After doing quite a few trials with random players you realize that the random players are worse then the drivatars .
the biggest mistake is the other players push off other players from the course …
you need to realize that it is the team of people versus the drivatars
and not an individual win event if you don’t learn this soon you will all always fail.
remember every member of your blue team needs to place well not just you .
We’ve been trying to tell them this for over a year with no success. There needs to be a penalty (time penalty) introduced for deliberate actions against others, or a system warning that tells them to stop or face a penalty or even temporarily banned until they learn to clean race.
In my opinion, for the Trials we need same conditions as online races - anti-ram system and ghoasting first 30 sec from the start. Then It should be a lot playable.
Perhaps they need to stop S2 racing in bad weather? Just a thought but putting events for casual players to do with a high bar then punishing them for trying to do it is a game problem, not their problem. Bad drivers in ranked? They didnt decide to put it in the playlist…
Also… If they are bad drivers, then you must be bad as well to be in back with them.
“Deliberate actions” If you can make an AI system advanced enough to difinitively know intent that cannot be exploited, am sure they will put it in.
Stick a bunch of S2 Lambo on winter roads, peeps hit. Sometime perhaps they be hitting back if you hit them first. Been more a few trials where I got sick of the pro driver bull rushing past me to get ahead. Probs also peeps who regularily ranked. Fix it in ranked and will see it fixed in trials. It isnt the random part that is the problem.
From my observations nearly half of the players enter the trials without a tune - with just the stock car. Combine this with the statistical fact, that half of the players are worse than the average player. Add to that, that some of the unbeatable drivatars act erratically at the beginning of the race. Cram this together in time and space: at the beginning of the race all racers are very close together.
Now if they would just disable collisions in the first 15-30 seconds of the race, all this would haven be mostly sorted out already.
Apart from that, I find most trials fun anyway. Once I find a decent car and tune and get used to the mayhem-pattern at the beginning of each race, I normally do the trial over an over again. Not all of them, but many. Mustang vs. Mustang was fun, I did it approx. 35 times.
Often players don’t know what to expect given the combination of season, weather, discipline, and car restrictions.
A big problem is that at the start, everyone has to try and get past the moving obstacles (aka Drivatars), and get past those not able to get past the moving obstacles. If like me you do anything to avoid hitting other players, and let the grid disperse a bit, it can be difficult to catch up.
I think they need to stop putting all of the moving obstacles (again, Drivatars) at the front of the grid, and instead mix it up a bit. Don’t have all players jostling with each other at the start, forming automotive Waldorf Salad, while the moving obstacles ('tars) can leisurely zoom off into the great unknown, never to be seen again till the end of time!
And yes, as alterx13 and tweitzel said, disabling collisions for the first 30 seconds would help immensely.
The one issue on that could be if the drivertar AI on it, but I think if that part is doable, even a 10-15 second no collision would do wonders.
Actually statistically the average driver being supposedly the 50% point is incorrect. The point is roughly 30% good drivers and 70% bad drivers. The ‘Pro’ drivers only account for ~1% and there’s about 5% who are going to top most of the competitive charts in the various disciplines.
As such when entering trials with 6 drivers in the field it’s likely to have 1 top 5% driver, 1 good driver and 4 drivers equal or worse than the drivatars. The ones who get mad are generally in those 4 bad drivers.
Another issue with ghosting or anything like that at the start is that people don’t learn how to race at the start if you ghost them. Yes it can be frustrating trying to pass cars cleanly, but it’s a skill, one that needs to be learn’t. Take away that learning process and all you have is people who can’t cope when they then have to deal with it again.
The bigger issue for me is the Drivatar’s. Not sure how they work or are hosted or whatever but when they glitch whole road widths to hit you off the track, being the brick wall that they are, they send you flying, no matter the skill of the driver, sometimes it’s just impossible to avoid these glitchy monstrosities. It’s actually much less of an issue when playing solo as you host all the cars. In an MP race it seems it’s not server based and it’s hosted on one of the clients meaning you are at the mercy of someone else’s crappy upload speeds. Either that or whatever poor excuse for collision and position code for the game is just not up to the task of having 12 cars in a lobby racing against each other…
I might be wrong here, but isn’t Drivatar PI linked to player PI?
From what I saw, if all players are 900, all drivatars are 900 (or very close to 900?) too.
If one player is 824, there Is a drivatar that is around 824.
If two players are low, there are 2 drivatars that are low.
Generally this also means that for each player with lower Pi, especially when it’s really low, there is one Drivatar that will be easy to beat for everyone with a higher PI car.
Now obviously, the actual performance of a car is not always apparent from its PI, so your mileage might vary.
However, if you have a very well performing low PI car that you are sure can beat max PI drivatars it might be beneficial for the team to take that to the Trial.
The conclusion would be that it is best to enter a Trial in the lowest PI car you know you can win in.
Please feel free to check my theory, but from my limited experience I am pretty sure this is true.
edit: Actually, once you’ve done the trial you could enter a few times in the lowest PI car allowed and quit the first race, just to help others a bit 
This picture I saw in another thread supports my theory. See how there are two S1 players, and two S1 drivatars. The player who finished 2nd did the team quite a bit of a favor, with two player cars only beating the two S1 drivatars.
It’s not entirely reliable.
I noticed it first time during last series winter event, or so… Anyway it was 3 S1 events in Ashbrook.
I noticed that some times some players got left behind more than made sense and then I started looking at PI values and sometimes there were no low PI Drivatar counter parts for lower PI car human players. I think I noticed that happening once during this trial too which I did ten times or so for fun.
Interesting. I thought I pretty much had a 100% on this, but it is hard to find pictures online. I’ll keep checking.
I’d say it is a bug then, as in the rest of the game drivatars match players.
I even got a screencap and those are automatically uploaded to my Xbox Live something, but I have no idea how to post them here!
Not entirely sure it’s a bug though. It might be that there are other hidden statistics that game uses to even the teams.
Most players aren’t meant to win the trials. Simple fact that a great deal of players can’t win against unbeatable drivatars without rewinding.
but yeah it would go a long way if people would tune a car for the event, and try to be courteous of their teammates. but lets be honest, none of the players that need to hear that advice are reading this forum.
I’d add an offline qualification stage, where the participant had to finish in the top 3 on unbeatable on the first course in the trial to allow them to then enter the online trial.
Part of the charm of the Trial for me stems from the uncertainty as to which team members I get.
It’s more fun because mostly it’s more than just “win against unbeatable”. It’s “make your team win against unbeatable” although we were blessed by players who can’t even keep their car stable on a straight line.
Aside from the infamous “Warthog Trial” it never frustrated me. Only needed 1 try this week - with a player in an Aventador '12 that completed the Marathon by ~60% when I finished it.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s never bothered me. I didn’t do the Warthog one and I don’t think I’ve ever had any trial take more than two attempts. However, i accept I’m probably in the top 5% of people who do the trial so I can usually contribute decent points and slow the drivatars down if I need to.
My proposal was more aimed at solving the issues for people who, lets say, are more in the 30%-50% bracket. They can battle with the drivatars but a couple of zero pointers on the team each time will make it really tough to get the team win. Introducing some form of minimum standard/warm up event might really help them.
Haha I’d love to see the expletive storm that would cause
All those who currently ‘win’ by riding on the coat tails of better players would suddenly get very upset.
Except that a very functional way to win against Drivatars in a solo game is bash them like crazy… I doubt you get better players in your trials.
Good. What better way to weed out the trash and also train them to be better drivers in the process? There should be a licensing system in place. ‘You can’t get through this race in the top 3 without ramming everyone and everything in sight? You don’t get to play online until you learn to do so.’
The Warthog was was a particular issue and it mostly revolved around not the challenge, but the races. It used the Windmill Cross Country race. Which is effectively impossible on unbeatable drivertars to win because it is nothing more than a drag race, and a very short race. So with the warthogs, two problems came up. First is the stock gearing on the warthog cannot keep up with drivertars on same PI, so were just outpaced. But then even those of us with proper tunes had trouble winning or getting good place because there wasnt enough turns or time to get caught up to or ahead of the drivertars, even dirty racing. The third race was same thing which has a problem spot that can easily flip a person. Many losses were just because people flipped hitting a particular bump.
So it had one race that was actually fun and interesting, but two impossible races. It is the only trial I never was able to complete.
As for fixing the trial, they got to avoid maxing out the difficulty like they have been doing. I think the S2 lambo in winter was fine, but it shouldn’t have been street scene. That just raises the bar too high. For people like myself, I just want to win it and enjoy winning it. The reward was worth nothing to me. But the street scene side of things killed the fun and challenge by making it go beyond challenging to just frustrating. I wasn’t able to try and enjoy the S2 in winter side of things, and yes. That can be a lot of fun.