With online racing taking center stage in Gran Turismo Sport, there has rightfully been many questions about the game’s match-making capabilities. Playing with drivers outside of your own skill set – whether they are faster or slower than you – can be a frustrating experience, especially if you end up with the rude and childish players who often plague online lobbies.

To solve this problem in GT Sport, Polyphony Digital is building a reputation system which will be used to match players of similar skill and maturity levels. At E3 last week, Kazunori Yamauchi explained the system to GTPlanet in more detail.

“You’ll notice – if you go online in GT6 – the world out there is very rough. It’s like the African savanna,” he joked. “That situation is obviously not very good, and in order to achieve clean online races, you need some type of rating system.”

GT Sport’s driver rating system will be based on two indices: Driver Class and Sportsmanship Points. Driver Class will represent the overall speed of the player and how well they perform in races. Sportsmanship Points will keep track of the player’s behavior and manners on-track.

“These two scores will affect your driver rating. For example, if your Sportsmanship Points go down because you have been driving very rough in some races, you will only be matched with other players who drive rough on-track. On the other side of the spectrum, people who run clean races, will be matched with other clean drivers,” Kazunori explained.

Driver Class ratings will be grouped and organized by letter (S-A-B-C-D-R), though this letter rating will presumably be determined by some underlying numerical value. Class ratings will be calculated based upon qualifying results, race results, and the average rating of the drivers you’re racing against.

Sportsmanship Points will be calculated on additional metrics which can either increase or decrease your overall rating:

Factors For Increase

Race distance

Course difficulty

Race category

Factors For Decrease

Driving off-track

Wall contact

Entering restricted zones

Ignoring flags

Ignoring speed limits

Pushing other cars off the track

Collisions with other cars

Driver ratings in GT Sport will almost certainly be a controversial topic when the game releases this November, though the system will be required for a competitive online ecosystem.

Polyphony’s design is clearly inspired by iRacing’s Safety Rating, which has been a hallmark of the PC simulator since it was first introduced. As any iRacing player can tell you, such a rating system adds the notion of “consequence” to online racing – an essential ingredient to high-level competition – which ultimately makes the game more fun as well.

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