Thought I'd fire up rFactor 2 and see what's new since I noticed I've missed various "MAJOR UPDATES" since I last tried it according to Steam. Must have a few improvements, nice! Can't see anything really improved in the UI, still feels really clunky with pauses between screens. Clicking "customize" to get to any useful actual race configuration still says "please wait" while it refreshes servers, despite me never caring about that. But wait, there's a new competition tab - let's go! Competition tab is strangely void of, well, anything! I see "Active sessions" and a button that says "more". Guess I have to click it! Ok so zero explanation what's going on, so I click around a while, agree to god knows what and after ignoring competitions that tell me to open shopping cart, I subscribe to the Tatuus Winter Series - nice! We have 4 main navigation "buttons"; Summary, Sessions, Schedule, Standings. Weird because I can't see a way to start any kind of practice or anything. The UI is flickering around trying to reload dynamic parts of the screen which just makes it all feel quite cheap. Ok it tells me I need to subscribe to some more content - click the button and, oh the UI has frozen and it's now given me that Windows 10 circle showing the game has locked up while it presumably downloads and install whatever content was missing. I patiently wait a minute and my control comes back, could be worse I guess but can't help wonder why the hell the "new UI" that was years in development behaves in such a user unfriendly manner. I still can't find a way to start anything, oh a random error popped up "Error fetching competition standings (500 - BDAAFE-058597). Let's just return to the competitions menu from the dropdown, click, click, nope nada. Back button is working though. I'm going to stop here and just say that it's clearly a substandard experience, some might say extremely substandard! I've spent a fair bit of cash on the DLC since S397 took over and I'm glad I stopped 6 months ago when I realised nothing was ever going to come of this sim. I feel bad for them, but when you consistently roll out this trash you are going to lose some respect. Yes it's a BETA, so what, does that mean you can't do a bit of testing before serving it up to the masses? Why is it not in a beta branch if they know it's so poor. I love the idea of a competition system, but it's blindingly apparent that if I wanted to invest time in it, I will need to come to terms with an extremely bad user experience. It's 2021 guys, we shouldn't have to do that. Apart from these silly gripes, there's a smorgasbord of other problems that remain unaddressed that I notice others complaining about. The problem is that the cost of the DLC content they are pumping out is is high, and you've got to be very naive to think that the quality of this stuff is going to improve to a state that is acceptable. I fully respect others who want to support S397 through this, but I'm out!
Comp system is a first release beta. Expect join issues, scoring issues etc as they sort thru all the data collected. Other errors, mainly for offline users are on hold until the UI and Comp systems are fleshed out. Have a great day, plenty of other titles to keep you occupied.
Other than the fact that I am not a big fan of the new UI myself I see barely any big issues with how the competition system works, atleast on my end and everything is pretty straight forward with a few little issues that are clearly on their to-do list. There is nothing clunky or anything like that and if you aren't running very old hardware or have a bad internet connection it should work rather flawless. What's so bad about content getting updated automaticly that is needed for the competition? I don't get it. It takes a few seconds to download the vmod and that's it. After that downloaded you can see how much time is remaining till next race and start practicing with the vmod, wich btw. lists all content and layouts used in the competition. What's your proposal for the so called "issue"? Hunting down for the content on your own? Do people even think before they write such nonesense? I mean, there is alot of things that could be done better but the whole joining process is as smooth as it gets. More complex competitions will be added and it's only the first draw. It's not that hard to understand, really.
