Suggested

Restoring League Integrity & Fair Play

Hi everyone.

First of all, I’d like to acknowledge the massive effort being put in by Jack to resolve the current bugs and stabilize the game.
It’s clear that a lot of work is happening behind the scenes, and it’s much appreciated.
However, while bug fixing is the immediate priority, I would like to bring up a specific issue that I believe must be addressed in the near future to ensure the long-term sustainability and balance of the leagues.

The majority of leagues are facing a serious issue with players remaining in them without setting up their cars, which weakens the competition.
Correct me if I am wrong, but right now, the auto-kick feature doesn't work at all.
As a result, the majority of leagues are filled with inactive players that sometimes haven't even opened the game in over a year (!)
This is a pattern: leagues full of inactive players offering zero value to the game.
Even if these players are kicked by the league host, they simply join another league and repeat the same behavior.
My suggestions?
1) If possible, implement a rule where if a player remains inactive for more than 7 days at any point during the season, they are automatically removed from the league.
2) Perhaps consider a system to discourage accounts that join leagues only to remain idle, especially when this becomes a repeated pattern.

Another critical issue is that there are many inactive leagues in the game (including many new IGP leagues).
Such leagues are either full of inactive players or they have a few active managers (sometimes even only one) that are dominating the league in order to boost their statistics and subsequently their ego.
In my view, this is classified also as farming and it goes against the nature of the game.
An efficient way to handle this issue, would be to create a filter that measures the active managers of a league at the end of the season.
If, let's say, there are 3 or less active players in a two-car league and 5 or less in a one-car league then the league gets disbanded.

In addition to this, for similar reasons, the creation of a league should cost significantly more tokens than today.
I have seen many created low-populated leagues by players only to be left inactive after a few seasons.

Also, I believe that non-boosted leagues should not have the option to be private. 
The fact is that many players hide behind these leagues to farm and consequently violate the game rules.
And yes, I’m not buying the argument that hosts do this to protect their leagues from trolls or low-level accounts. 
It is their responsibility to monitor their league and act accordingly.

I have also noticed that several high-level accounts are joining low-level IGP leagues to shamelessly accumulate easy wins.
This should not be permitted; new players are there to learn by competing against one another.
A practical solution would be to implement a level cap for joining these leagues.
I might sound a bit controversial, but I strongly believe that auto-generated IGP leagues are doing more harm than good to the league system.
They lack a host and, more importantly, they are too 'impersonal' to form strong communities.
As I mentioned before, we need fewer, but more active leagues.
While these leagues can be a good starting point for new players to get used to the game, they shouldn't be a permanent fixture.
If the league search filter improves, as Jack suggested in the latest forum update, I would advocate for scrapping them altogether.

Moreover, on a more controversial note, I believe that players who fail to set up their cars should receive a DNS (Did Not Start).
In almost every race, backmarkers dictate the final results because of the DRS they provide to trailing cars. 
A fairer approach, if technically possible, would be for backmarkers not to grant DRS to the faster cars overtaking them.
I would like to see a poll regarding this in the future; I believe the majority of players would agree with me on this.

Turning to a separate issue, please consider implementing a minimum level requirement (e.g., Level 2) for players to post in the forum. 
We have seen many strange posts from bots containing suspicious links. 
This is an issue that needs to be addressed, especially considering there are many younger players in the community.

What do we gain from all of this?
1) Eliminating ghost and very low-population leagues will stop the waste of server resources on running inactive competitions.
2) Healthier competition, as active players will be concentrated in more populated leagues.
3) The integrity of the Hall of Fame and most importantly the game's in general will be restored to some extent.
4) Increased chances of forming stronger, active communities.
This, in turn, increases the likelihood of leagues being boosted, leading to more income for the game.

I realize, Jack, that there are more pressing matters to attend to right now, so I’m sharing these suggestions primarily as food for thought for the future.
Once the current priorities are handled, please keep these suggestions in mind, as I believe they will be essential for the long-term success and fairness of the game.
Thanks everyone for your time.

Dear "new" Toto
I'm Tibor from Hungary. I don't think it will be worth the many innovations.
Many managers are not asked!! I'm sure that's why many people leave this game.
(How nice it would be if the real Toto was here with us)

As an admin of a quite active league there are some interesting points in your post. There are lots of leagues operating by mere inertia and lots of managers yearning for some true action on track, which is a problem! Rather than putting that fairly strict rules (I believe that the last word should be for the managers in hosted leagues), I would tweak the league search engine, putting coefficients of cars that make setups and/or are connected online in the races.

Fair points, I agree with you.

I say no. Sorry, can't agree with this.

Hi!
It’s an interesting point of view, but as long as leagues will be manage by individuals, there will always have thoses problems.

I played in couples of manager games, and the best I see is the bracket of tree draw format.
Let the bests race again the bests.

The top league is for the world championship or time zone championship.
Under it, there is 2 others draw that have 4 draw under, and so on.

It’s like 20 teams at top, 40 teams (2 leagues) at level under it (level 2), 80 teams (4 leagues) at level 3, 160 at level 4, etc…

So the best against the best, and the new one against them.

The draws and levels will be regulated by itself, as active will go up, inactive will reach the bottom.

That’s only a suggestion of my personal experience.

See you at top!

Restoring integrity and fair play would restore longtime hosts their ability to manage their league without having to pay Jack, we helped him build this platform spending our time to setup the league and moderate league chat etc

My 2 cents

I saw active players become inactive because of this

Honestly, this is a very good suggestion.
In my opinion, the game would really benefit from a system like this.
As you correctly pointed out, as long as leagues are managed by individuals, there will always be similar problems, so some measures have to be put in place.
Thank you for the input!

On a broader note, many new and inexperienced players may not fully comprehend how inactive leagues hurt active ones and the competition in general.
For example, some players want to race at 5:00 UTC.
When they search for leagues, they find, at best, one or two truly active ones with a few spots left, alongside ten other leagues that have only two or three active players at most.
Let’s say they join the active leagues until all spots are filled.
The players who didn’t make it will end up joining the idle leagues.
They will get bored immediately, racing against lapped cars, just like the few active players already in those leagues.
If we had a system that closed these inactive leagues, more people would inevitably be funneled into active ones, which would mean much better competition.
And speaking of competition, is it fair when players dominate leagues full of inactive accounts?
They don't need to change engines, train their drivers, or recruit new ones from the academy.
This allows them to simply farm tokens without any effort.
I have completed more than 2,000 races in this game, sometimes competing in what are arguably the most competitive leagues.
When a race starts and you know that at least 12 out of 16 managers are inactive, meaning more than 24 cars will be lapped multiple times, the game loses its management nature.
It simply becomes a chase for DRS from the backmarkers, period.
Thus, this leads back to my initial post: the league system needs drastic changes at some point in the future.
Anyone who has spent significant time in this game will agree with me.



I don't disagree, you have a valid point.
There are many priorities that have to be addressed and bugs to be resolved before moving on to how the leagues operate.
I just wrote this post mainly for the future, when the game is in a more stable state.

You spoke the language of facts.

Does racing in a league full of inactive players the same amount of reputation as in a league full of active players? If yes, addressing this might also help reducing inactive leagues. 


Maybe a system like the 107% rule in F1 (drivers must set a time in qualifying which is at maximum 107% of the fastest lap) could make sense. Maybe not with 107% as there might be low level players who just can’t have the same pace as top level managers and might be well outside of that 107%. 

Introducing this would practically make impossible to be the only active player in a league because it would exclude inactive players from qualifying and from the race.

You could argue “the manager doesn’t have to do setup” and I agree, he could technically just don’t do the setup for a few races but:

1. What Toto suggested should also be implemented so if you don’t do setup for 33% of the races you get kicked out.


2. If he improves the car with his design points he will be quicker than inactive managers anyways.

The real downside would be that you, as an active manager, may not forget to setup the car for the race as this would disqualify you from it and lose points.

Thank you for your contribution.
I agree with all of the points you made.
In my opinion, the current state of the leagues isn't promising and, more importantly, isn't viable.
It is better to have 30 active leagues with 10 active managers rather than 100 active leagues with 3.
For example,leagues like these (I picked the most obvious one that I just found after hitting the search for leagues icon) don't contribute anything to the game and are probably being used for farming purposes:
https://igpmanager.com/app/p=league&id=880273
https://igpmanager.com/app/p=league&id=760937
https://igpmanager.com/app/p=league&id=784689
Until some rules are implemented, I don't see how this situation can be stopped.
Anyways, there are many good ideas in this subforum; I hope they will be taken into consideration in the future.

Playing devils advocate for a bit: who are we to judge these leagues, maybe it’s just a few friends racing eachother whenever they find time.


Farming needs to be stopped, I fully agree on that.

Maybe the trick is to lure discontent managers to more challenging leagues, but that’s a fine line with poaching managers from leagues. For me, higher up priority list should be league search / filter options.

I agree that league search options could be improved, but that would have a minimal impact on how leagues operate right now.
The current league system is flawed; we have so many inactive leagues that contribute nothing to the game.
And, sorry, but I respectfully don't buy the argument that these are just a few friends racing whenever they find the time.
The majority of such leagues have zero to one active managers who don't set up their cars at all.
In my opinion, it is completely fine to have a league with four or five friends racing together, but I am referring to 'farming' or inactive leagues, not small communities of friends.
As I have explained thoroughly in my previous posts, inactive players and leagues hurt the game way more than it seems.
There are many solutions to improve this situation, and in my view, this should be set as a priority once the majority of bugs are fixed.
Thank you for sharing your view; I understand your point.
At the end of the day, this is a suggestion post where we share our opinions.
I wouldn't say I 'judge' these leagues; I am just stating the facts.
Whether they are closed or not is not my business, I am just a player :)

Could the problem be solved by introducing a feature that allows the league manager to add bots to ensure there are at least 12 participants? The bots could be generated by the system and would help reduce the abuse of fake accounts, which are often unmanaged or used for farming.
The bots could be automatically removed whenever a real player joins the league.
What do you think?

First of all, thank you for sharing your view.
I firmly believe that league inactivity is a much bigger problem than farming accounts.
As a result, your suggestion would have made the situation slightly worse.
The game desperately needs active leagues in order to keep players engaged, rather than leagues where only a few managers are setting up their cars.
As I have said in a previous post: when a race starts and you know that at least 12 out of 16 managers are inactive, meaning more than 24 cars will be lapped multiple times, the game loses its strategic nature.
It simply becomes a chase for DRS from the backmarkers, period.
In my opinion, the solution is pretty simple.
The auto-kick feature should be present in every type of league (boosted or not).
If you don't log in to your account for a week, you should be kicked out immediately.
It only takes a simple login for a single minute, so I don't buy the argument, "I was so busy that I didn't have time to open the game."
Right now, we have many inactive managers in many leagues who haven't even opened the game for a year, so we need a change.
If you look around, you will see so many leagues that have only 2–4 active managers while all the others are inactive.
This kind of inactivity hurts the game a lot; it leads the remaining active players to stop playing altogether.
Returning to how we should solve this recurring problem, I have suggested plenty of times that many leagues need to be closed.
How?
By having a filter that measures the active managers of a league at the end of the season (the auto-kick must be functional for this to happen).
If, let’s say, there are 3 or fewer active players in a two-car league, or 5 or fewer in a one-car league, then the league should be disbanded.
Overall, I think this is an efficient and quick way for the league system to be improved and, more importantly, to remain viable for years to come.

Bringing this back to the top for one last time. 
I’ve refined some points of the initial post; I think it addresses many issues regarding how leagues operate. 
I believe these changes are essential for the long-term health of the game. 
Anyway, there are many good ideas in this subforum; I hope they will be taken into consideration in the future. 
Thank you everyone for your time.