Migration from VSK5 to VR / Protest&Rule Handling

[Liese]

HI,
is here anybody who might point me to a general description of how Racing Rules will be dealed with and how Protests can be filed etc?
I am migrating from the 10 year old software VIRTUAL SKIPPER 5 and it was possible to race with 
1) Automatic Penalty
2) Manual Penalty / Raising Red Flag  
and after a race you have been able to launch a protest and get i.e. compensation in a series of races within one event, if the protest committee - after review of the race situation - determines that you have been unlawfully detained acc. Rule XX.

This organization has always been time consuming, but very fair imho.
And people learned the RRS in detail, which helped in real life 🙂

Maybe some skippers have fun to give me short impression about the protest handling. I didn't found anything in the forum.
Is a race review and check of distances/collissions even possible?
(Honestly I have just sailed the Training sessions, but I want to read some basics in advance about this Software before investing time.
 

Since it seems, that it is accepted for 'official eSailing Championships" there mus be something like Protest Committee and Hearings (in additional forums?)...

Best regards,
Liese/Joerg
 

 

[Sisu]

Hi Liese, I am also a VSK5 veteran.

Penalties are automatic only, and no cancellation is allowed, even in private races, and I don't think it is possible to save replays for postrace debriefing as it was in VSK. Additionally, there are no collisions - boats "ghost" through each other. In my opinion, this encourages penalty-hunting behavior.

VSK was notorious for calling Rule 15 too often. In this game, it's the opposite - Rules 15 and 16 are rarely called, and competitors will often use a very quick luff or jibe to starboard to penalize opponents. Because collisions are not modeled there is very little boatspeed penalty for doing this. If you attempt to make a close pass downwind, you had best have very quick reactions.

VR also has a issue with correctly calling Rule 18 at leeward marks on opposite jibes. It will almost always rule in favor of the boat on starboard, even if the boat on port was inside overlapped.

I played a little bit in VSK5 the other day after spending most of the last month in VR. I like how easy it is to organize races with friends and the amount of competition here, but I miss a lot of the features in VSK5. Still, I've been having fun on VR. It's fun to see online sailing so popular!