The Unfortunate Truth

stug77 wrote:There are always going to be delays but what's worth remembering is we all have a love for motorsport and at the end of the day racing is what we all love to do.
Granted it was an extraordinary long delay and yes we could have maybe keep in the loop .....however to try and get 50+ drivers in parties to notify them could have also been a logistical nightmare....   I'm not staff nor am I making excuses I just thing it should be seen from both sides of the coin.

I have a feeling so many people are annoyed because it never used to be an issue to get 50 drivers in a race/party.

One thing I will point out is this: the races I normally run in (when I can run) are organized by Mikey J. They're on point and run smoothly, so kudos to his series.

The communication aspect is a ball-ache nowadays as we can't just all be in the game chat. That and parties aren't big enough.
As a rule of thumb we all know it's not an issue now. It's just a pain when things break and when the number of people coming on so late was just unprecedented!
Hence why we're closing entries/sign in 24hrs before. Makes things so much easier!
I remind people of the days on FM4 when our GT series had in excess of 200 people on the first race night. We got through it but not without a lot of stress and swearing behind the scenes.
It's never as straightforward as is seems - if it were then everybody would do this :p

Unfortunately I have to agree with some of the sentiments posted here. 2016 has been a disappointing year for me racing wise, as I've only been able to complete one series to date. There are several reasons for this however.

For those of you who aren't familiar with me, I work nights, so I sleep during the day. I basically try to get the races in before I leave for work. That alone puts a time constraint on me.

Obviously, UK based race times are out of the question. On the US side, Mikey runs most of the series. He had to move his start time back to 9pm EST so he could attend his own series. I totally understand and have no issue with that. I don't expect either him or the league to tailor races around my schedule. For me, the events of the evening have to be completed by around 10 pm, so I can get to work on time. There in is the rub.

I should be able to compete in a series with a start time of 8:30. Unfortunately, one of the biggest delays is always qualifying. Drivers are asked to be on at least 10-15 mins before the stated start time. Often they are not. Qualifying is often delayed significantly waiting for drivers to show up in their assigned lobbies. This is one area that definitely needs to be improved. It should be a firm rule that qualifying should begin at promptly at the advertised time. If your are not in your lobby, you don't qualify. I can accept a reasonable delay here and there, but not 10-15 minutes all the time. Qualifying should NEVER take more than 15 minutes (on average). Half an hour just to get qualifying done is unacceptable for most series.

While connection issues are not as prevalent as they once were, they do still pop up. This could be minimized however. Often, it is the same drivers who have issues throughout a series. They should be doing all their resets BEFORE they come on line, not waiting until they can't connect.

Organizing the race lobbies should be done as quickly and efficiently as possible as well. I once popped into the host chat once to see what the delay was, and there was a big discussion going on that had nothing to do with the race. I politely reminded the group that people were waiting.

We all understand that things happen that are beyond anyone's control. That should be the exception however, not the norm. The last series I tried to run I was only able to complete one race due to totally avoidable delays.

Lastly, I would add that we cannot put this entirely on the staff. Often, they are not even involved in a given series or event. They cannot be held responsible for what occurs when they are not even involved. I would encourage them however, to monitor our events more closely to insure compliance with our standards. Race host and organizers should be held accountable to provide an enjoyable experience for all who participate. Yes, all are volunteers here, but if your going to commit to any endeavor then you need to step up and do your best.

I have a serious question on your last paragraph. How can the staff not be involved when it's an official TORA event?!

That makes no sense.

I've organized events and series before. There are a lot of logistics that people don't realize can take some time. Docs sometimes go bunk. Hosts may be at a premium and hard to contact, therefore hard to pass information on to, creating delays and such. There are bound to be issues on the first night of any series event. Small delays aren't unexpected.

That being said, last night was a complete joke. No excuses can justify a race night taking 3 hours to do a 6 lap qualifying session and two 21 lap sprint races.

I would go into a list of "how do you fix this", but if any of you think that these "calls for any change" will actually result in anything, you haven't been here long enough. It won't do a damn thing. You stomp your feet and tell the staff to execute the basic things on a race night... then they come in and tells you in a nice way that everything is fine and you're an idiot for "not seeing the entire picture". The furor around a particular delayed event goes away after a week or so, and bam, nothing is changed, and the cycle begins again with the next delayed event. A lot of teams have left because they won't put up with this, but some return because they have nowhere else to race.

Races should always run on time- there's no excuse not to. Unfortunately, it's pretty much an expectation for major events to run late because they always have here at TORA. Every single TEC race has run late to varying degrees; BritishGT and ToraGT before it always had massive delays with people getting upset and leaving. ToraGT used to have 150+ entries and having delays in that made sense because the logistics of that were a nightmare. Not the case anymore, so this isn't excusable.

Much of the problem is, the little things aren't being done, and it makes TORA look bad. The staff needs to be more involved, or get volunteers who will be. The threads for this series were templates that hadn't even been corrected to designate which series was going on. The GT4 builds were listed without handicaps even though they were fine in the Dev section. You added mandatory decals less than a week before the first race. You say "We do what we can, we have these sponsors, only so much I can do, etc" but the end result looks terrible because it seems like 50% effort was given. Proofreading and clarifying decals rules would've taken a maximum of 15 minutes... Can't say you didn't have 15 minutes, can you?

I'd say get additional help, but you won't. You have select staff members leaving because the in-fighting among the team is unbearable and that little to no progress has been made on advancing the quality of the site and racing for at least 2-3 years. Much of the staff remaining is lame duck and refuses to take a single shred of legitimate criticism without snarky replies in addition to letting said complaints go in one ear and out the other.

This isn't about "many hands make light work", or, delegating the tasks properly so that someone doesn't have enough time to learn to play the xylophone between qualifying and race sessions. This is about learning to listen to outside input and working with the community as it changes, not ignoring repeated pleas for change. Until this happens, nothing will improve.

@ Lightning, They are not always hosts, are they? No staff members were involved with the Stock Hatch series.

Then why was it in the "Pit Lane" section of the forum?

F4H Lightning wrote:Then why was it in the "Pit Lane" section of the forum?

I'm a little embarrassed to say I can't answer that. I would guess that we can have an officially sanctioned TORA event without any direct staff involvement?

I don't buy that.

F4H Lightning wrote:I don't buy that.

SH has been run by the EZT guys w/o staff help and it's been great.

F4H Diablo wrote:

F4H Lightning wrote:I don't buy that.

SH has been run by the EZT guys w/o staff help and it's been great.

Imagine that!

EZT MAKO 6669 wrote:

F4H Lightning wrote:Then why was it in the "Pit Lane" section of the forum?

I'm a little embarrassed to say I can't answer that. I would guess that we can have an officially sanctioned TORA event without any direct staff involvement?

The point with the EZT series was that we were proud to have you guys run that here and wanted to give you the recognition it deserved by having it in Pitlane

F4H Lightning wrote:

F4H Diablo wrote:

F4H Lightning wrote:I don't buy that.

SH has been run by the EZT guys w/o staff help and it's been great.

Imagine that!

Well staff can't run everything here which is why we have always actively encouraged TORA Community driven series. The concept of which often produces some concepts that none of us had even considered. It's a brilliant thing. So yes... I did imagine that

F4H Lightning wrote:

F4H Diablo wrote:

F4H Lightning wrote:I don't buy that.

SH has been run by the EZT guys w/o staff help and it's been great.

Imagine that!

You said it yourself, you like series run by Mikey and they are slick and punctual. Same especially goes to Louis for IndyCar among respective others. It's not like we're suddenly incapable, we know what we need to do to improve and mitigate reoccurring problems.

Matt wrote:

F4H Lightning wrote:

F4H Diablo wrote:

F4H Lightning wrote:I don't buy that.

SH has been run by the EZT guys w/o staff help and it's been great.

Imagine that!

Well staff can't run everything here which is why we have always actively encouraged TORA Community driven series. The concept of which often produces some concepts that none of us had even considered. It's a brilliant thing. So yes... I did imagine that

You've missed the point sir.

I have another thing I'd like to bring up: why did I have to be essentially a lobby host for BGT lobby C after you bailed from the party chat? The grid places were not told once everyone was in the party. We still had people asking about starting procedure and pitting process. Because I have previous hosting experience I got the lobby straightened out.

Hmm as far as I was aware everyone knew the slots also it seemed - as I said in the chat that people seemed to be having issues connecting following me being in there and rather than delay things further with more faffing trying to sort out parties it made sense to drop out the chat.
Also I have my standard BGT grid process in place for Silverstone so everyone will be fully aware and won't have to ask.

Ok, fair enough. I do hope all of this is sorted out by the time the next round starts qualifying.


EDIT: That said, I am willing to host a lobby if you guys are shorthanded and I'm racing that night.

Matt wrote:

EZT MAKO 6669 wrote:

F4H Lightning wrote:Then why was it in the "Pit Lane" section of the forum?

I'm a little embarrassed to say I can't answer that. I would guess that we can have an officially sanctioned TORA event without any direct staff involvement?

The point with the EZT series was that we were proud to have you guys run that here and wanted to give you the recognition it deserved by having it in Pitlane

And we totally appreciate that!! Our last series was not without some issues as well, but we are working to improve that ourselves.

As I've posted in the Silverstone thread sign ups will close 24hrs ahead of the race. This means Saturday night is the last chance to sign in to race. No exceptions.
The issue of the docs will be resolved this evening so all will be straight again and we can crack on with a great little series before Xmas.

Matt wrote:As I've posted in the Silverstone thread sign ups will close 24hrs ahead of the race. This means Saturday night is the last chance to sign in to race. No exceptions.
The issue of the docs will be resolved this evening so all will be straight again and we can crack on with a great little series before Xmas.

Here's a small idea that could be implemented to make it easier- why not have the race day thread include the sign in form? that would make more sense than where it is currently, and could help with people ending up not using the doc.

I do hope there is a backup plan available for round 2 and 3 if the docs don't work again.
Make a new doc in Google Docs or Office online (we all have Microsoft accounts). Make something offline.
Running late by 5 minutes is something that just can happen. Running 90 minutes late is unacceptable. And I don't have the feeling the staff feels that it is unacceptable even if it was for 1 time.

As far as signing In goes, don't have 2 ways to do it. Makes it confusing for everybody. We used that thing for ABRC and it works. However it takes time to see if you singed in. Or do it the other way. Sign in closes 1 hour before the race. Then throw people in a qualifying lobby. It doesn't matter which qualifying lobby you are in. Not even if it's only 1 class. Times driven are times. Okay some people go faster when they can charge/follow a faster person. Though luck if you have nobody to follow.

With TEC we also started behind. That haunts you all the way to the end we know that. But I think the delay was roughly kept at the same 30 minutes. Shows that it can work once we get started.

Running in the ABRC it starts on time and finishes within 2 hours after it started. That's how you want it to be. Also because people don't take a break between every session. We can stay in the same lobby because there is only 1 lobby(sadly, because I want more lobbies). Sure the first races were rough also with how to start the races and such. But it now runs smooth as hell. If our normal lobby host Stan is not there I get an invite from the respective lobby host. Or from other people I know who are racing that evening. Or if I don't get an invite I ask people around. Send them a message on Xbox live. Check the forums. I take actions to make sure I don't miss my invite.

I just find it sad to see this happen to the British GT again. As season 1 on project CARS also did not start out smoothly. But that also had some other reasons.

@Diablo the addition of the mandatory decal 1 week before the start is true. However it has been said it's fine if it's not there in round 1. You need to have it starting in round 2.

Matt wrote:
b) Despite three reminders in the Brands Hatch thread to use the automated sign in thread many didn't which led to a few issues in making sure everyone who had signed in were in fact on the sheet as well.

This has been a problem for many of the series across TORA this year theres no formality in signing in for the race. Some series run that form others don't and it makes it very confusing of how to sign in. We need to have one way to sign in for all series and stick to that ONLY... whether it is the digital form or manually typing IN.


I have to agree with everyone else as well on the amount of time it takes to start lobbies it takes way too long. The Docs don't matter they shouldn't even be used prior to the race take a screenshot of each qualifying lobby and line up cars accordingly. Once the races are done for the night go back at some point and fill in the docs. Hosts for events should be on 30-45 mins prior to make sure everything is ready and right. The lack of making sure lobby settings were correct gets aggravating after a while as well. Not to mention the constant backing out to fix settings... We should not be waiting more than 5-10 mins for anyone to be on either if someone can't make that time frame then thats on them and they should have to miss that race imo because its not fair to everyone else to have to wait on one person for 20-30 mins. You don't see professional series starting late because a driver isn't on time if we want this Organization to be as professional as possible to real life we need to treat it the same way.

+1

I certainly think that Staff need to invest in growing their roster. It can't function properly as the exclusive club it seems to be. All Outline series should have at least 1 staff member behind it. That's not to say SH shouldn't be in Pitlane, rather, one of the guys behind it should be accepted as staff. We need more people behind the scenes to react to thinvsthat need attention. Like its been said, we're all volunteers, and I shouldn't have to wait for TJ to get online to open up the support races and Spotter Guide threads I've done for TEC. He shouldn't be expected to react to it every day unless this is an actual job.

Personally, I am willing to, and capable of standing up to the plate to help out, and I know people in and out of Staff that can vouch for me. But there seriously needs to be more effort than just adding one guy to the team. TORA plainly isn't as good as it used to be, but it still holds the weight that comes with it's reputation, and it is too much to throw on the shoulders of a few of us. Because when we do, stuff like this happens.

On the other side of the same coin, everyone here needs to shrug it off and step it up themselves too. Things won't improve unless there are more people willing to fight through the issues and do it themselves.