Roadmap #4: Filling The Grid

So far this series has been about what I am building. This one is about who I am building it for, and how I intend to find them.

Let me start with a word I will not use.

We Are Not A League

You will never see the DEC described as a league. Not in an article, not in a Discord announcement, not in a reply to a comment.

In sim racing, "league" has come to mean something casual: a group of friends, flexible rules, decisions made by whoever is awake. There is nothing wrong with that, and plenty of people are looking for exactly it. It is simply not what this is.

The DEC is a competition. If I want teams to treat it like a professional organisation, I have to speak like one from the first sentence, before there is any track record to point at. Who We Are Looking For

I am not trying to attract everyone with a copy of Le Mans Ultimate. I am looking for people who prepare. Drivers who practise before a round, who lift when they are clearly beaten into a corner, who can lose a position without turning it into a three-day Discord argument. The goal for Season 1 is a grid of at least 24 teams made of exactly those people, and I would genuinely rather run 18 good ones than 30 with a problem in the middle.

To find them, I will be where they already are: the official Le Mans Ultimate forums, Reddit and the dedicated Discord communities.

The Net And The Mesh

Some competitions filter their entry list at the gate, with high fees, invitation-only grids or pre-qualifying shootouts. I understand why. I am not doing it, because gatekeeping like that mostly filters for free time and existing connections, and it keeps out the exact newcomers a fresh grid needs.

So the DEC casts a wide net. Entry is genuinely open, and the process is designed to be easy.

The filtering happens afterwards, through the mesh. The regulations are strict and, as Roadmap #2 explained, they are applied identically to everyone by a system that does not care who you are. A driver who cannot race respectfully will accumulate penalties, and they will not enjoy the experience of racing here for very long.

The result is a competition that filters itself, gradually, into a grid of people who wanted to race cleanly in the first place. That takes longer than a gate. It also gets you better neighbours on track.

And We Need Officials

A competition is only as good as the people running it, so I am also recruiting Staff and Stewards, in places like the r/Simracingstewards community.

If you have ever stewarded anywhere, you know the real problem. It is not the difficult decisions. Difficult decisions are interesting. It is the administration: the spreadsheets, the timestamps copied by hand, the same question asked in three channels, the two hours of paperwork wrapped around fifteen minutes of actual judgement.

My promise to officials is short. Steward the race, do not fight the spreadsheets. The platform does the paperwork, and you do the part that needs a human. If that sounds like the version of the job you always wanted, come and talk to me.

Proof Instead Of Advertising

I do not have an advertising budget, and I am not sure I would use one if I did. Trust is not something you can buy attention for. It is something people conclude about you after watching for a while. So the plan is simply to be visible about how we operate.

Every published decision goes into a permanent public archive. On its own, one decision proves nothing. But two seasons of them, side by side, become something no marketing copy can match: hard evidence of whether we actually treat everyone the same.

It also gives you something to hold us to. If you believe a decision does not line up with the way the same incident was handled in an earlier round, you have the archive to point at, and your team manager can appeal it. Staff review the case against that precedent, and if they agree the regulations were applied inconsistently, the decision is overturned.

Consistency is not a promise that we will never get one wrong. It is a promise that when we do, you can prove it, and we will fix it. For the genuinely controversial incidents, the ones that would normally spawn a week of arguing, I want to go further and produce "Inside the Stewards' Room" videos: replay footage with a clear walkthrough of how the decision was reached. Partly to educate the grid, and partly because most sim racing toxicity grows in the gap where an explanation should have been.

Growing Without Growing The Workload

There is an obvious trap here. Every one of these commitments creates work, and Roadmap #1 promised this organisation would not run on somebody's endless personal sacrifice.

So later in development, the platform will generate its own media. Race results, pole position announcements and championship standings become properly designed images automatically, and the app posts them to Discord and social media by itself.

Nobody formats a graphic. Nobody remembers to post the standings on a Monday. The competition keeps a visible, professional presence, and it costs zero additional human hours.