For clarity's sake, "you are allowed to use any camera perspective" means that we are not restricting run submissions based on what camera view you are using ingame. e.g. we won't disqualify anyone who uses chase camera or nose camera views in their run submission, and you are free to use any camera view that the game provides. That rule does not refer to a situation like this.

I cannot see the OP because i think the account got deleted, but to clarify: the general assumption is that you're running the season's tracks in official calendar order.

Running the tracks in any different order shouldn't make that much of a difference anyway, since they're all raced in discrete segments, and reordering them shouldn't make any run intrinsically longer or shorter.

Yeah I agree, with runs this long I agree that miliseconds just look weird.

But I like to be honest with filing the records, so if any submitted run video has a timer that keeps track of miliseconds, I'm including the miliseconds on the recorded run time for transparency. If there's no timer in the run video, I'll just base it off the video timestamps, because when that happens I won't be able to account for miliseconds unless I download the video and find the exact run time in a video editor, which... yeah, definitely not going to that much trouble unless there's a tie.

Ah, ok, yes.

I agree with the no assisted starts, as it does make a run harder and bring in a more realistic challenge. Difficulty is weird, because not only does AI difficulty vary between tracks, they also don't drive like humans, so even between equally-skilled drivers on the same track, they are going to have to adjust the AI to different levels to match their own performance. Not only that, different people have different definitions of "hard". I personally set 101% AI for career mode, so i think 95% AI is easy, but not ridiculously so, and 102% and up is hard. however i have a few other friends for whom 80% already stretches them to the limit. I agree with 80%, but I also think there's a distinction between playing to speedrun, and playing for a fair/fun challenge. Other than that, I also don't mind allowing the offset TV pod camera, but I also think most people see it as a harder view to drive in than centred TV pod, so most won't choose it anyway. But allowing it in the rules won't hurt. As for that Parc Fermé rule... hmmm, I'll have to discuss this with Admin, see if our philosophy regarding this category allows for metagaming and setup tomfoolery, or if we also consider the realism aspect as part of what makes this category "hard". As it stands, though, I believe most of us prefer to just run the standard setup anyway because navigating to and selecting different saved setups is too risky a time-waste.

Regardless I'll ping Admin after I'm done writing this to make sure they see this thread,

As for the first proposed rule, please see the All Tracks subsection. Championship% is purely a race to the bottom to see how quickly you can win the championship whilst making use of the game's mechanics.

Other than that, you're already allowed to choose whichever car you want to use, it's just that having to chase lap time also means that there's no viable reason to use anything except the big 3, so I don't think a rule specifying top 7 in the championship is necessary.

The number of flashbacks is going to have to be a contentious one, I know that I can use anywhere between 10 and 20 flashbacks on average per 100% length career mode weekend (which takes me 4-5 hours) depending on the track, how i normally set the cars up, and how I drive, but a fair number for me might be lower because the default setup is more grippy than my career setups. Admin might disagree and think a higher number is fairer. We also have to remember that flashbacks are a time penalty in and of themselves, so maybe we might consider that a sufficient penalty for pushing too hard on track.

I agree with this. Replacing the PS4's stock internal drive with an SSD is possible but isn't something one can easily or safely do without research, and doing the same on an Xbox One will void the warranty.

First of all, welcome to the board!

So here's the thing about the points you brought up:

For weather, there's nothing we can really do about it. I'd love to be able to specify Dry weather instead of Dynamic in the championship setup, but that option is greyed out as of the current patch (v1.09), and has been since launch. This source of RNG is an inherent element of the game and I know it isn't fair to be screwed over like that, but the same thing goes for speedrunning other racing games like Colin McRae Rally; it's part of the game, it doesn't immediately trash the run, just push through it, you can always try again later. Hell, it's even worse in games like Dark Souls where the WR run strategy depends on getting a weapon that only has a 20% chance to drop from a few specific enemies. So in the end I don't think it's that big of a deal.

For the AI, the same thing applies; it's part of the game, they've been programmed this year to be particularly racy and unpredictable compared to previous years, and there's no way we can get rid of them without destroying the spirit of the run. What I have noticed, however, is that their on-track performance is somewhat predictable. Bottas will be weak (and by that I mean he isn't pulling a 2s lead by the end of lap 1) compared to the Ferraris at Germany, Australia, and COTA, and weak to the Red Bulls in Japan and Monaco... I find those are the best opportunities to "gently nudge" him off the track and widen that points gap, and I believe doing that whilst losing the least amount of time takes skill. If you notice in my own run I don't do it in Abu Dhabi or in any part of the second half of the season, I do it at lap 1 turn 12 in Australia, and he scores no points when he would have gotten 18 otherwise.

All of this plays into the number of race skips we can get. I don't believe that skipping the longest races completely nullifies all of the skips we can do. Right now it should be no problem to be able to skip 5 races because of Bottas' performance, but with that "gentle nudge" in australia I was able to get a gap wide enough for me to skip 6 races. As it stands there are four tracks where the lap time is solidly above 1:40, those are Belgium, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Azerbaijan. All four, immediate skip. That leaves two free skips that can be used on the four other tracks that will most affect your run time due to rain. I believe a dry France is longer than a dry Britain, but the opposite is true when both are wet. Which do you skip? Japan is shorter than USA, but is easier to make mistakes and will punish you harder. Which do you skip?

And if you analyse the other competitive runs, most of them are far more violent with Violent Cousin Melvin and have managed to give themselves 7 skips, but in the process have wasted more time than they would have saved, so I think 6 is the best before diminishing returns... at least for me. As for picking someone else that isn't hamilton just so 2nd place has more competition... I don't know, might work, might not.

So tl;dr I agree with you about the weather randomness, but not the severity of how badly it affects individual runs, and the AI randomness can be circumvented by exploiting team performance and AI behaviour in a way that also helps to mitigate the randomness from weather.

edit: I type so much about strategic race skipping and I completely forget to mention China and Russia... I am stupid