Got Banned from iRacing AND their subreddit for 2 Weeks for Off-Platform Behavior aka Reddit Trolling - Discovered many great things about their platform in the meantime

A week ago I got banned for alleged intentional wrecking. This was a weird ban though, because there was no subsession ID or description attached, and my protest was filed at 6:34 PM then 11 minutes later I received my ban. All after hours. Strange.

Turns out iRacing went full Big Brother and was able to use sensitive data to track my anonymous Reddit account and trace it back to my real life name and iRacing account. They claimed I admitted to intentionally wrecking somebody publicly and that was enough for them. I never got protested in the sim, however.

I argued that it was not me the driver, but the Reddit character of JUULFiendFortnite that did this. I may have exaggerated several elements of the story I told in my post and a steward decided to ban be after hours as if I’d truly committed this crime. I was not given the opportunity to fairly appeal, as there was no incident to steward. Basically, they banned me because they didn’t like my Reddit content and it upset them enough that they had to de-anonymize (internally doxx) my Reddit profile. Oh well.

What I’ve discovered about iRacing is they have some pretty cool stuff available away from the official races.

AI RACING

Did you know you can create your own season and race for championships against AI? I’m still trying to figure out the best settings to make this as realistic and as challenging as possible for me, but this is really fun. If I’m kind of tipsy, in a bad mood that could affect my judgement or just don’t feel like getting run over by a bunch of idiots, I’ll hop into this going forward. I could’ve avoided many skirmishes in the past if I’d known about this.

HOSTED SESSIONS

I’ve made many friends and been invited to many** **leagues as a result of being involved in several hosted sessions over this past week. These are a lot of fun, especially amongst the dirt oval community which always has hosteds going on. I’m going to be doing a lot more dirt racing when I return to official competition as I’ve gotten a lot better at it this week. I’ve been invited to multiple dirt racing leagues this week.

Sometimes real drivers do hosted sessions too. I actually did one with Corey Heim, and unfortunately I found out him and his friends are actually a bunch of jerks who don’t deserve for you to root for them when they race in real life. Still, I’m glad I got to do that.

I even did a dirt demo derby which was a lot of fun, which I actually won! I avoided wrecking the entire time and let the rest of the field beef with each other. Went slow, used my brakes a lot, and came out with the victory. This is stuff you’d never get to try on the officials.

Overall, I am definitely looking forward to my return to official competition this Wednesday evening. But I now know I have alternatives when I am not 100% to do officials.

Since I know iRacing is now monitoring my Reddit account, I’ll give them a few pointers. I wish you could race AI on dirt ovals. I also wish the AI raced more like real people. Maybe some emotions and the ability to defend positions better. But I’m sure that’ll come in a future update.

Maybe the addition of a Bad Sport lobby like GTA has would be nice too. A real punishment would be putting all the banned guys together. I’m a pretty clean racer and some of the behavior in these hosteds has me sick this week. But I’ve also gotten in a few good ones and that’s been amazing.