So I know there is a couple of threads already pertaining to ideas for the broader whole of the 2017 title, but I wanted one just for the hardcore league racers who dedicate so much time to this game online and want to see it become the best it can be. Here are my main 4 ideas
1. Expand on the Online Championship Mode
The bare bones mode is a great start and for some leagues, its enough to get by on. But for the bigger leagues with a more established setup, its not quite there. Take AOR for example, we have our own stewards section that imposes penalties and handles hundreds of drivers, bare bones isn't quite enough. What I would like to see is to create a stewards panel on the game capable of imposing penalties after a race (for example a panel of 3- the save host, and 2 other drivers, who in the case of AOR would be the coordinators). This would allow us to impose time penalties on the last race to influence the results to match what we have or even apply qualifying grid drops, which would be huge instead of forcing people to take a qualifying ban.
Another aspect of improvement would be setting the session to private, instead of friend's only which is what i've been told it does. In addition, it would also be nice to add a driver's list. So in the case of PS4, you have a list saying that these 20 drivers are in these cars, and have a few other people listed as "reserves" that are part of the list that we can update as the season goes on.
2. Spectator Slots
This is one thing I feel is missing massively from this game for the leagues. As it stands right now if you want to have a broadcaster, which many leagues right now try to take advantage of, you have to have someone physically in a car. My suggestion would be for 2 of the driver slots to be able to switch to spectator slots, where you don't have to pick a car and would be taken straight into spectator mode. This way the lobby size doesn't need to be expanded, but allows us to avoid any potential major issues. For example we had a SC come out this week at Monaco when our broadcaster retired at the start of the race to get into spectator mode. This solution would fix this problem.
3. Online Driver Personas
This would be more of an expansion/tweak of what we have now with the career mode personas becoming your online persona. It would be a nice update if for next year we could have something in another menu where we can select our online number and helmet and not have to restart pro-career mode every time we wanted to make a change.
4. Saveable Replays
This is something that could be applied to all game modes, but I feel would benefit league racing the most. Hopefully we could get a system similar to Project CARS that allows you at the end of the race to save the replay of the race. This includes all cars on-boards and the broadcast cameras. This in a perfect world would replace the need for #2, and would allow drivers on all consoles to save their race footage without having to sacrifice stability by streaming. In addition this would aid league runners by allowing them to review incidents on their own replay rather than waiting for footage from other drivers.
This is just the first few ideas that come to mind that I hope can be implemented for 2017 to give league racers the best possible experience and I hope many others provide their opinions for Codies to take into consideration.
1. Expand on the Online Championship Mode
The bare bones mode is a great start and for some leagues, its enough to get by on. But for the bigger leagues with a more established setup, its not quite there. Take AOR for example, we have our own stewards section that imposes penalties and handles hundreds of drivers, bare bones isn't quite enough. What I would like to see is to create a stewards panel on the game capable of imposing penalties after a race (for example a panel of 3- the save host, and 2 other drivers, who in the case of AOR would be the coordinators). This would allow us to impose time penalties on the last race to influence the results to match what we have or even apply qualifying grid drops, which would be huge instead of forcing people to take a qualifying ban.
Another aspect of improvement would be setting the session to private, instead of friend's only which is what i've been told it does. In addition, it would also be nice to add a driver's list. So in the case of PS4, you have a list saying that these 20 drivers are in these cars, and have a few other people listed as "reserves" that are part of the list that we can update as the season goes on.
2. Spectator Slots
This is one thing I feel is missing massively from this game for the leagues. As it stands right now if you want to have a broadcaster, which many leagues right now try to take advantage of, you have to have someone physically in a car. My suggestion would be for 2 of the driver slots to be able to switch to spectator slots, where you don't have to pick a car and would be taken straight into spectator mode. This way the lobby size doesn't need to be expanded, but allows us to avoid any potential major issues. For example we had a SC come out this week at Monaco when our broadcaster retired at the start of the race to get into spectator mode. This solution would fix this problem.
3. Online Driver Personas
This would be more of an expansion/tweak of what we have now with the career mode personas becoming your online persona. It would be a nice update if for next year we could have something in another menu where we can select our online number and helmet and not have to restart pro-career mode every time we wanted to make a change.
4. Saveable Replays
This is something that could be applied to all game modes, but I feel would benefit league racing the most. Hopefully we could get a system similar to Project CARS that allows you at the end of the race to save the replay of the race. This includes all cars on-boards and the broadcast cameras. This in a perfect world would replace the need for #2, and would allow drivers on all consoles to save their race footage without having to sacrifice stability by streaming. In addition this would aid league runners by allowing them to review incidents on their own replay rather than waiting for footage from other drivers.
This is just the first few ideas that come to mind that I hope can be implemented for 2017 to give league racers the best possible experience and I hope many others provide their opinions for Codies to take into consideration.