[INDEPENDENT] Buckyball Racing Club

@MacrosTheBlack: I really like the idea for your event. If you do use BB missions though, I'd suggest not awarding bonus points for missions that pay higher, as the high paying missions are all reserved for high ranked players (as well as the BB being really random), so since rankings are really just achieved by playing for longer, you'd be giving a big extra advantage to more experienced players and penalising any new players who fancied giving your event a go.

If you do have a regulation Cobra version, please use a virtual budget of 100CR to start with, it's traditional. :)

Galactic Rally Planning Update

Thanks Drakhyr and everyone else for your feedback about the Galactic Rally. I've not had chance to reply in detail to your earlier posts about the rally until now, but I have been giving it some thought as I really liked some of the suggestions and helpful thoughts.

I'd definitely prefer to split the GalRally into separate events rather than running it as one, and I'd actually prefer these to be spread around the year, rather than all together. I'm not an Elite explorer myself and over 75% of my total light years travelled is just from my BBRA runs, so planning the GalRally stages is quite a big undertaking for me (this isn't a complaint though, I'm very, very keen to do it). It's much better for me to be able to plan the overall rally one part at a time. This would also allow me take make alterations to my plans for the later, more challenging stages based on how the earlier, more local stages worked out.

I don't want to hog the calendar though, which was why I had hoped to be able to squeeze individual weeks into the calendar, but I've realised that this would be very restrictive as CMDRs would end up being be forced out of the rally by real-life commitments.

Instead I've come up with a solution that I think would allow me to split the GalRally into 4 rounds plus an A* run, with the rounds spread over the whole of 3302, without restricting CMDRs and without needing to take a single slot in the BRC calendar!

Basically each round will have 6+ stages and will be run over a two month period, with a one month gap between rounds. Each stage will have a leader-board, each round will have a leader-board, and the overall BRC Galactic Rally Championship will have a leader-board (based on points rather than cumulative time). The stages for each round will be published at approx. 0:00GMT on the first day of the two month slot (so I'll try to be sober at New Year, until after midnight!). Competitors will also be allowed to submit a single A* challenge run between 01-Jan and 31-Nov that counts towards the overall championship. For the official rounds each stage must be completed within the two month window in the correct order. Unlike normal BRC events racers will only get one shot at each stage (I'll be using a Google Doc form similar to EZ's BBR-9 form to register that you're about to start a stage)

The BRC Presents: The Galactic Rally Championship:
  • January-Feb 3302 BRC Galactic Rally Championship Round 1: The Local Region (6 Stages, about 10-15 Kylies total)
  • April-May 3302 BRC Galactic Rally Championship Round 2: The Crab Pulsar (6 Stages, about 15-25 Kylies total)
  • July-August 3302 BRC Galactic Rally Championship Round 3: The Skull and Crossbones Nebula (6-7 Stages, 40+ Kylies total)
  • October-November 3302 BRC Galactic Rally Championship Round 4: Across the Formidine Rift (7-8 Stages, 50+ Kylies Total)
  • Anytime before 31-Nov-3302 BRC Galactic Rally Championship Round A*: Do the A* Challenge (1 Stage, 25800LY or 1 Stage there plus 13 Stages back, 60+ Kylies total)

One thing that I'm considering is using the reversed version of Erimus' Scenic route to the Core for stages on the way back from Sadge, so that you could stay in the core for as long as you like (or continue onto the far rim if you wish), but your actual return run from Sadge to the bubble would be timed over manageable 2-3000LY stages. You effectively stop the clock upon reaching Sadge, and then restart it again to race home in 13 timed stages whenever you felt like it.

Because each round is spread over a two month period, and is broken into stages, it should be possible for CMDRs to fit in each round however it best suits them and their other gaming and real-life commitments - while still having a fixed end date for each round, to allow the Championship leader-board to work round by round. Certainly rounds 1 and 2 should be manageable over a single weekend for any hard-core gamers, but even someone like myself with significantly limited playtime should be able to fit in the runs somewhere, without needing to stop racing, etc. back in the bubble. Rounds 4 and A* need more commitment and time away from the bubble, but at least if I used the 14 stage version of the Sadge run, both these rounds should be able to take you back to the bubble within 2-3 weeks of departure. And the Sadge run could be done whenever best suits you during the year.

In addition there will be a "Grand Tour" leader-board that would allow any published stage to be run in any order, any time during 3302. I need to have a little bit of a think about how this particular leader-board will be set up, as the total distance/time for the grand tour will keep changing every time the stages of a new round is published. At a guess I expect that it would sort of work like a skiing or golf leader-board. While the BRC GalRally Championship leader-board will be points based, the Grand Tour leader-board will use cumulative time.

  • 01-Jan to 31-Dec 3302 BRC Galactic Rally Championship "Grand Tour": Cumulative time of all stages including Sadge run
 
BRC Galactic Rally Championship "Grand Tour" stuff.
Your plans for the galactic rally look good Raiko, I think that adds depth to the normal 24 ish events we plan to run each year, so im all for it.
 
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There are a couple of bits I'd welcome some wider views on, coming from the recent races and some discussions about future ones :)

Jokers

I think that following the introduction of the "Win It or Bin It" Joker in the Outpost Dash, this is a concept we might see returning. I'm a bit unsure about it myself, so it probably won't feature in any race I'm organising. In particular, I do think the joker in the Outpost Dash ended up being a bit overpowered - I felt that a competitive run had to be with a joker, and once the first of the top contenders had played one, there wasn't any point submitting a time until the point of sending in the best one with the joker. It would be preferable for it to be more balanced, allowing the possibility of winning without - though I realise that while this is a great aim, it's very difficult to get the balance right in practice!

Open-only

There has started to be a bit of a tendency (starting with the A* Challenge, admittedly) to state that races have to be played in a particular mode (open only or solo only). I'm of the view that we probably ought to stop doing this, in the interests of making races as inclusive as possible. I think the split boards for solo in the past have been come from two main reasons: (1) concern that solo has an advantage (no NPC interdictions, potentially faster witchspace transitions), and (2) desire to have more than one board to give more chances to compete for a top spot.

However, I haven't actually seen much evidence of (1), possibly because the number of solo / private group entries has been fairly low, and (2) has been covered by some variants in recent races.

For my festive special, there will be multiple boards for different ship classes (you'll see why when I publish the rules :)). I'm intending to allow entries in open, solo, or private group, on PC, Mac or Xbox - I'll keep track of which is which, but they'll all be on the same board unless I start seeing strong evidence that one or other mode does have a measurable advantage.

Prizes

There has been a prize offered for the Kessel Run, and one of the future races has also mentioned the possibility of real world prizes. I have no objection to this, but I will post the following disclaimer (or one similar to it, if I can improve the wording!) in the thread of any event which does:
The choice to offer prizes is at the discretion of the race organiser. This is not an official Buckyball Racing Club policy, and should not be taken as a precedent or as indication that prizes will be offered for any future Buckyball Racing Club event.


In other news...

Registered Groups

I did get an email back from Zac confirming that we're on the list of registered groups (even though the actual "Registered Groups" thread on the forums hasn't been updated!).

I will be dropping an email this week to suggest that the Galactic Intern (i.e. Ed Lewis) may wish to join a BRC race at some point. If he accepts, I'm happy to take volunteers to join me in talking Ed through a race at some point - it would mean coming on teamspeak for the stream one Thursday evening (in a week we have a race, obviously!), and probably only works to have a small number of people talking on the stream - drop me a PM if you're interested.

Galactic Rally

It sounds fine to me to have the Galactic Rally running alongside other events. Would it be worth trying to organise a point in the calendar for a Grand Depart to drum up interest? (might mean delaying the start slightly beyond 1st Jan - possibly to the weekend of 9th/10th)
Also, I do think there would be value in letting people catch up (i.e. run round 1 later in the year if they didn't do so at the start) - otherwise there is a risk that the numbers just decline significantly through the year, as there can't be any new entries to the overall championship after the end of February.
 
I think the joker was a great idea and I also expect we'll see more events with jokers. With that said I think there's room for improvement and the fear of jokers being overpowered is valid, though for me the biggest problem when we first saw them wasn't simply the fact that you effectively had to use it to win (though see below). People hoarding their joker until the last day then deciding to apply it to the best time they'd done resulted in a barren leaderboard due to the lack of submitted times and then a flurry of joker submissions.

For my race idea I am stipulating that the joker must be declared within 24 hours of the race entry being completed. That way you won't be able to save it for your best attempt; if you do a great time you must decide whether to play it or save it, and risk losing the chance to boost what turned out to be your fastest time if you save it and your subsequent times don't reach the same standard.

I'd also like to see different types of joker rules. As mentioned in the Kessel Run thread a straight tradeoff for losing shields made sense in the Outpost Dash where everyone had enough jump range that keeping them was no-brainer. In most races it's a meaningful decision to risk protection for range, and a joker in that case should in my opinion have different rules: time off for maximum temperature while fuel scooping or for reckless flying fines, for instance.

On the subject of the quasi-mandatory joker, my second place time was with the joker in what I had decided would be the best ship for the race. When Kliggson came along and beat it I found myself with a dilemma: accept second place or try again with an inferior ship choice. Server issues prevented several of us from racing on the last evening, so we'll never know how the final standings would have been when everyone had done their final run; what I do know is that I did improve my time in the supposedly poorer ship and I would have beaten the eventual winning time were it not for bugged NPCs hogging all the pads. Yes I would have had to use the second ship's joker to do it but playing the first joker didn't have to signify the end of the race for me.

Open-only
Yes, they should be, in my opinion. And if people aren't entering times in the other modes anyway then I suggest we don't need to make a big controversy over the point.

My race idea is one that offers prizes. Partly that's to encourage a variety of ship types and route strategies, as there are multiple prize categories. I absolutely do not want to start an arms race with people thinking they need to offer prizes and racers expecting prizes. So the suggested disclaimer is fine by me.

Registered Groups
Good news on the group and a thumbs-up to the livestream thing, which coincidentally I was thinking over the weekend would be a cool idea.

Galactic Rally
Yes to both ideas, especially the ability for people to catch up, which realistically I would think is a must to keep up participation over the stages.
 
Jokers: I'm open minded about them, I think they worked great in Alec's race to encourage sheildless racing (without the option to repair!), which was really fun. I don't think that they're always a good idea and don't plan to use them in my own races, but I did love Alec's jokers. The variation by furrycat sounds great as it would get around the problem of "hoarding race times", but I wouldn't do that anyway. :)

Open-only: I made the Bootlegger Challenge (and the linked Black Riband) open-only, purely because of the real danger of some of the systems involved in open-mode. For other races that I run (eg the Rally) I don't plan to do the same, but the Black Riband will always be open-only and the 3302 Bootlegger challenge will be adjusted so that avoiding Lave/Leesti is slower than visiting them (I made a mistake last time). The simulator will still be there for non-open players.

Other than in special cases like the BC though, I don't think that there's any advantage gained by running in solo (indeed some of the recent network problems can make solo the slowest choice). I do think that you should keep the open board separate from the solo/private board though, there's a lot to be said about the community spirit of these races, it means more to me than my actual times, and hanging out at Cady City and at Sadge with other racers had made this game very special to me. Keeping a separate board for open-mode keeps open the place to be, which in turn makes these events community events. Cady City was the place that it was mostly because Robin decided to camp outside the station being the paparazzi, and that wouldn't have happened if we'd all been in solo mode. It's actually the Buckyball Runs that showed me that open mode is only as dangerous as you want it to be. ;)

Hahaha 95% of my open mode deaths are buckyball docking/launching incidents, 5% are deaths from NPCs, 0% are pvp deaths (I'm sure I'll be killed by a player eventually, but that's fine). Equally I've not killed another player in combat, just forced one to jump away, but I have accidentally destroyed another racer boosting out of the slot at BBR7 while he was boosting in!

Prizes: I'm not planning to offer prizes.

Registered Groups: :D




Galactic Rally: I'm planning to promote each event separately in the hope to have new entries to the later rounds. I'll possibly drop the word "round" from the events. The only way that I can see the overall championship working if "catch ups" beyond the already large two month window are allowed is by dropping the points based championship altogether and just using the "Grand Tour" cumulative time as the championship league. But that would give a massive weighting towards the A* run time, which is only a single stage.

The trouble is that when for example the first event finishes at the end of February, that event needs to have a winner and those points for winning must be what are recorded onto the championship leaderboard if it is points based. You can't then have the option for event one to be won six months later by another CMDR, it a bit like me posting a winning time for BBR7 now (as if I could!!!! lol).

And I would like to have the points based overall championship. I think that the key to keeping participation levels high is to make sure that the Grand Tour (time based) table is treated equally with the Championship (points based) table. Runners can catch up anytime in the year with the Grand Tour. The final two rounds (especially the last one) are big challenges that go to parts of the galaxy that haven't been well traveled, so I'm hoping that a few competitors will enter those rounds who haven't joined in the "easier" rounds at the beginning.

The original concept of a single multi-stage tour around the southern milky way would have actually probably seen lots of runners drop out mid way around the route anyway I think, so I'm actually okay with it if only one CMDR makes it to the end. I'll have run all the stages myself before posting the stages of each event, and although I won't be a competitor I'll be posting my times as a guideline for how long each stage might take you. So as long as I make it though to the end of the rally scouting out the routes, I hope that at least a few will try to show me how slow I am. :)
 
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Just a little addition to the above. For the Galactic Rallies I'm really planning for each event to be important individually. Winning the first rally in the "local" region, or setting the best time for a class will be just as important as winning the last rally across the rift.

The overall championship is just a way to thematically tie the races together as a story. The grand tour is the "main event", not the times, the actual tour. I know from my own A* runs that a low ranked explorer will be at least midway through Pioneer if they complete the Grand Tour, without needing to do any "farming" of neutron fields. They'll actually be touring the galaxy, looking at Nebulae and super-giants, traversing rifts, plotting through brown dwarf fields and visiting both the centre of the galaxy and the edges.

Someone who has never done any exploring before, who has only flown around the bubble, will be able to join the Rally, starting with the initial stages to nearby points of interest, and by the end of the rally they'll be a truly experienced explorer. And that's how I'll be promoting the Rally.
 
I think something we should also think about is the last 2 races have favoured smaller ships. which is fine as long as the next two aren't outpost only.
Like the webpage says about the club we need to be aware about being inclusive.
I'm ok with individual hosts of races giving prizes as long as its more of a gesture.. I can see fabulous prizes being cause for not so scrupulous racers to partake.
the Joker was cool. as is any little addition to the format that changes it up. bb7 was great but its not been recreated yet within the BRC , id like to see more scramble races.
hanging about outside cady city taking shots of the racers was cool, but im not hanging about in Jabbah till someone turns up. that's crazy talk. ;)

EDIT:- Id like to have said something about revealing routes but I cant really without ranting.. so ill just leave it at mentioning it.
 
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I think something we should also think about is the last 2 races have favoured smaller ships. which is fine as long as the next two aren't outpost only.
Like the webpage says about the club we need to be aware about being inclusive.
I'm ok with individual hosts of races giving prizes as long as its more of a gesture.. I can see fabulous prizes being cause for not so scrupulous racers to partake.
the Joker was cool. as is any little addition to the format that changes it up. bb7 was great but its not been recreated yet within the BRC , id like to see more scramble races.
hanging about outside cady city taking shots of the racers was cool, but im not hanging about in Jabbah till someone turns up. that's crazy talk. ;)
I also like scramble races the best, even though I'm probably more competitive in chain-jumping races.

(So I'm not sure why I decided to organise a 100KLY+ tour of the galaxy - lol)
 
I think something we should also think about is the last 2 races have favoured smaller ships. which is fine as long as the next two aren't outpost only.
I had an idea about that. What if we allowed big ships to enter outpost races by getting a loitering fine rather than docking?

Assuming the race doesn't require them to get cargo, that is.
 
There are a couple of bits I'd welcome some wider views on, coming from the recent races and some discussions about future ones :)

Jokers

I'm really pleased that people liked the joker idea. It was a fairly last minute, spure of the moment thing, introduced as others here have pointed out, to get around the fact that there was otherwise no need to ditch shields in my short jump range race which made it too far too "safe" for my liking. Given more time I might have fine-tuned the 1-minute bonus as I agree it was problematic in that playing the joker was probably the only way to win. I also agree that it was deeply problematic in that, once you'd played your joker all you could then do was try another ship. That in turn caused people to save their joker (and indeed their race submissions) until the end. I didn't really have a solution for that, besides which I didn't want to mess people around by constantly changing the rules once the event had started. That it worked out as well as it did was more luck than judgement!

Open-only

I'm actually a bit of a fan of the Open only thing. Level playing field and all that, plus I'm quite keen on enticing people out of solo and private groups. I used to hover in and out of Solo/Open a lot (especially after I suffered at the hands of the Leesti griefers) but since joining the fuel rats I've stuck to Open pretty much exclusively and feel that my ED experience has benefited greatly. Open really isn't as bad as many people seem to fear and especially with things like Buckyball where losing a ship or two is par for the course kinda think that cowering in Solo isn't fully entering into the spirit of the thing.


I loved and totally "got" that EZ's bumper stickers were virtual. The introduction of actual stickers for the A* run was a really nice and very generous touch but definitely not something either the racers or the race organisers should come to expect. In the end I sent a prize to Cmdr Kliggson because I wanted to "pay forward" EZ's generosity but I always left it deliberately ambigous in the text of my event as to whether this would be an actual thing or not. I think this should continue to be down to the organisers discretion and will hopefully continue to be an unexpected surprise if and when it happens.

Registered Groups

I will be dropping an email this week to suggest that the Galactic Intern (i.e. Ed Lewis) may wish to join a BRC race at some point. If he accepts, I'm happy to take volunteers to join me in talking Ed through a race at some point - it would mean coming on teamspeak for the stream one Thursday evening (in a week we have a race, obviously!), and probably only works to have a small number of people talking on the stream - drop me a PM if you're interested.

I thought about doing this myself. Race duration may be an issue here. We'd need to have a race that Ed could complete (at least once) within the hour. I did wonder about re-opening the Bump'n'Grind for one night only. In theory I'd love to be a part of this but RL timing may be an issue for me. Keep me posted tho.

Looking forward to the galactic rally and whatever else you guys come up with.
 
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Hello. It's me again. Here is an analysis of the joker efficiency in the Outpost Dash.

Key
  • Pos is the racer's final position in the standings.
  • Raw is the position the racer would have had if there were no joker.
  • Eff is the position the racer would have had if only that racer had a joker, no one else.
  • Final time is the racer's final time, in bold if jokered.
  • Raw time is the time the racer actually ran.
  • J/E is the joker efficiency, measuring how many places were gained through use of the joker.
  • R/E is the raw joker efficiency, measuring how many places would have been gained if only that racer had a joker.
outpost_efficiency.png

[size=+1]Analysis[/size]
The top ten positions were all claimed by jokesters but only one racer lost a top ten place because of other people playing the joker card. Not only that, the top six positions were unaffected by joker usage, and the remaining four racers in the top ten only gained a single place each through joking.

It's in the middle of the pack that the joker is most useful, gaining three places for three racers and two places for a further two racers, with the three competitors who gained three places being squarely in the middle of the leaderboard.

In the contrived scenario that only one racer could play the joker, the top nine places would still have been made up by the same competitors; only two racers who actually finished outside the top ten would have broken into it if they had sole joker access, and then only into tenth equal spot. Only two racers other than eventual winner Kliggson could have won if they had a joker and no one else did, otherwise Kliggson always wins no matter how you shake it.

[size=+1]Conclusion[/size]
While the joker did determine the final order of competitors, it did not significantly affect which competitors appeared at the top of the board. The racers at the top of the board were the racers who ran the course fastest.

[size=+1]Best times only[/size]
If we remove all but each competitors best time the table looks like this:

outpost_best_efficiency.png
Still the top nine positions are unchanged by joker usage and still the joker is best used in the middle of the pack.
 
That's a great analysis furrycat, the only thing that I'd add is that the joker for that race made me run without shields, and without repairing even though I had a very low hull percentage at the end. That made the race really, really good fun. Without the jokers I'd have kept shields fitted because the class 2 (can't remember if they were A or D) shields that were fitted to my courier for my practice runs didn't negatively impact performance in that race at all, but did make heavy landings totally safe.

So the jokers made Alec's race more fun, without affecting the results. :)
 
I'm really pleased that people liked the joker idea. It was a fairly last minute, spure of the moment thing, introduced as others here have pointed out, to get around the fact that there was otherwise no need to ditch shields in my short jump range race which made it too far too "safe" for my liking. Given more time I might have fine-tuned the 1-minute bonus as I agree it was problematic in that playing the joker was probably the only way to win. I also agree that it was deeply problematic in that, once you'd played your joker all you could then do was try another ship. That in turn caused people to save their joker (and indeed their race submissions) until the end. I didn't really have a solution for that, besides which I didn't want to mess people around by constantly changing the rules once the event had started. That it worked out as well as it did was more luck than judgement!.
I thought that the Bump & Grind event was really well run, I especially liked the way that you chose to slowly unveil the times as the event progressed.

I thought about doing this myself. Race duration may be an issue here. We'd need to have a race that Ed could complete (at least once) within the hour. I did wonder about re-opening the Bump'n'Grind for one night only. In theory I'd love to be a part of this but RL timing may be an issue for me. Keep me posted tho.
The only worry that I'd have about using the Bump'n'Grind for Ed, would be pad blocking. Since we're normally all about blasting in and out of the slot at dangerous speeds, it might be better to use a short enough duration station to station race for a stream.

--EDIT--

Sorry, I expected these posts to be auto-merged!
 
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I pretty much agree with everything I have read above. For the record, I am not a fan of 'Jokers' but have no fundamental problem with them either. I am also happy not having the open restriction. Prizes - up to the organiser! I may have one for the mischief mile, if I can get organised enough :)

I think something we should also think about is the last 2 races have favoured smaller ships. which is fine as long as the next two aren't outpost only.
Like the webpage says about the club we need to be aware about being inclusive.

The Mischief Mile was going to have an outpost in it but I am already seeking an alternate location because of the previous 2 races having outposts. I need to check that the 'conda isn't overpowered for the race though.

EDIT:- Id like to have said something about revealing routes but I cant really without ranting.. so ill just leave it at mentioning it.

I prefer to see route planning as part of the skill of racing - I think its similar to creating pace notes for a rally stage or walking an autotest course - so revealing optimal routes at the start takes something away for me. However, if competitors want to share their routes, who am I to stop them :)
 
I promise that I'll never ever, ever, ever reveal my route ever, ever again.

I hope that that's enough assurance for everybody! :D
 
Only just joined the Buckballers and I did use someone's route, I was a little short of time so it helped get me going.

It's kind of like having marked maps as a beginner in a navigational rally? Spoiler tags should be applied though I guess. Would like to look at doing my own route plotting as time goes on.
 

Ozric

Volunteer Moderator
Joker analysis

Man my raw placing just keeps getting better and better :D

I don't run the races too often (rl can be a pain), but I still tentatively consider myself part of the group mainly as I have followed it since Beta ;)

I also don't go in for making as much money as I can, so I have a limited ship supply with the biggest being an Asp, so I have appreciated the smaller focussed races recently.

Personal preferences would be...

Jokers

Not for every race, I don't mind them coming in for some of the mid length races as I think the amount of skill to not smash your ship to pieces over 5 or 6 speed dockings is impressive.

Open Only

Bring it on!!! I only fly in Open anyway (except for some brief Hi-Res photo taking)

I personally don't buy the no NPC Interdictions in Solo (technically there should be more to compensate for potential PC interdictions), but the Witchspace transitions can indeed be a factor. It's a tricky one as, like you say, you don't ever want to force people into playing in a mode that they don't want to, but perhaps they might also find out that Open is nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be.

Prizes

As others have said I think it should be up to the individual organisers, but certainly not something that should be expected as we would not want the class of clientèle that would attract.


I'd love Ed to get involved in a BuckyBall race, I know he's doing Elite Racers this week but they have no staying power :D Maybe I'll give Zac a nudge I'm sure he owes me a favour (he obviously doesn't ;)). Depends when it is, but I may be able to help out if you don't get enough other offers.
 
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Jokers

There's just one thing the joker analysis misses, and that was actually referred to in furrycat's earlier post:

When Kliggson came along and beat it I found myself with a dilemma: accept second place or try again with an inferior ship choice.

The only thing we'll never know is whether anybody might have run again (and potentially recorded faster times) if they hadn't already played their joker.

Open only

I'm in complete agreement that open is preferred, and encouraged for the community element. I only ever fly in open myself (even though that has led to me being blown up by bullies around community goals on a few occasions). I'm just suggesting that while flying in open should be encouraged, it shouldn't be mandated, in the interests of being inclusive.

Galactic Rally

Having re-read Raiko's post from 5th Nov, I can now see the point about having separately a (points-based) championship leaderboard and an overall Grand Tour time, with the Grand Tour allowing late catch-ups. So I'm happier that this will do what's needed to encourage new entries through the year :).

Educating Ed

I have some ideas for this already. I think it would have to be done at the same time as one of the shorter (warm-up) races, so that there's time to get some introductions and practice elements in before a 20 minute or so race lap. I'll leave saying any more until I've sent the email and seen whether there's any interest back from Ed :D.

Update: email sent :)
 
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I think having solo parts to the event is good. if you just start saying everyone must run in open. I think we could miss the opportunity to pull some solo players into open. or maybe they really don't have the bandwidth for open.
I would like to see the continuation of regulation ship runs in solo.

I think itd be good if we can get an educating ed doing an episode with us.
but yeah , itll have to be a 20-30 min race. warm up or other short one.
the warm ups don't need to be warm ups.. they can be full races...
they were originally proposed as a filler set of races to bring new people in or for old timers to practice load outs. any warm up I had planned was station only and open and solo.. for maximum inclusiveness.
Be nice to get Drakhyr and Ez to do the educating ed.. because inevitably the question how did this all start will come up. ..but Ez doesn't seem to be into our races. theres a few old BBR racers that probably think the BRC is some kind of sacrilege as they never turn up .. so theres a divide there. I have to keep remembering that Ez didn't really want any publicity for his races.. and preferred it underground.. where as I think we could benefit from some publicity and more racers.
I think Drakhyr and Alot should do it if it happens.
 
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