So I've been discussing this with some of the guys in the RaceRoom Discord, but at Captain Coffee's suggestion, I'm mentioning it in here and a solution I would suggest. The issue is that the new choice to cap ranked servers so that those with too much reputation won't be able to join some of them is leading to a lot of angst among myself and my community, not too mention some others outside of my community as well evidently. While I think the intent is noble, it's negatively impacting American time zone users because servers allocated specifically for those areas are already pretty depleted in the times those American users are likely to be on. This serves to only split servers even more, making each less populated and therefore far less likely to result in a race. My suggestion is that for AT LEAST American servers, establish those with both capping and without capping, each clearly marked. This could even be used to acquire metrics on which are actually used more. My hunch is the uncapped ones will have more activity, but I could be wrong and am willing to accept that if so, but I think it's a worthwhile experiment.
Ravey, bro... You're in the Discord discussions about this. You know my reasoning. You're going to argue with me in here too? I'm just posting it at Captain Coffee's suggestion in case those in control of such things want to consider it.
The suggestion is pointless. If there is a capped and uncapped version of the same rookie server of course the uncapped will be busier. But it also won't be a rookie server anymore.
Capping rookie servers was meant specifically to split all players into several servers. Even some european people consider this a questionable decision because the playerbase isn't big enough. American player base is much smaller, so it makes much less sense to try and split it.
For the record, the American & Oceania servers have not been updated with reputation limits and everyone is able to join those rookie servers. The main reason for this is, as stated, the smaller userbase for those regions. Once the regions get more (peak) users we can expand the full schedule (including rookie/am split and the feature races).
Thanks for that reply! That makes total sense. Now I see that the real complaint then is that the European servers having this capping is evident to us in American time zones because we're most often hopping on European servers since they usually have the most players. There's probably no good solution then unless you could dynamically change the capping based on time... Thanks for the response.
I have played several times after this capping and my sensation is that there's no races with more than 3-6 drivers, when a couple of weeks ago you were able to join consecutively (finish one and go to another) at races with 15/20 or 20/20 drivers (mostly 235i, TT cup or MX-5 events). I really enjoyed that, even when I play with noobs or simply rude people frustrating your race. Both American and Oceania servers have the problem of the ping. My Internet connection is quite good and I use cable, but it cannot go down more than 200ms. Its impossible to play with that. With this situation the game it's not interesting for me. These previous days I have been played it was more interesting the chat with the other 2/3 players during the qualifing to know their opinion than the race itself. Everybody thought the same I'm explaining here. It's my opinion, which is similar to ScoPi. I'm sure that there are a lot of members thinking the same and don't know that the idea is to fill other servers. And maybe most of them have the same ping problem than me. Too many disadvantages for a not big community of players.