I definitely will participate.
This is still the best event of the year.
Nothing equals it in terms of tension of pushing through night rain and storm to advance the team, and online cameraderie.
Nevertheless I have a few gripes where I see room for improvement to foster participation to the race:
1) Length of the race/running the race into the work week.
The race running till the middle of the week is pretty tough on the ballance between sim/private/work life, and by wednesday dedicated pilots get pretty drained after several nights with little sleep.
Also, it can get very pretty lonely Tue/Wed morning around 8:00Z when US ppl go to bed.
I'd appreciate if the race could be run on week-ends only.
Something like this: Split the race in two parts and run over two week-ends.
Week-end 1 (about 35-40 hrs of race time):
Start as usual around 15:00Z on 1st saturday.
Run the race non-stop until sunday night. Last flights to start not later than something like 6:00Z monday morning (asia ppl + late US ppl + early EU ppl online).
Then Race stops for the teams where these flights ended till the next WE.
Week-end 2:
Start friday evening something like 24:00Z (US ppl home from work).
Run non-stop to the finish line (probably 35-50 hrs flight time remaining judging from last races).
IMO that would allow for a more healthy compromise between work and sim life and would reduce the stress of the race (and I suspect that Fri/sat nights more pilots would be online than Mon/Tue/Wed nights)
2) Apparent steep learning curve for Newcomers, and fears of hurting the team.
I remember my trepidation when joining the RTWR about letting the team down by crashing or other newbie errors.
But that has been greatly addressed by the Rookie Mulligans introduced last year, which should definitely be continued into this year (and maybe even in addition to the free baton transfer a landing crash should be accepted as valid flight with a moderate penalty like 30 min ?).
With the Rookie Mulligan a newcomer making an error has very little risk of hurting the team as long as he's flying with a solid wingman, which would take a heavy weight off a newcomer's shoulder.
Looking forward to meet ya all in the race
