S20 - Tracklist & Changelog

Welcome to Season 20!

We've been working behind the scenes to adapt and get ourselves ready to support 10,000+ members signed up to PitSkill, let's delve into what's coming in season 20!

Season 20 Tracklist

Changes

GO Setups Daily Series (GT3) -> GO Setups GT Series (GT3+GT4)

GO Setups is sponsoring the Daily Series once again; this time with GT3 and GT4 cars available for registration; running every 2.5hrs from 19:45 UTC until 19:45 PST.

There will also be only 1 server available for the GT Series whilst we assess how popular the series is; so be quick to sign up if you want to race that day as the slots ARE LIMITED.

Daily Scheduling

The daily schedules now run every 2.5hrs from 18:30UTC up until 03:00UTC; allowing you to race all through the night; from the DD -> Daily; we're hoping to increase the length of these schedules as our numbers grow, so invite your friends!

PitSkill/PitRep Changes

- The minimum number of required drivers for any CLASS to be ranked by PitSkill is now 4, this means that if you enter a race and fewer than 4 drivers show up; it won't count for PitSKILL but it will count for PitREP still.
- PitRep has had a slight tweak towards the latter end of classes in terms of how much CPI you need to have gained to get out of the current class.
- PitRep licence boosts have been set to +1.75 FLAT across the licences when upgrading or downgrading a licence so it's easier for you to understand.

Stewarding Changes

A brand new stewarding system has been implemented to allow us to cope with the growing number of reports, and to maintain the ability of our limited stewarding numbers to be able to keep up with growing demand.

Goals

The stewarding and development team sat down to discuss a solution that would be able to provide the following goals to be met:

- Improve the consistency of stewarding across post-race incidents.
- Increase turnaround in report submission to completion times.
- Allow drivers to protest any incident reports they receive and provide additional evidence.
- Reduce stewarding workload for "minor" incidents; however, still allow them to be punishable.
- Improve transparency regarding incidents & penalties.
- Allow for a feedback loop when incidents are protested to build more examples and groupings.

Stewarding "Peer Review"

The new system we have built has been loosely based on the "Overwatch" system from CS: GO which once a user was reported; it would be sent over to a community review board and the incident would then be categorised as either cheating or not in CS: GO, this would then be fed into their cheat management engine and it could pick up heuristic behaviours to detect in their auto-anti cheat.

Since we're unable to anonymise reports; we didn't want to start a blame culture within the platform; so we opted for the following solution.

As you can see from the flow above; we have taken a similar approach to the overwatch system with a change in who's involved; to cater it for a racing approach to make it feel much more like real life; where when you have a penalty pending you can "plead your case", this allows for you to have 72hrs from when the incident is raised to either accept the incident and have a 25% PitRep deduction; or protest with a reason and optional added evidence and the stewards will award the FULL penalty if found guilty.

You will be unable to access PitSkill until you have actioned any pending penalties on your licence and if you're not able to action them in time; they will be sent over to the stewards to assess as they would have in the previous system, protesting evidence doesn't go through the evidence checks however if the original report evidence does not meet the standards, it will be rejected.

2024 Special Events Sponsorship - €3000 Prize Pool!

As communicated in a previous post; our special events will now be a staple of the platform; and we can confirm that we have secured sponsorship for the 2024 season with up €3000 in prizes available to grab!

More information will be available when we've crossed the t's and dotted the i's!

Hosting Upgrades

We are looking at securing hosting upgrades across our infrastructure, especially on the website end, however, as we're currently running at a very tight budget there's only so much we can look at.

We are investigating possible solutions for upgrading and identifying bottlenecks in our system and will be monitoring performance and demand across the environments.

We hope to have a solution ready for next season; this will not affect the race servers as they are easily able to cope with demand so don't worry about your races being affected, but during high peak times, you may notice a slight reduction of performance on the website, (possibly) although we are doing what we can to mitigate this where we can.