Cars and rules for 2019

[Cas]

About the bonuses... maybe I'm just saying what Overdrijf said in another way, not sure if we've got exactly the same idea, but the more we add, the better to help all of us think.

I think about this: suppose bonuses are only for the current race so it's my turn and I boost some car. Then the car gets used a lot and as a consequence, for next race, it falls, since my boost is lost. This means, making the bonuses permanent affects competence of cars for other races which isn't fair for somebody who wouldn't choose the same car, but making them temporary affects the competence too, in the other direction.

There are many things that can do about this:
- We could make it so that bonuses are temporary, but cars boosted by the track designer are immune to fall-from-use
- We could make the permanent bonus a proportion of the temporary bonus, say, half the temporary bonus
- We could replace the ability of the track designer to apply bonus, with an ability to freeze certain cars
- We could make the bonuses dynamic during the race (of course, not affecting the already posted calculated laps). This could be crazy and very complicated, although it'd be very interesting to see. Could work like a charm or destroy everything

As always... this is brainstorming. Hope some of all that is useful to anybody

[Overdrijf]

Interesting ideas, but I'd personally argue pretty heavily against two of these:

- Boosted cars are immune to drop from use:
Cars that get boosted are often already close to being useful. This is I think a recipe for seeing the same car come up several times in a short amount of time.

- Bonuses are dynamic during the race:
Not only does this hurt both the time hiding game and the really strong optimization attempts, it could make the race unwinnable after a certain point. Yeah, it's good to promote early racing, but not at that cost, I'd say. To counteract that you could make it that bonuses can only go up during a race, which is better, but also incentivizes late racing even more.

[Overdrijf]

A semi-interesting brain fart I just had: would it be easy to implement a delay in public replays being posted, like say 12 or 24 hours? Like an extra button that says "public after delay"? It might slow down the collective efforts to find the fastest route a bit, but it would also reward innovation with a chance at LTB points. I'm thinking of calling it the "Oh god what if Marco (or Overdrijf, let's be honest here) comes online somewhere in the next few hours"-mechanic.