I remember in early forza games drafting gave you a dirty lap, but I hadn’t really raced much online till now. I notice that drafting in multiplayer also shows as a dirty lap, and with all the corner cutting that goes on, I don’t like that the “race results” shows the dirty lap symbol, and clumps us in with corner cutters and wreckers. Can Turn 10 come up with a way to differentiate a drafted lap from a dirty lap?
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- Drafting sure is part of RL racing.
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A little D or something to denote a clean lap with a draft so the race counts it as clean (esp for the purposes of the following grid position in leagues) but the time doesn’t go on the leaderboards.
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Beauty is in the eye of the behinder. To everyone else, or the system at least, it looks like you gained an advantage over those who completed the lap without assistance from the draft effect.
A more complicated assessment of lap quality may make sense for grid order and payouts (or penalties), but the objective of racing in traffic is about finish order. Rivals hot lapping is available for setting clean certified lap times to compare circumstance results on the leaderboards.
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Clean laps (in terms of laptime certification) mean pretty much nothing online, with the exception of Leagues where the fastest drivers start at the front in future races.
Unless I actually see somebody cut a corner to gain an advantage, I couldn’t care less if their laps are clean or dirty.
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You can often tell when a player corner cuts or otherwise cheats when you go to a track they can’t cut.
Otherwise, clean/dirty laps are not really a big deal. Most of us are smart enough to not jump to conclusions unless we see obvious infractions with our own eyes.
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The reason you get a “dirty lap” in the game from drafting another car or being drafted by another car, in single player or online, is because we have track leaderboards by class across all modes of gameplay, and people have used drafting in the past to boost each other around the track, obtaining times that would be impossible otherwise. You gain an aerodynamic advantage by drafting and by being drafted, as in real life.
Obviously, it’s not dirty racing to draft someone - that’s part of the strategy of racing. But for the purposes of maintaining fair leaderboards, any drafting (whether you are drafting or being drafted), will result in a dirty lap time, and always register below clean lap times.
If we limited track lap time leaderboards to rivals mode, so that you could only post times by pure hot-lapping alone on track (or against ghosts, which don’t result in drafting), we could remove the dirty lap time flag earned by drafting from all other forms of single player and multiplayer racing, but most players would be horrified by this.
Another option would be to have separate leaderboards for every track, class, mode of play (career, MP, rivals, etc). And that, my friends, is an unholy amount of leaderboard management (we already manage thousands of leaderboards as it is now).
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Would it not be possible to have a separate indicator on the leaderboards for drafting and make it so that it still places these times behind clean laps on the leaderboard, but has no affect in league races for grid placement. Its not a huge issue for me, but it is a little annoying to be battling for 1st all race in the league and then be placed behind a couple of slow people at the start of the next race because they were able to post clean laps.
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When drafting, BOTH cars will drive faster.
Why? Physics !
And as the T10 member stated above, it is simulated in the game.
This brings up something that I’ve been curious about for a few years now:
If you are 150ft (50m) ahead of somebody, are you still gaining an aerodynamic advantage when they draft you?
I understand how things work when 2 cars begin to bump-draft each other, but I can’t see how a gap that big can influence the car in front.
Is it simply a case of the game’s certification system saying “these 2 cars are within 150ft of each other and doing over 100mph; therefore, dirty laps for both.”?
There is actually a dynamic aerodynamic wake around each car modeled into the physics system, the shape of which depends on the size and shape of the car, as well as its velocity. There is a threshold before it flags a dirty lap - if a trailing car enters the wake of a leading car and remains in it for N seconds (I forget the exact threshold), it flags a dirty lap.
While you can’t see this wake in the game, it’s pretty much in a direct line behind the lead car, and while it gets longer the faster a car goes, it doesn’t actually bend as cars go around sweeping turns. The computational power required to do that accurately at 360hz would cause the world to fold in on itself. And we can’t allow that to happen.
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The point of clean laps is obviously for clarification of fastest lap times and weather they are clean or not. For example when hot lapping alone to achieve a good lap time. Now if when driving online in multiplayer and drafting you will have a higher top speed than if you were hot lapping alone. Therefore they can’t allow a lap where you have drafted someone to be counted as clean. It would in essence be cheating and then every fast lap would be set in multiplayer cuz you could draft for higher speed and still have a clean lap. Clearly this would not be far to people trying to hit lap alone. A level playing field is needed.
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This^
Not only that, allowing drafted laps to count as clean would completely invalidate the rivals feature. In other words, you couldn’t ever post a “fastest” lap in rivals, because they would all be done via drafting in multiplayer.
It is necessary that any lap that relies on someone else to help you, count as a dirty lap otherwise Turn10 might as well remove Rivals completely.
Drafting is insignificant now. This only applies to highspeed sections to notice a difference. In FM 1 was a big deal because drafting actually worked for an advantage and the leaderboards where raided with this technique.
The biggest thing the grinds my gears is getting drafted will cause a dirty lap even though the car in front has no advantage.
The dirty lap mark should show why it was dirty.
It would be simple to show I would think. For instance -
A ring with a dot in the middle would show off track and draft penalty.
A ring would show off track only.
A dot would show draft only.
All of them would invalidate the lap for rivals.
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I’m struggling to understand the reason for this thread. Maybe the word “unclean” would make people feel better than “dirty”. If you cut corners it’s not a clean lap, if you hit someone it’s not a clean lap, if you are drafting or drafted it’s not a clean lap. A “dirty” lap isn’t an inherently bad thing, it’s just that a “clean” lap means there was no outside interference so it’s better. Putting another symbol next to a dirty lap would do what exactly, are you going to show your friends I have the fastest dirty drafting lap. Lap times mean nothing in racing other than for qualifying, so it’s not really something that you should be concerned with. If you care about lap times you can either play rivals, get a big lead before your next lap or wait till everyone passes you and get clean laps but lose the race. I think turn 10s leaderboards are a pretty solid system, and is probably one of the last things people should complain about.
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Drafting makes you faster is the correct statement…and it doesn’t draw a black flag…