[2021] Federation Grand Prix - Time Trials Contest

The Federation Grand Prix is here! In addition to the awesome in-game rewards you can pick up for tackling the daily challenges during the event we’re running an additional contest for those of you who are particularly keen on optimizing your racing ships - the Federation Grand Prix Time Trials!

Contest Details:

• The contest will run from 11:00 UTC on Thursday, March 11 to 11:00 UTC on Tuesday, March 23.
• After a capsuleer has completed each of the 3 routes as part of the untimed Federation Grand Prix live event, they will then be able to begin the repeatable Extra Lap version of the challenge. It is only these Extra Lap challenges which count towards your leaderboard times.
• There is a separate leaderboard for each of the 3 routes - Southern, Eastern and Northern (see bottom of this post).
• Each leaderboard will track the top 10 fastest times for that route. Leaderboards will be updated daily with the results from the previous day.
• Capsuleers can appear on multiple leaderboards however only their fastest time for each route will be counted.
• Capsuleers will be awarded points based on the final position they achieve on the leaderboard for each route. Points will be added together across different leaderboards to get a capsuleer’s Final Score.

Leaderboard Scoring:

1st Place – 25 points
2nd Place – 20 points
3rd Place – 18 points
4th Place – 15 points
5th Place – 12 points
6th Place – 10 points
7th Place – 8 points
8th Place – 6 points
9th Place – 4 points
10th Place – 2 points

Scoring example: At conclusion of the contest period a capsuleer is in 1st Place on the Southern route (25 points), 3rd Place on the Eastern route (18 points) and 8th Place on the Northern route (6 points) they will receive a Final Score of 49 points. There is a system for tie breaks.

Prizes for Top 10 Final Scores:

1st Place – 12 months Omega, Federal Police Thanatos SKIN
2nd Place – 6 months Omega, Federal Police Dominix SKIN
3rd Place – 6 months Omega, Federal Police Megathron SKIN
4th Place – 6 months Omega, Federal Police Hyperion SKIN
5th Place – 3 months Omega, Federal Police Vexor Navy Issue SKIN
6th Place – 3 months Omega, Federal Police Brutix Navy Issue SKIN
7th Place – 3 months Omega, Federal Police Brutix SKIN
8th Place – 1 month Omega, Federal Police Ishtar SKIN
9th Place – 1 month Omega, Federal Police Vexor SKIN
10th Place – 1 month Omega, Federal Police Thorax SKIN

Even if you don’t make the final Top 10, all capsuleers who finish on the leaderboard for any routes will have their names immortalised on a monument which will be added to the Luminaire system for this and future Federation Grand Prix events.

Bonus Community Prize for Doing it Wrong:

Do you think you can pull off one of the Grand Prix routes in an Orca? How about a shield tanked nano Kronos with Festival Lanchers?

While we expect the leaderboards to be dominated by super fast and agile ships as befits a Grand Prix we would like to invite brave (or crazy) capsuleers to attempt to complete any of these routes in an “unorthodox” ship. Come up with something creative, bizarre and/or funny and upload a video of your attempt (successful or otherwise)! We will put it to a vote by the community and if your video is chosen as the people’s favourite you will receive 12 months of Omega as well as a Federal Police Nyx SKIN!

Prizes will be awarded in a timely fashion!

Rules:

• Capsuleers are free to be as creative or as devious as they wish. If you come up with some sneaky way to shave off some precious seconds (or entire jumps) then go for it!
• Your time between checkpoints is tracked using our own internal methods. Only times posted by CCP on the leaderboards are considered official.
• Only one character per human player will be eligible for prizes. We will be checking the winners list for alts. In the event we identify a competitor who has appeared multiple times on the Final Score list only the highest score attained by a character owned by that capsuleer will be counted.

Southern Route Leaderboard

Eastern Route Leaderboard

Northern Route Leaderboard

UPDATED - Monday, 15 March

All leaderboards updated with the times from yesterday.

When you first warp to the “Federation Grand Prix” starting line landmark site in Luminaire, the challenge in the info panel on the left side of the screen will change into a button that says “Claim Reward”. If you click that button, you’ll receive the points towards the season reward and the next destination will be presented to you. Clicking on the challenge in that info panel opens up the section of the agency with more details and a system name that you can right-click to set destination directly if you wish.

I have good news for you Cade! If a character has the Interceptors skill to at least 1 and has the appropriate Frigate Skill to 5, they can fly an Interceptor even if they don’t have Evasive Maneuvering 5! Evasive 5 is required to train the Interceptors skill normally, but if you get the Interceptors skill in some other way (like an Expert System for instance), the game doesn’t require you to have Evasive 5 in order to fly the ship.

Thanks for your concern and for the polite way you communicated it.

I have updated the Eastern Route leaderboard.

Due to the announced bug with the repeatable “Extra Laps” version of the Northern Route yesterday (which is the timed version of the event we derive our numbers from) it meant that no runs were completed and thus there are no scores to post for that today.

I’m having a separate technical issue obtaining the times for the Southern Route for its leaderboard too, so for now I can only post 1/3 of the results. I’ll try to get it recfified ASAP but as we’re heading into the weekend it may have to wait until Monday, sorry! :\

Everything’s working now and I was able to pull the times for the Southern and Northern routes. All 3 leaderboards have been updated in OP.

I’m going to try to and do it daily until the end of the event, with the final scores being posted on the 24th.

This isn’t the first time there’s been a Federation Grand Prix in New Eden although it’s been some time since the last one.

This time trial contest wasn’t part of the original design of the Grand Prix live event, we just thought it would be a cool thing to do on the side for players who really care about optimizing their runs. As such the leaderboards weren’t built-in in to the client so we’re having to improvise a little so that it can happen.

I really like your suggestion about medals, too. I’ll give it some thought!

Let’s check tomorrow then and see if you and @Xafen_Katapi appear on the next update. This data comes from a delayed copy of the live database, not the live database itself so there will be lag with the numbers. This is unavoidable. As I said in OP I’ll be updating daily with the previous day’s results.

Effectively nothing - short of using actual exploits which would be forbidden in the course of normal gameplay - is prohibited. If you can think of clever ways to shave off minutes or avoid dangerous gatecamps then more power to you!

Re: the issue with getting the Northern Route over and over again - I’m not sure, perhaps @CCP_Fozzie can answer that if he drops by this thread again. Otherwise I’ll bring it up with him after the weekend! This contest runs for another 10 days so I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time to get it sorted and get your runs in.

Right now!

@Naskingar_Eginald @Xafen_Katapi You guys seemed to be very confident you’d be on the leaderboards at the next update but I don’t see you there. There were some really fast times posted recently though which might have nudged you back out unseen. Does that sound reasonable or does anything feel “off” to you?

Thanks for your replies here, I’ll do some checking up tomorrow.

Updated with the yesterday’s results.

To the folks who are reporting that they should be on leaderboards I’m having to follow up, please sit tight a bit longer. If you’re posting on an account other than the character name you’re racing on please DM me that character’s name (if it’s top secret) and your estimated time.

It should be available to everyone. Open the Agency window and look in the Encounters section for the Federation Grand Prix. Also make sure that you’re set to show the events panel on the main window. You toggle it with the little flat icon at the top left of your screen.

Times have been updated for yesterday’s runs. Still investigating reports of missing times.

Leaderboards updated.

Thank you for your reports which allowed us to identify a flaw in our script which wasn’t correctly updating improved times for capsuleers. As a result all the leaderboards have seen some dramatic decreases in the times and should now correctly reflect your fastest time achieved for each route.

An additional personal thanks for being so patient and providing constructive feedback while we figured this out! I’ve uploaded an Excel file here which has the top 100 for each route as of midnight UTC this morning so that people who are outside the top 10 can see where we have your times pegged so that you may alert of us of anything else that seems “off”.

Also shout out to Interstella Cabbage SellaFella (currently in 47th place on the Southern Route) just for having such an awesome name.

It’s pretty much as I said there. Unfortunately I can’t tell you the exact error because I wouldn’t know how to explain it anyway. What it seems was happening that only a player’s first score on each route was being reported and any other attempts - even if faster - were not being picked up properly. However in the first few days there was still some movement on the leaderboards due to people posting very fast times on their first tries which gave the false impression that things were updating.

Once players started pointing out the times were getting a bit sus we gathered the reports and were able to identify the flaw. @Elsebeth_Rhiannon helped me with some troubleshooting too, so cheers!

Leaderboards updated. Encouragingly, @xa666’s reported time from yesterday appeared exactly where it should have which gives me confidence that everything is now working correctly.

@Rhudak That’s definitely a good idea! This contest was something we came up with just before the feature was deployed to add a bit of extra fun for the community to get involved in but by then the mechanics were already baked in. This seems to have been fairly popular though so perhaps for the next GP we’ll get involved a bit earlier.

Good suggestion!

Leaderboards updated.

Sure, I think would be ok!

Leaderboards updated.

Re: Names on the monument - I do believe it will be the Top 10 on each leaderboard at the end of the live event. Having been on the leaderboard at some point doesn’t mean your name will be on it.

Leaderboards updated. A bit later today since I had to stream and do some Sunday things.

Leaderboards updated.

There is now only a little over 24 hours left in the contest since the Federation Grand Prix live event concludes at downtime on Tuesday, 23 March. As with all the leaderboard updates so far I won’t have access to the final times until Wednesday. Good luck with the last day of racing!

Leaderboards updated. Only 1 hour to go in the Federation Grand Prix event!

Just a reminder to the previous reminders - the final official leaderboards won’t be known until tomorrow.

Although I can’t promise anything a year ahead of time (game development is a chaotic process), we do hope to bring the Grand Prix back next year in its more traditional time slot in June. The events team is working to build a set of events all across the calendar that we can iterate on each year to improve things and keep them fresh, so we’ll be taking the feedback from this thread into account for changes to next year’s version of the event.

Thanks to everyone who participated!