Survey discussion on the current leaderboard setup
5 years ago
Australia

So with the release of Dirt Rally 2 less than a month away, I've been having thoughts on how runs should be handled for this new release. There are issues with how the board for Dirt Rally is currently set up and I wanted to open up a discussion as to how we can improve it.

Currently in Dirt Rally we have the leaderboard setup in Level Leaderboard, as the grid layout looks a lot nicer and easier to see who is on top in the overall view. The downside to this has been that none of the runs are considered 'full game runs' and thus don't appear at the front of runners profile pages, which is a shame cause a lot of these runs are extremely good. For Dirt Rally 2 it would be nice to actually have these runs be more publicly displayed, but that grid layout is much easier to look at overall.

As a result of having the runs on the 'level leaderboard', we don't have any space for proper individual levels. Dirt Rally had online leaderboards but I'm pretty sure the times have been hacked for those. A solution I have pondered for Dirt Rally at least is to request a separate 'category extensions' leaderboard to store IL times if people wanted them. If runs were stored on the full game runs board we would have space for these, but if we decide to use the same level leaderboard setup for DR2 then a category extensions board could be an option if people want it. The overall question is whether people are interested in having ILs or not, both for Dirt Rally and DR2.

We had a fair bit of timing issues when first doing DR runs. Ultimately IGT was easier and favoured more due to inconsistent loading times, however IGT has a number of issues of it's own. Firstly, IGT doesn't increment during the setup/repair section of runs, allowing people to just dawdle around during that section. Secondly it completely eliminates any speedrunning tricks that we could implement. For example, we could take a 10 second penalty by jumping the start, allowing us to save 5 seconds RTA for a total of a minute over the full 12 track run. It also means runs are completely dead upon an out-of-bounds penalty, and kills off any potential for wrong-warp strats to be used in runs as well. Because of this, I believe we should start fresh for DR2 using LOADLESS timing instead. This doesn't come with it's own consequences though, mainly being way harder to time locally and it's also way more work to validate runs. I personally am willing to put the work into this validation process as the community should be small enough to handle that, however without a proper load remover it opens up the opportunity for accuracy errors to be introduced. Given that we round down the second anyway it wouldn't be too inaccurate, but still more likely. With this timing methodology I believe runs will become much more of a true speedrun than what they currently are.

So those are the main issues I want to hear people's thoughts on. Did having runs stored on the level leaderboard work well? Would people be interesting in being able to submit ILs? What timing methodology should we go with for the future?

ViperUK likes this

Hey man, thanks for this post.

As for Dirt Rally 1:

  • The grid system is good as it is, in my opinion. Sure, it's a bit of a shame that 2nd or 3rd places are not visible, and it's not perfect overall. However, with the current system, this is the best compromise.
  • About your point concerning exposure: Most views/clicks come from the leaderboard itself and not so much from the player's profile, so having the record shown as a level run isn't that much of an issue.
  • ILs would be definitely interesting to have. For me personally, they are not a must-have. If you wish to add them still, you can have them in the level leaderboard as well, below the full runs. Maybe it attracts people who prefer shorter runs, who knows? ;)

Dirt Rally 2.0:

  • As this game hasn't been released yet, I think it's too early to make plans on how the board should be handled. Let's have another look in a month :)
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