Retiring cars

Retire it forever. As a matter of fact how about giving them some prestige
and retiring them to a "Hall of Fame" page on the website (hint, hint).

If you keep a ringer in the mix, whoever spends the most time on the game/website
will know which models to snag. I would suggest that you do everything to keep the
masses available in the game rather than an elite few. Keep in mind that this is
a general statement and I am not directing the comment at anybody/team in
particular. I hope you can see that I take the time to give my input to what can
make the game better and better. While I do have my share of trophies and such,
I don't have hardly any time to do downhill races anymore. I appreciate the efforts
that you have made in this game!

What may take some discussion is, how many races does a racer have to win in order
to be retired? 66%? 75%? 90%?

As for retiring models, there are literally thousands of cars and variations that are available.
You are only in the beginning stages of these events. Once the top ten racers are retired, it
will really make the races more competitive as the cream of the crop will have been retired.
It will basically level out the playing field. I'm not a follower or NASCAR but from my under-
standing, the cars have strict requirements as to fuel, weight, size, etc. This is to make a
level competition field as possible. Retiring models achieves this goal as well.

If you are worried about running out of racers, I'm sure that your supporters will donate
enough models to alleviate that fear. I will soon send you some racers myself.

All good points, thanks Mark. That all makes sense...and now thinking about as leveling the playing field rather than punishing everyone, I think it's fair to retire cars to the Hall of Fame. Maybe there's some achievement for owning a car that is retired or something.

Like you said, figuring out *when* a car gets retired is the trick. I need to look forward and think about season length and races per week to determine what is fair. I think I might also plug in a rule that says players can't enter the same car in a race twice in a row or something...at least that might spread out the beatings a bit.

I'm not so worried about running out of cars now that we'll be switching to smaller tournaments. I'm not including variations in the game, but even then, there's 150+ cars to start with already which is plenty. Collecting cars in the game isn't going to be *that* easy.

There seems to be a focus on Allstar page to highlight the champs!

There seems to be a focus on collecting cars..

I might be putting too much emphasis on the collecting cars. I guess picking bracket winners for points didn't seem like enough of a game, but maybe it is...? Since part of racing diecasts is collecting them, I thought mimicking that could be neat but if it's too much micro-managing for players then it's not worth it.

I'm struggling to find the balance between effort and payoff...but I guess that's what makes designing a good game tough, huh?

Thanks for suggestions...good ideas for handling the super cars.

I'm struggling to find the balance between effort and payoff...but I guess that's what makes designing a good game tough, huh?

There is effort and payoff to consider from two perspectives. Your's as the builder as well as from the consumer's point of view.

How much effort does it take you to build the game engine? How much effort does it take you do conduct the races?
How much effort does it the public to go through the whole list of racers to find out which ones are available
to fill their garage? I think I have a decent grip on the overall situation.

What is your purpose of this project? Are you trying to generate content that would enable you to benefit
from advertising revenue? Are you doing this for fun? If there are only a dozen core participants, is that
enough for you to keep doing this for fun or profit? Only you can decide.

I know one thing that if people only put cars in their garage and don't come back for awhile then
that may not be generating that much interest. But if you have weekly voting then if one wants to
compete, then they must come back every week. Now you are generating traffic and interest!

Thanks for all that.

I'm really not too worried about the game from a building perspective. That's the easy part. I build software and design for a living, I know how that all goes...it's creating a game that is fun that's the hard part. But since fun is subjective it makes it even harder to find the sweet spot. Everyone's input so far has helped me narrow down the scope of this project already.

If there's one thing the League has showed me already is that people are willing to send in cars to have them raced. This opens up some other options like mail-in races. That's something we'll have to explore and discuss to see what type of interest there is amongst all players.

The Fantasy League needs to be more than just picking winners in a bracket. I don't believe that will hold up over time because that wouldn't hold my attention for long. I'm just trying to find what can be added to compliment the brackets without adding too much micro-management. I don't want that anymore than anyone else does.

And collecting is absolutely part of racing. You collect cars to race them. You want the best stable of cars you can find...if that type of dynamic can be created on-line, I think that could be a lot of fun. But if it doesn't translate well or lead towards an ultimate goal within the game, then it's pointless.

I think part of my problem, nay, concern is trying to combine two modes of fun into one.

Racing alone is fun for all of us, but trying to build a fun game around the racing fun is the challenge.

I agree that there has to be more than just picking winners in this game. I like the idea of collecting cars to enter into tournaments. My thought is to keep these tournaments competitive by removing the obvious ringers and entering new models into the system. It's fun to have races where any one car has a chance.

Well, I think bracket play will be the bulk of v2. That's not to say things won't be added later, but I think we'll have more fun with more cars by tournaments and people picking winners.

More details here
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=38

I think that at the end of the season there should be a number of races in all sorts of orders and stuff of the top 16 cars, and then the winner is retired and the owners of it are added to a hall of fame. I like the hall of fame idea mentioned earlier.

By the way, when is season two beginning?

Well, this season ends Memorial Day weekend in a couple of week...that's about all I can say right now.

I just really started building v2.0 this week because I finally set some plans in stone. Since v2.0 is a lot less complicated, I'm hoping development should move a little faster. However, I'm also trying to coordinate v2.0 with a blog redesign so it'll all come out of the gate as a single product.

My goal right now is to have v2.0 ready by July. If it happens sooner, it happens. This first season turned out great and I learned a lot. Version 2 will have another big push and launch like we did for this one...hopefully we'll get *and retain* players this time.