Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 68: Bait and Switch

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 68: Bait and Switch

Normally, when a theme for a CSR round is selected, the host goes through with it and lets it run normally for a week, with the next few days reserved for reviews and results. However, very rarely, circumstances force the host to step down and let the next highest-placed finisher in the previous round take their place. Once this occurs, a new rule set is chosen and the round is restarted from the beginning. Hopefully, the new host would ensure that the round would finish exactly as planned - on schedule and exactly to other users' wishes.

So far, this forced bait-and-switch has only happened twice in the history of CSR: in the 39th and 111th rounds, the entire contest had to be restarted from scratch with a new rule set. In each case the new rules proved to be very popular with the entrants. However, in the first of these, the original rule set was actually very unbalanced, since it heavily favored certain car classes over others - an undesirable situation in any case. The rule set that replaced it was therefore deliberately designed to avoid this problem.

This leads us to another issue that could potentially affect any round of CSR (or other forum contests, for that matter): balance, or in some cases, the lack of it. Within a given rule set, some car bodies are better suited to it than others. Take AGC 1, for example. When I decided to host it, I quickly realized that there were a few car bodies that had too little drag, and was forced to exclude them from the list of items that could be used. On the other hand, there were also a few bodies that, despite being eligible for use (and a few users did indeed choose them for their entries), were simply too big to be as effective as they first seemed.

So what have we learned from all this? If you ever get the chance to host any Automation forum competition, especially CSR, make sure that you are physically and mentally up to the task, lest you have to step down and force another user to reboot the contest with a new theme. And whatever rule set you come up with, make sure it's sufficiently balanced, to avoid the contest being dominated primarily by one type of car and/or engine type.