The only thing I don't like is that in a race of 6+ if just one person doesn't want the goal they can strike it. How often are goals with 3 c-buttons and a BA going to be kept? Or a lot of RBA in general? There are people that will use a strike on those every time and the odds of them coming up twice in a row aren't likely.
I don't see what's wrong with RBABot's reroll feature. Even if we don't use the bot itself, I think the concept is sound. More than half the entrants must vote to veto the goal for a new goal to be rolled for. Halo (and CoD I think) us(es) this system to determine maps/rulesets. Mario Kart and MPH use a similar system, in which everyone votes for a specific map/track and the one with the most votes is chosen (ties are broken by a random draw), which doesn't really work for us because we're voting to accept/reject a given goal, not voting for a goal of our choice. However, I think it's close enough to reinforce the fairness of the majority veto system (at least to me). The only problem I can think of with rerolling with the bot is that it created a large amount of spam in the channel. Again, the
purpose of this is to ensure that we are racing a goal that the majority of people will have fun doing. That's the point of racing, isn't it?
Kind of as a side note, I've been thinking we need some kind of "Rules of Racing" to avoid things like Elminster being DQ'ed, Librari seeing the goal and then being allowed to be .removed, and things like Siglemic taking 22 hours. There are no lines and I feel we should draw some so that everyone knows what they can/can't do.
This. If we have rules explicitly outlining what happens in these situations, then there's nothing to argue. If Librari saw a goal and was removed because he didn't like it, why wasn't I removed from a race where I didn't even know the goal for 20 minutes? On top of that, I was DQ'd even though Zero left for 3 hours and I could've easily beaten him if I had started playing from the moment that he left. Many people told me I had no right to ask for removal 40 minutes in, even though I proved that I had been attempting to ask from the start of the race. I'm not even going to go in to the fact that it was AniMeowzerz who DQ'd me.
What's done is done and I don't think anything can be done to change that now, but things like this wouldn't be a big deal if we had a set of rules to refer to. I would have no problem with being DQ'd if there was a rule in place stating I can't be removed for missing the countdown (the most important part being that said rule would apply to
everyone else). I'm positive there are some people that would not have been DQ'd had they been in my position...and if an op had been in the same situation they likely would've just done .end and restarted the race for everyone.
having an official list of rules for all races is a good idea. having a time limit of something like twice the amount of time that it took the first person to finish should work, if anyone is still in the race then they tie for last place and its over. if everyone or the hypermajority agrees that the racer should be DQed then they are. im not sure after that, some general rules about cheating and the consequences for them. it should probably be in its own post and have the .cosmosis as a sub set of the rules
A time limit is probably a good idea. I disagree with your proposed time limit because if complete novices join a big race (which is bound to have our top players in it) then they won't be allowed to finish no matter how hard they try, which will discourage them. This goes against encouraging people to always finish and never quit so they can have the satisfaction of having finished the race, plus whatever skills they have improved by doing or learning whatever tricks they did. I think it would be especially detrimental in MM races simply because a couple of people are much farther ahead in the metagame than everyone else, and because 1st cycle is excluded from 95% of MM races, so short goals can end up being half an hour or less. DQing somebody for taking longer than an hour is definitely not what we want to have come out of this. Twice the time that last place finished in seems better because it's extremely unlikely that one lone racer is that much worse than everybody else. I say worse because you're never going to lose 2 or 3 hours from bad luck (maybe from a bad decision if it's a puzzle race, but I figured those are exceptions because the completion time has varied from 3 to 9 hours, not counting Siglemic's 22 hour finish). The point of this rule is to prevent people from holding up races just to be a jackass. This becomes less of an issue with multiple race functionality, but it must still be addressed because people are going to want to see the point changes when the race is recorded. Holding up a race may prevent races of the same game in the immediate future from being recorded as well. A so called "hypermajority" vote sounds like a fair idea to me, but it is slightly arbitrary, which I don't think is good. It seems to only work on a case-by-case basis, but maybe that is what is needed for people who are taking 8 or 9 hours. I'm just offering my idea of a time limit of twice the time of the current
last place as a suggestion.
