DRL 2020 Revival

[NukedIceCream 159]

Hello hello! After a very long absence due to lack of activity, we are finally back! Sort of. We're not going to have a big fancy leaderboard or any of that stuff, but we're still that same old outlet to get in that classic dirty racing. Currently only 1 tournament per week, but I'm open to expanding to 2 tournaments in order to cover more timezones and get more people involved if the interest is there. 

There will be a couple changes to the proceedings compared to how things were ran in the past, some of these are gone over in the in depth rules topic, but I'll cover them here as well.

tl;dr: DRL is back, it's pretty insane. 

Sign ups:

Tournaments will be ran through the HT Tournament system, this means you're required to have a HaloTracks account to participate. Tournaments will be posted roughly 1 week in advanced and will be advertised on discord. Sign ups are on a first come first served basis, however the player cap is now 14 so more people can get in on the action. 

Race start procedure:

Instead of the classic "DRL" shout starting method, we'll be using a more traditional sticky detonator starting method on track that don't have starting gates. While the novelty was fun, it's pretty inconsistent and always caused confusion on when you were actually meant to "go".

Dirtiest racer vote:

We will indeed be voting for dirtiest racer still, however we will be using the "original" voting system where each person only gets 1 vote per tournament. While per race voting is nice and gave a more accurate result, it drags the tournament on far longer than it should. It's the dirty racing league, not the dirty voting league. The vote itself is a fun side thing, you should be racing dirty as much as you can regardless of the vote.

Racer cap:

In the past tournaments were always limited to 10 people, this was mainly due to the 360s nature to be quite laggy with even 10 or 12 people in games. With MCC and it's release on PC games are far more stable, so I'll be capping tournaments to 14 racers. If 14 proves too unwieldy for the connection and/or maps, I'll drop this down to 12. Some maps are definitely not chosen with 14 racers in mind, so some races could get insanely chaotic, providing even more contact and wrecking opportunity.

Leaderboard:

The veterans of the squad (or anyone that's been around me), remembers the old leaderboard WhiskeyWarm made for the squad. It had so many stats, all the data, and a complicated ranking system that factored in everything, and was always able to evolve so it didn't matter when you jumped in. I tried my best to "reset" the leaderboard and mess around with it to potentially re-use it, however I am what some might call "dumb". With that being said, for the time being we will not have any leaderboard ranking system.

I'm not in a rush to create a leaderboard, as I feel it wouldn't currently add anything. I will however keep track of stats and in the future I'll start a primitive system to keep track of people's tournament wins, race wins, win%, dr votes, etc. for the sake of it. It won't be pretty or efficient, but it would still be nice to have at least some various data points.

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With all of that being said, I'm sure I missed some key points and haven't properly ironed out the rules yet. We'll work on this as we run tournaments and fix the issues as we come across them.