. Here's an excerpt:

You cannot farm ranking against bots if their skill level is more or less constant and their results would actually account to their individual ranking. Same as you cannot farm ranking on 1.3k drivers. The situation would be exactly as with other drivers - if they're ranked higher, you're getting ranking for beating them, if they're ranked lower, you don't, you can only lose some if they beat you.

 

Just sort out the servers so ping is not such an issue.
Very difficult for we in Oceania to play in the USA and Europe time zones and the same for them on our servers.

 

The AI does care about clean driving, they just aren't able to do it as efficiently as an experienced human (they don't predict anything, just react to situation and sometimes it's already too late to do anything).

 

Do you have any examples from other racing sims? Racing is a ping-sensitive activity and I think R3E already does a great job at handling it.

High ping between such distant zones is inevitable. That's why they have servers in different locations in the first place, so that people from Oceania didn't have to play on Europe and USA servers. Next it's a population issue, of course, but the idea of bots is made to mitigate exactly that.

From what I read in the news, bots can be used in racing sessions created by players (hosted races and league races). Bit I don't know how it affects ranked races, I don't follow this game.

 

I think this is an interesting idea, especially since there are examples from other games. But these are games of a different genre. In racing sims some people, or even many people, will be against bots in ranked races because for them it's important that they are racing real people and not bots or a mixture of two. I don't know how big this number is, however.

Probably this should start as an experiment with one server and see how things are going and what the feedback is.

 

https://www.iracing.com/ai-hosted-comes-to-iracing/

This is what iRacing are doing.

 

I did read it, but I think that for ranked it is not a good solution as it is too open to exploits and in any case ranked servers, in Europe at least, tend to be well populated at normal playing times of the day. If you beat someone you will gain rating, how much depends on the difference in rating before the race between the players.

I would like to see it on private multiplayer servers and that could be a testing ground to see if it is feasible longer term in ranked once it is refined but that could take years to accomplish plus we all know the limitations of the old game engine and how extra AI ar a processor drain.

 

Yes, but which exploits exactly? Maybe it's not that much of an issue.

One that comes to mind is that if AI has the ability to avoid contact they will do it and they are extremely careful at that. You can abuse it and do something like pushing them off line on the straight even if they are in front and you only have a meter of overlap. That, of course, first requires identifying who is an AI and who is a human.

Second, and this is more like a general concern, is that AI doesn't really behave like a human. In a tight pack they tend to form lines and leave a lot of space outside and/or inside. They do some sort of weird unreasonable corrections on the straight and even under braking. They often look clueless; I have an impression that even newbies drive more predictably than AI.

Also, the AI has some issues with losing pace or even losing control in some places. That would limit the choice of circuits and classes for races with AI, but I hope it won't be a big problem to find properly working combinations.

I don't see why the same can't be applied to/with bots. You have a car that behaves like that - use it to calculate reputation; and finishes at this place - use it to calculate rating.

 

I can think of a number of exploits, which I´d rather not detail, plus all the inherent limitations of AI you mentioned above plus the processor demands.

Again, it´s a good idea for non ranked servers, which tend to be near empty if they are not a really popular combo and which the user can configure to set up AI strength, number of cars etc.

 

Then I reserve the right to ignore that argument, if you don't bother to elaborate. No exploits possible, as far as I can tell.

Obviously it's the server that would have to process the AI, not any of the players.

 

If you read @Maskerader s post about AI limitations then it is easy to see what you can do to exploit ranking. I guess you can also do similar things with a group of friends but that´s another question.

Knowing that RRE is already one of the worst games on the market in terms of multiplayer loading times and server stability vs actual player base, the last thing needed is to put more load on dedi servers.

Again, I support the idea, don´t get me wrong, but ranked already has enough issues with disconnects, collision disputes etc not to add any more complications. ff there are not enough players on ranked in Asia and US then that´s a marketing issue and the team needs to push the game more or reduce the number of servers to concentrate players on less options. Filling spaces with stooges is not a long term answer and just highlights the weaknesses. What´s next, an Esports championship only with AI racers going round like a funeral procession?

 

I'm not sure they are so bad they are game-breaking. They do act weird sometimes, but it depends on circumstances and can be addressed, even if partially. I just did a 15 minutes race in GT4 at Most with a rolling start and I have nothing to complain. They were careful, had stable pace all around and no accidents, successfully used most of the opportunities to overtake me, even followed my slipstream (or at least it looked like that). The race concluded with a car overtaking me on the outside in the last turn, which was impressive and 100% clean.

If we're talking about turning a one-digit grid into a two-digit one, then it's no more than a dozen of AI at worst. That's nothing special.

Loading times are client-dependent because of how game resources work, it's not a server issue.

Collision disputes, again, have nothing to do with servers.

Any change you introduce to a program is a risk, but most of the time it goes fine. Sorry, I can't accept arguments like "this might break something" from people outside of Sector 3. Unless you have examples of how AI affects the game stability, of course.

 

I will freely admit that I don´t know the technical limitations or even how the game uses my pc or the server but those are semantics in this discussion.

The crux of the question here is the perception of a lack of online players. The solution is simple to that but requires effort from the community and from the game owners. Spread the word, join leagues, clans, teams or be a youtuber and create a community, offer people prizes to race with you, create an official inter team league so that people can feel invested rather than watch boring Esports processions with the same 25 aliens as always who might as well be AI.

How do discos get people in? They give some beautiful or influential people free entry or offer promos to entice others and they have people on the street hustlling to get punters inside. I´ve never seen a club with inflatable dummies (although there are quite a lot of inflated body parts) or robots throwing shapes but maybe I don´t go to the right places.

I see so many times, "RRE the best kept secret in sim racing". Is that not the worst possible business model? A game no one has heard of? Word of mouth can make a game (AC) or break it (PC3) but what happens when no one is talking at all?

EA and SMS/ Codemasters are masters at profit grabbing rehashing the same game every year with minimal differences but they also spend the cash they save on development by selling the game. Everyone knows when F1 20xx is coming out and 95% of people change to the new FIFA every year.

I´d much rather Raceroom invested in attracting more real players and in the game infrastructure for instance to not have 8 hour downtimes every other week to add one new track or fix an AI bug and I don´t live in Oceania, where it would be my prime time to play. Some bright spark will no doubt give a technical explanation why that can never be but that is shut down instantly by comparing to AMS2 or others that work online too and have a seamless updating process, so much so they do weekly patches. You can´t get drunk if the pub is closed.