Hey that was me for this latest mid-casual event! Obviously that didn’t last…
Going to try and get my runs through tonight/tomorrow. I’m going to stick to a car that is under 470 HP this time…
I totaled my car in leg 3 so I have to start over :-(
Monte Carlo is notorious for that. Well, it’s notorious with me at least. This month’s monthly challenge starts in Monte Carlo, and I was so excited to start it, because it features 6 stages each in Monte Carlo, Germany, Greece and Wales. Those are the four locations I’m good at!! So I got started, and I was kicking ass on that asphalt section and when I got to the icy section, I was already dreaming of the riches that would await me at the end of the month. I could afford a VW and a Hyundai!
Instead, I went over the ice wall, terminal damage. No retries. Monthly challenge over.
Ouch, that’s rough!
This is neither a recommendation or a deterrent but driving while drinking tequila results in a real bad time while having a real good time.
So I want an honest answer to this question: how many times do you guys restart stages in the Dirt League? I set it to having no stage restarts, but I know that there is an exploit to restart them. I’m really having a hard time believing that you guys still get some of these ridiculous times without restarting individual stages. I guess next season I should remove event restarts as well.
I will not restart any stages if stage restarts are disabled, because otherwise what is the point of setting it in the first place? It would totally feel like cheating to me. Neither will I restart the event unless I faceplant a tree on the first corner of the first stage or something. Once my overall time is set that’s it for me I don’t run the event again. Even when stage restarts are allowed I will normally only restart if I have a serious crash.
However, if I am unfamiliar with the car or stage, I will run a custom event beforehand mirroring the stage set until I feel I can get through the stage crash-free. I don’t tend to set the fastest time per stage but I can normally get through without any “offs” (not always!) thus having no terrible times and preserving the car condition. The game is so unforgiving on going off the edge of the track, and with some of the co-driver’s calls being inconsistent or flat-out bad in a few places, I feel going in totally blind is asking for disaster, at least with a controller. If my wheel hadn’t stopped working it might be a little easier.
I am very experienced with racing games having played them a lot going back to the original Gran Turismo / Colin Mcrae Rally back in the Playstation 1 days.
I don’t think disabling event restarts is a good idea as it sucks if you have a terminal damage situation (see Rock8man’s monthly challenge above) and then you are done.
The only case in which I restart stages in the leagues is if I do something super-dumb like pop a tire in the first thirty seconds. Anything else I live with.
Like I said above, I sometimes do the first stage and then restart the event if I messed up during that first stage. Once I get a first stage I’m happy with, then I go ahead and finish the rest.
I’m sometimes tempted to restart the event if I’ve got time later that week and think I can do better. Like this week, I messed up really badly on the last stage. Even worse than LedShok. And there’s still time until tomorrow to restart and try again. But it will depend on how busy I get at work, or if I’m doing something with my wife later today. If I still had a weekly event to run, that would get priority, but I already finished one weekly, and got terminal damage on the other weekly and the monthly.
I haven’t been playing racing games as long as Ormus, but almost as long. I really only started in earnest when Need For Speed: High Stakes came out (aka Need for Speed 4). It came out in 98 or 99 I believe, which was after Gran Turismo. Sega GT was my first real driving sim, and Gran Turismo 2 was my second.
Changing the subject slightly, I updated my AMD drivers yesterday, and it installed a program on my machine that is constantly recording the last 30 seconds of any game, just like on Xbox One and PS4. And it says to press Ctrl F2 to record the last 30 seconds. That’s a little hard to hit in DiRT Rally without messing up your driving, but after I had a bad hangup in the snow in a Group B RWD car in today’s Daily, I pressed it to try it out.
Here was the clip it generated. Notice my rear tires got stuck in a RWD car. Lots of compression, so it doesn’t look nearly as good as playing the game, but I’m impressed that my PC now does what my consoles do, and I can share clips really easily.
Unfortunately, 5 seconds after I recorded that clip, it crashed DiRT Rally. So any time I want to record a clip, I guess I have to forfeit the race I’m doing in order to record the clip, which suuuuuucks. And if it’s constantly recording, I wonder if it’s using the limited space on my SSD or it’s using one of my storage drives.
Bah looks like my video card is dying. I tried in vain to find something local. Fail… Won’t have a new one until Monday. I cleaned the current one. Maybe it will make it through the weekend. ;)
The most recent Dirt League I did without any restarts. Helps that we were driving the kit cars which are very driver-friendly and the event was in Greece where I know most of the stages like the back of my hand. Still, crashed twice on the fourth stage so familiarity only gets you so far! :-)
That said, on most ‘event restart only’ leagues I’m quite comfortable having half a dozen attempts at the first stage if I feel like I botched things terribly. But once I’m past the opener I just go with whatever I get.
On the occasions where I completely throw it away (terminal damage or wheel loss early in a long stage) I simply retire and then weigh up whether I have the motivation to completely start the event over. Typically I don’t and just skip the round for that week (or try again another day when the frustration levels have subsided!).
When a league has event restarts but no stage restarts I will generally retry the first stage until I am reasonably happy with the results. Like ledShok, once I get past the first one I generally keep going without restarts. If I restart I will restart the entire event, not use the stage restart exploit. I did cheat a couple weeks ago without really thinking about it and I posted here that I did so. I did total my car on stage 3 of the mid casual league this time and restarted the event.
In general I don’t have the patience to keep restarting after the first stage. I don’t expect to win any events no matter how many times I try with ledShok, Rock8man and some others here. I know my place :-)
I think my times speak for themselves :)
I will restart a event if it goes bad the first and occasionally the 2nd stage. I will wear out the restart button on a stage when the game is setup for stage restarts.
Me too (as long as the stage isn’t too long)!!
Today’s daily is recommended. Group B RWD (but not the 037, thank god!) through a long Swedish stage in the snow. Without a lot of straight bits you can effectively slap it one gear for pretty much the whole run and drive the bends with throttle control. Not sure I was all that quick, but I enjoyed the atmosphere (the rumble of gravel under the car, snow peppering the windscreen, etc).
Inspired by rock8man’s exploits I decided to finally try my hand at the Monthly challenge as Group B was featuring and I own the Audi. Knowing that finishing is half the battle in such a long event I drove with as much caution as I could and was nearing the end of the opening Monte Carlo stage with nary a scratch on the bodywork and (from what I could tell) a decent time to boot. Unfortunately the last third was the icy section and I overcooked the entry into a hard right and kicked the backend over the snowbank as I exited. The car teetered for a moment before dropping me backwards over the edge. Anticipating a time penalty I was surprised to get the ‘terminal damage’ slow mo message and that was that…
Now, I’m quite comfortable that in real life this may well have been a rally-ending incident. Not from any damage (it was a relatively low speed corner and I went off as more of an oversteer spin than a crash) but I’ve seen plenty of WRC cars slip into a ditch and been unable to extricate it with anything short of the tow-truck or crane. But in DiRT Rally terms it was such an innocuous little moment (it was the other side of the road from the cliff edge!) and nothing like the flips and high speed offs that see you bounce back on the road without the co-driver even missing a beat. To be honest, despite the massive frustration I was somewhat glad that it happened on the first stage of what was likely to be a 90+ minute marathon so I didn’t lose much other than having to wait another three weeks for the next event…
Oh, and kudos to rock8man for his run in this round of the Mid-Casual league! He’s leading the rankings at the moment with an excellent showing in his Subaru.
In particular, maximum respect for the three seconds he took out of me on the second stage - a stage I was familiar with, pushed hard, and felt I’d done one of my best runs! Madness! :-)
Well my car and computer both made it through this week. I’m only a couple of minutes behind the pack! Woooo! ;) I did manage to make it through almost the entire thing without any major damage. I punctured a tire like 3 turns away from the finish on the last stage.
Well, I saw two Wales courses, and I felt like the Subaru would be my best chance. I’m currently running through Wales on the Master Championship in that same Subaru, so I’m very familiar with the courses and the car. But yeah, I was still pretty stoked to beat your times even if it wasn’t in the same class of Car. :)
If I hadn’t been kicked out the game, I was having a lot of fun in that Daily too. (See above for my recorded clip though, getting stuck in snow is easy when you have RWD).
Now, I’m quite comfortable that in real life this may well have been a rally-ending incident. Not from any damage (it was a relatively low speed corner and I went off as more of an oversteer spin than a crash) but I’ve seen plenty of WRC cars slip into a ditch and been unable to extricate it with anything short of the tow-truck or crane. But in DiRT Rally terms it was such an innocuous little moment (it was the other side of the road from the cliff edge!) and nothing like the flips and high speed offs that see you bounce back on the road without the co-driver even missing a beat. To be honest, despite the massive frustration I was somewhat glad that it happened on the first stage of what was likely to be a 90+ minute marathon so I didn’t lose much other than having to wait another three weeks for the next event…
Yeah, that terminal damage in Monte Carlo just seems so unfair. Especially the ones that are not toward the cliff edge where you would fall downward, but the ones that are toward the cliff going upward. It almost feels like there could be nothing over there to cause terminal damage. Unless it’s secretly like the Fortress of Solitude in Superman 2 where Zod and his lackeys fell into bottomless pits. That’s what’s over there in Monte Carlo!
And I’m also so glad it happened to me on the very first stage.