Le Mans Virtual 24 hours 2023, Verstappen rages

Drive Le Mans blindfolded. Should make for an interesting video. The F1 guys can do that from muscle memory.
(although I'm betting he was listening to the engine sounds)
https://indianexpress.com/article/s...e-track-autodromo-hermanos-rodriguez-8232505/

 

People have said iRacing has been dying for years too. After each high publicity debacle on that service there were a bunch of people saying it would be the end of the service. But they've continued fixing bugs as they've seen them. Think ACC had similar high profile server issues too. Unfortunately these things happen and they will always be an embarrasment.

I've paused my iRacing subscription for a bit because I got bored of same old same old. There's problems with it that have been there for years and whenever you think they're going to release an upgrade, you just get more content instead. Which is great, but eventually you get bored of the sim itself and wonder why they can't invest in it despite recurring revenue for the service itself. There's a heap of problems in rF2 as well, but they appear (in the last year or two at least) to be getting resolved at a slightly faster rate.

In a week or two this will all calm down. But I hope in this time it is largely forgotten only by the players and not by the developers. The reason iRacing is good now is because they've had so many of these embarrassments and have learned from them.

 

The sporting regulations stipulated that in the event of 4 or more disco's simultaneously, they would get their laps back. Which did occur at least twice. Those cars did get their laps restored. The issue with Max is that only two cars disconnected at that time. So to follow the rules, they could not give them the laps back.

 

I've read the whole discussion and I need to straight up some facts.

Few people in this thread said that it was ddos, so it's not s397/rf2/organizers/whoever (pick one) fault. There were two red flags. And only the second got blamed on ddos. The first one seemed to be just a server crash. So whatever the reason and real fault was even the organizers did not blame ddos for all the issues.
Any ddos attacks can be handled and mitigated. Of course this requires knowledge and preparation but I guess lesson learned (if that really was a ddos).
Last years event was without red flags, the inaugural though had them. After that event there was a long post on the S397 webpage about a long process of identifying and later on an update on fixing all those issues. With red flags on other virtual WEC races seems not everything has been fixed.
There is also a matter of those frequent disconnects. Of course when that happens the first thought is that it's the person's internet connection. And I fully agree, that's the most probable and most often the case. But I got a feeling that with how often it happened here, the truth might actually be in the middle. Jimmy has spoken about this as well and he has some experience in such long events in various sims. More so than probably most of us.



As a side note when I started watching the event I was curious whether they'll be brave enough to finally introduce the rain. When they announced that it might rain, my first thought was about all the issues this might cause. Of course we have no idea now whether that was any cause of anything, but even the organizers decided not risk it anymore after red flags. I guess it just goes on par with one of the videos I watched about this whole controversy (I think those linked in this thread) that with rF2 you kinda expect problems.

EDIT: oh, they blame ddos on both red flags now.
https://www.facebook.com/rFactor2/p...iKH8cQny7u8MX3cHrGtMKaUYatmEXUnJasb1K5pB4BB2l

 

Is such a shame all the bad press someone like verstapen can generate with only their comment.
It was unfortunate that he disconnected, say what ever you want from the event and organizers, but he basically boycotts the simulator.
Hope the devs (s397) survive the backlash, that this will bring the opportunity to fix what ever happened and build the confidence again.
They should work with leagues like lfm (with many players) to identify how to make their servers and net code more robust, and even scalable to withstand a ddos (servers clusters, containers, multisite replication, etc, etc).
Of course all this is $$$, and when no one wants to buy your product it puts you in a terrible position to invest more money and time in it

 

Anyone noticed how many views this topic is getting on myriad YouTube channels?

 

I wonder which competitor platform, that is losing its licences to MSG, and has access to up to 15000 online computers at anytime through there platform for a ddos, might stand to gain from all this..

 

It's supposed to be the big official 24hr of Le Mans, sanctioned by the WEC and everything, so it's kind of a big deal for it to have gone so terribly. Easy stuff for YouTubers to make content out of. If it went perfectly, then hardly anyone would be talking about it.

 

Like last year's

And I think that's where perspective gets lost a bit - there were a couple of group disconnections (akin to mechanical issues) with most of the time loss returned, a couple of technical/server issues (akin to bad weather), and finally 2 cars had a disconnection issue. One of them I think had already had issues. The situation was handled in accordance with the rules.

The reason it's getting attention is 1. the leader was affected, 2. It was Max Verstappen. Probably 5% and 95% importance respectively, as far as the post-race coverage goes.


It sucks that this still happens, and I think everyone has some reason to wonder if rF2 drops connections a little too easily (definitely doesn't compare well to other programs in my experience, but I have no online racing in other sims to compare those), and it's fair to expect some movement here. I don't see rF2's future in peril, but the current licensing advantage won't last forever, and it may never return if rF2 can't prove itself useful. In that case it'll remain a good sim, but not a sim used for events - which would help to grow it, if it works well. (as with many things in rF2 - lookin' at you CS!)

 

Outside of disconnections, I think there's room for improvement in the netcode. At least from an external view.

I mean the prediction logic when actually racing feels more solid than iRacing - where you can often have false positive collisions. Then the damage model is a little janky so you can find yourself fired off into a barrier (or spinning like a top for eternity) from the smallest of impact. Maybe the same errors happen in rF2, but instead we get false negatives? I.e. maybe we ought to have crashed but due to uncertainty it decided instead to be kind and give the benefit of doubt?

Either way, I think racing feels good in rF2. Even when you've got a really high ping. But the replay cameras look smoother in iRacing. Which makes broadcast races look more professional on iRacing than on rF2. I think in rF2 you are more aware you are watching a game due to this. It's like we need a little more interpolation in the prediction engine to fill in the blanks and be less jittery.

But really, low priority I guess if they aren't able to fix the connection issues. Because having the fastest driver in the world complaining about it is more harmful than a few people watching the broadcast and thinking it looks a little game-like. Hope they get it sorted because having played all the sims I can say the tracks themselves feel most lifelike in rF2 and the physics is the most natural. Both things that should really give it the edge for events.

 

With all due respect to the guy obviously with 2 times F1 world title but can’t help myself seeing him as a non grownup kid that always find someone or something to blame when things don’t lean his way

so sorry Max but I won’t uninstall RF2 from my PC no
Not now not tomorrow not in a million years

 

I wish I could uninstall Verstappen...

 

Max being Max I guess. Not the first (and probably not the last) time he is blaming someone / something else if things are not working out the way he likes.

Of course those disconnects should be examined, maybe things can be improved. But speaking out of experience, doing lots of endurance events, I've never had a random disconnect, if not my whole internet was wonky.
Seeing issues on the server side like mass disconnects, yep, thats something not so uncommon. But then usually those events are red flagged anyways.
Might be, that rF2 is pretty tight with how stable a connection needs to be, so you not get disconnected, but on the other hand, if things work, we've got the best netcode for wheel to wheel racing. Simply compare that to iR where often it's enough for a car to be half a meter away to get hit by it. Speaking for myself, I prefer the rF2 solution big times.

The whole story is really made bigger than it was. What did we have, which we know for sure? A DDoS after server informations have been leaked and some random disconnects which are not very uncommon with having so much drivers from so many places. Especially the latter one could have happened on every platform.
If there have been other issues, like rain causing the first mass dc (if it wasn't a ddos), yep for sure that needs to be solved for the future. but everything else, right now, seems to be pretty easy to explain.

After all, I've enjoyed watching quite a few hours of this event. There have been some good battles and the real-racers did an amazing job keeping up with the simmers.

 

Imo a lot in this topic are missing the main point.
It really does not matter much what the cause was or if Verstappen was throwing a hissy fit or not.

The reality is that over the last decade or so a significant part of the sim racing community has given RF2 a (or multiple) shots. And they left because of bugs, ai issues, ui issues, online issues, etc. etc. Only a small group of diehards (you, me, most on this forum) are left playing this game.

Everyone over here wants RF2 to fullfill its potential. But for that it needs to improve its game & regain the trust of the simracing community that isnt playing anymore (so that the game makes money and has the funds to invest).
And MSG/RF2 needs to be a 'good news-show' for a longer period of time, not just a nice update at the end of the year, but structural good steps so that slowly the community starts believing in this game again.

Imo the last year or so has not helped at all with all the negative MSG news and stories, and this disaster of a 24h just set us back a year or 2.

 

In fact, something weird might have happened. We've running endurance events here in Portugal for 2 years without problems, including 24H events...

 

They said they were DDoS attacked. This has happened to ACC during a large event and has been happening for about a decade on iRacing. Sim racing has traffic conditions that looks a lot like DDoS attacks at the best of times. Which makes it difficult to guard against.

People saying they've run endurance events for years aren't pulling the kind of attention to warrant someone attacking them. But when it comes to events like VLMs, there's a load of attention on it and likely more than a person or two who would like to see it fail unfortunately.

 

Unfortunately this will surely have an impact on MSG and their standing with possible investors that don't understand sim racing?
MSG always refer to their prestigious online events in their quarterly financial statements and the licences they hold for events like this are not only significant from a reputational view but also financial as these have to be paid for.

It looks like the agreement with ACO and WEC runs to 2031 so in theory this should be safe but the licences for these are held by a separate business "Le Mans Esports Series Limited" which is a joint venture between Motorsport Games and ACO.

Everyone with even a slim interest in motorsport will have heard of Max Verstappen so his statement that he's going to uninstall rF2 going around on YouTube, Twitter, etc. must be considered a "bad thing" for MSG.
On the other side, MV is well know for "spitting his dummy out" and his attitude at the end of Brazil 2022 race when he ignored a team order to let Perez through perhaps shows that he's not always the easiest person to work with.

The other car in the Redline team won overall though

 

Steam will do this for you.

 

Another aspect of this is that I suspect that we all have one or more random disconnects during the day, we just don't notice as it doesn't affect what we are doing.
I work from home and will sometimes have to reboot my router - not often but it does sometimes happen.
I also received an email from my broadband provider advising me that work they were doing to be doing would cause a seven hour downtime period. OK it was overnight but that wouldn't help me if I was doing a 24 hour race.

I work for a firm that provides a SaaS solution and we don't guarantee a 100% uptime; I don't think that the Virtual Le Mans would or can guarantee a 100% uptime either.

 

Yes, that's something someone joining this kind of events must factor in as a risk.

I remember last year virtual Le Manse, there where some drivers on site, not remote; that could mitigate issues with high profile drivers and bad press from them.

Anyhow, what happened has happened and now damage control must be done and trust from the sim racing community rebuild.
I enjoy rf2 more than any other sim and surely won't be uninstalling it any time soon. But like many here just wish to see the simulator gets the attention it deserve