If you want all of this discussed publicly, then here we go...
Lorenzo wrote:I guess it's not a big deal for someone who occupies last positions
Lorenzo wrote:
[...] it's an organizers' fault that perverts the race, because they didn't provide equal conditions for every competitor, releasing the flawed track. [...]
What pisses me off most though is the lack of any information from majortom and Rudy about how the case develops.
First of all, I really dislike your tone and conduct from time to time. This is really not how you should behave, especially when you think back how we communicatively handled the situation a couple of years ago when it was you, who "perverted" the Chinese Grand Prix by cheating - with the slight difference that this case was also fully intentional on your part. Still that does not make us treat the substance of your case any different as driver.
The second thing that appears to me as a misconception of the truth is that there was "a lack of any information". Each of us wrote 3 PMs in the 3 hours between your failed attempt and the deadline, while I was outside coming home. So to everybody not involved our official explanation on the results table of you having crashed is a bit short to lay down the case. But you were also as quick as ever posting your discomfort right after our publication. And being honest, we had exchanged some words before and there has never been a case in history of PGR F1 when I did not type an essay about any so controversial decision afterwards.
You contacted me saying that something had happened during your login that would certainly justify another try - without telling me what it was. In my answer I made very clear that I could only assume that the issue was indeed worthy of a second attempt. Because, in your first PM, you failed to give any explanation or description and I had no device with me capable of running GeneRally and checking your files. Based on this assumption my statement was that, generally but rarely, second tries are something that we have allowed in the past. I might add here, mostly in the case of technical problems of all sorts; maybe when something extraordinary happened on track but I couldn't name one such case out of my head.
I also disclosed to you that there were some problems. We certainly would not let you and the wide majority of the field use the same login track twice. So we needed a new one before the deadline (yes, that is debatable), for which I had to successfully contact Majortom. Unfortunately, we had some additional anti-cheating measures in place this week, so I warned you that it might take a bit longer to prepare a new track that fits into the concept of what we wanted to investigate. You answered by saying "Never mind, I won't be able to make another run so late anyway".
You did explain to me what had happened in your second PM. Based on that I answered that:
Rudy - 2nd PM wrote:I would have advised you to keep going nonetheless - just to make sure that you have completed a full race because we might still decide that the underlying issue does not justify a restart or because we are not able to set up a new login track.
Never did I say that an AI car jumping a pit limiter was a justifiable reason for a second attempt - on the contrary so. I was thinking to myself that we had such cases turned down before, but Majortom usually knows better, so there was no statement or speculation on my part in any of the PMs.
As you have quoted me correctly, I added that a very similar problem had occurred to me while I was testing and I felt like having fixed it:
Rudy - 2nd PM wrote:I had this kind of problem with last year's version. But only at the start and from grid position 11 to 20. So I changed the AI line and some of the grid spots and it worked perfectly. That's why I didn't add some invisible walls like I did in Malaysia for example.
I would still agree that your case is an unlucky one. We re-place the pit limiters and extend all the existing walls, cones etc. in a way that there is no chance to circumvent the pit limiters as long as the car is not completely airborne - btw. that's why (unlike your suggestion) invisible walls are better suited than lamp posts because they are infinite in height.
Yet the problem that I experienced at the start, namely 1 AI was catapulted by the sunk tyres and went over the pit wall, was mainly due to the AI line and could be fixed by changing the approach of the cars between P11 and 20 to the chicane right ahead of them. I never experienced what happened to you during the race - only during the start. In your case there were 3 AI cars trying to squeeze themselves through the bus stop chicane. One of them was ejected over the pit wall.
Usually, things like these are a bit harder to predict and they can happen everywhere when the AI is on rampage and their consequences are relatively minor. Sometimes cars, when ejected over the fence, never make it back, which can be a slight advantage, an upside that we would not contest by the way.
So yes, it is a bit annoying to me that the additional measure that I had in mind to solve the problem at the start would have also helped under slightly different circumstances during your race.
Lorenzo wrote:According to elementary game theory, randomness and fairness are two totally different things
I said sorry for what happened in one of my PMs because subjectively what happened was unlucky and might not seem "fair" to everybody. But in real life fairness is normative and a category that we would like to use but can't for several reasons.
Was your BOP in Australia fair when you used only slightly different settings? Could we have even made a decision that was "fair" to anybody? Re-emphasizing what we said in Australia, we are not capable (nor was it our job in that case) to evaluate by the tenths of a second how the potential result would have turned out if you had used the same settings as everybody else.
We can only make sure that the initial conditions are equal for everybody. What happens afterwards might not always be fair - even in our subjective view and depending on the reference point - but it is far too complex to fiddle about. And then there are other things that should not go wrong in the first place if we judge them by our own standards. But these things don't have a bias, they just hit you randomly. That's why we did
not say "Screw those drivers from P11 onwards. Let them have a higher risk of carnage at the start."
Lorenzo wrote:At the very beginning the race was screwed to the degree that was virtually impossible to continue racing, as I explained before. And especially at this track. Check it yourself.
I would not use this as an argument against your case but against your over-dramatization in language and argumentation. In retrospect your race was "screwed" to such a degree that you would have probably finished 2nd, which is not too different from your previous achievements - leaving all other potential ifs and buts aside. I can only assume that you were either naive or somewhat annoyed by your own mistake prior to your first encounter with the AI car, when you voluntarily quit the race altogether. Maybe that is also part of your frustration, which I can understand otherwise.
Lorenzo wrote:Also, technically I could not tell whether the track that I downloaded for the second time several hours later was still the same or changed.
I don't the see the point that you want to make here. You told me that you were not able to give it another go before the deadline, anyway. And I said that, although technically possible, another attempt on the same track is, figuratively speaking, not worth the bytes of storage in our mailbox. So at this point of time what I said was that "I will come back to you as soon as possible" to inform you when the new track is ready for you to proceed, which btw. does not equal some sort of unspoken decision that the underlying cause was found to be legit.
Lorenzo wrote:honestly, who first came up with that weird idea to race with AI? I'm wondering since 2009
People like the old organizers from kart_fahrer to us who simply like a race better than a time trial and can accept some sort of randomness and unpredictability that does not necessarily go their way. And then there are other reasons, of which we both should already know...
Lorenzo wrote:Definitely a lot more could be done to prevent this situation, and approach to these kind things define the quality of the competition, which is very inconsistent if we speak of PGR this year IMHO.
Preparation is the same for every track every week, that is why there are weekly track updates kicking in after the first few weeks of feedback. We also try to learn from the issues of previous years, just like the 2015 version of Spa-Francorchamps and the mentioned problems at the start. Admittedly, not all of our changes always work as expected but I would dare say that they don't aggravate things. So the past season must have been even worse from your point of view and all other things being equal.
Summarizing all this, there were no obvious false promises on my part concerning a potential second attempt. So the point of controversy lies in your opinion that a known but seemingly fixed problem with the AI and the pit wall, which could still occur under slightly different and very unlikely circumstances and to everybody in the field, undoubtedly justifies another login attempt because and even though its relatively small disadvantages.
Was there an obvious flaw that we failed to address and was eventually going to affect the drivers? No, because I did make some adjustments in that spot, which were generally suitable and seemed to solve (but in fact at least notably improved) the issue after testing and during the races of the other drivers, all of which it could have happened to. Still, somewhat erratic driving by the AI, including the abuse of objects, has always led to similar situations and is part of the game, which makes your case not a freak accident but a very unlucky and unpleasant one because my adjustments to the track did work to some extent but not perfectly.
As well as other forms of erratic driving that wind up in one or more AIs being damaged, I can only remember comparable cases with negative consequences to the participant, in which there was no second attempt granted. At the same time there are also a few cases in which we did not disallow the race result when the AI cars had taken each other out of the race, thus granting an advantage to the driver. We used to put that under bad or good luck and the inevitable GeneRally carnage. And please keep in mind, the consequences would have realistically been 3 points if you had only continued that race after both your mistake and the kiss with the AI.