Working Filters! That's what we need,then we can 'hide' the bumf that is of no use to us. Passworded servers Differing build servers Why do we need to see them? Fix the (I have the mod and current track let me join). Plus the mod needs to be defined in MM. No way of knowing unless the host has specified it in the name.
Wonder if some sort of flagging system would work? For example having a drop down which says"Public" and "league" in the dedi exe. With a filter system it would be another option to separate them? I guess that might fall under passworded or non passworded though.
Bik3rs website can do all this and the above that I mentioned,ISI needs to employ him in one way or another.
There are lots of people running public servers already like ISR and fun2race and others too who's servers are always up 24/7 and get missing component always works without fail. I do not see it will make a great deal of difference adding back the ISI servers to be honest. The reason that there are so few players around is not because of the lack of any official ISI servers, I am pretty sure of that. In my case and many others, this game has been in a literally unplayable state for 2.5 months out of the last 12 months. A matchmaker that simply does not work and ISI show 0% interest in fixing, nobody can race! Cars disappearing randomly during races, builds with collision detection that simply does not work and cars are crashing into fresh air, cars jumping up and down in the air doing ridiculous things, servers that require the utmost of determination just to get in them, builds that stutter so bad the sim is totally unplayable. These have all happened in the 2 years I have been racing RF2. And they all just get left out there for 6 weeks a shot compounding the damage needlessly. That join button fiasco sunk more than one league on RF2. And good leagues too. Their members stop playing because ISI have ensured it is impossible for them to play, the donations dry up, servers are not cheap, the place folds. None of them players are likely to play RF2 again. The damage done by these incidents is enormous and semi permanent. There was a guy who put considerable effort in migrating a league from RF1 to RF2 around that time. They are all there in large numbers on RF2 getting ready for the new season, then ISI hit us with some joke builds. Again it was the join button thing - the unplayable build and it has not been the only one. All them guys were literally LAUGHING at RF2! They were laughing at it! The sim simply did not work! They all went back to RF1 and will probably never return. Tragic. ISI inflict these wounds on themselves and on all of us who are interested in racing on line. The next train wreck I can see on the horizon is this. The release of the nascar mod will possibly - hopefully - bring in a lot of new players, perhaps many from iRacing. Them iRacing boys, they are accustomed to everything just working and working good. It is super slick, sure the game experience may be 2nd rate, but if you take the all important game experience out of the equation you will find that everything is just fantastic. The multiview support is top notch. Got an SLI system? No problem it just works as it does on every sim except RF2. Their matchmaker system is 2nd to none. They do not put out builds that are totally screwed up and if they ever did I would imagine they would fix it or roll it back within days as they would recognise they are slaying down their own players and community by failing to do so. Wouldn't it be a tragedy if a lot of iRacing players turned up here for the nascar and they all loved RF2 and never intended to play iRacing again, but within months we are likely to get another lemon build and for reasons I cannot fathom NOTHING happens and that build just stays out there for 6 weeks and people literally cannot race! No matter how much they love RF2 they are probably gonna go back to iRacing just because iRacing works and you can start and finish race on iRacing. It does not matter to me or anyone who really loves RF2 that there are many seriously rough edges to the sim whilst it is in development, we can all live with that but when there are massive god damn holes in the ship and water is coming in fast I think it would be wise to take such a situation a tad more seriously in future. Fiddling around forcing forcing some official ISI servers up to the top of matchmaker or changing the colours of something is nothing more than chicken feed. Lets address the real source of this problem, for which there is no magic fix. The damage has been done, it is not so easy to undo it. The players are just not there. It can only be improved by hard work which is maintained over a long period - then things may grow naturally then, and flourish naturally - it just take time that is all. What needs to happen is for the multiplayer to be up and running 12 months a year with builds that you can start and finish races with 12 months a year. If something goes horribly wrong it is not such a problem if it is quickly rolled back or given a hot fix, if that does not happen decay and stagnation are assured. I am not asking for perfection here, just for something that works and that alone will work wonders on the multiplayer 100x more successfully than any official ISI server ever can. If this had been done over the last 2 years, and I do not see any reason why it could not, I am pretty sure there would be 200% or 300% more players active on RF2 today . Perhaps a lot more. There would be no need to be having this discussion today because the multiplayer would be healthy and vibrant all by itself. The burn rate of new players is ENORMOUS! And so needlessly too. So many players really love it but just give up on it cause of so many problems. Only the really committed remain it seems in large part to me. There is no need to burn so many players, it is just so futile. Continuity is the key. Keep the multiplayer up and running pretty much all year round and give us builds that are capable of completing races in and business will automatically take care of itself, because this is the best sim out there. ISI need to separate the annoyances from the show stoppers, and react to the show stoppers quickly in future and do something about it, else this continuity and natural growth cannot happen. These years could be used so more effectively with not too much more effort from ISI, just an acceptance to take seriously large holes that appear below the waterline would make a tremendous difference. The way I feel is that during these in development years we should be able to build the multiplayer up and up over time so that by the time RF2 is finished the online environment is already vibrant and all sorts of servers are up catering for many interests, the more this can happen the better clearly. Then when the thing is done there will be an awesome online racing environment already there ready to go from day 1 of its official launch, I wish ISI would change their ways and stop kicking us all in the teeth at such regular intervals in order that such a thing can happen. If I throw weed killer all over my garden every 6 months it will look baron and dead 12 months a year, after 5 months the green shoots of recovery are visible and then I am out there again stamping on them pouring weed killer all over the place - it does not require Albert Einstein to inform us why the flowers will not grow as well as they could!
Yes, there is much truth in what you wrote here hardtohandle! Although the official ISI-servers-problem fits perfectly in that scenario: Once there are present, then they stopped this service for month, then they are there, not there, - seems they decide on daily mood. The worst thing is indeed that many interesting leagues happend to appear once upon a time and as many had to shut down because of too less driver! Me was also a "victim" of this as I searched and joined a club, and before I could really start and get into this- it closed it´s doors! BUM! Then my online subscription expired and guess what? I will NOT renew it (for "now",- and "now" can be years)!!!
What is currently wrong with the matchmaker? I've not seen anyone having problems joining our servers. Cars disappearing, collision detection issues, ect ect was all a little up in the air on 930 due to CPU usage causing the physics to drop out of real time. This was an isolated problem. You make it sound like the game is completely unusable. Have a look at about a hundred hours of footage from our races and show me where cars are crashing into thin air or bouncing around and disappearing. I hope you have lots time because it's a lot of footage: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSLEilfJxDJtXHagrSCVZcQ/videos I'm not saying there haven't been problems. But as a league it has been manageable. Holding back builds and stuff like that. We were on 798 for several builds until 910 came out. Then we stuck with 910 until 946 came out.And we aren't the only successful league that stuck with these builds for a while. In a perfect world buggy builds wouldn't happen and if they did a fix would come out quick. Maybe one day we will have that perfect world. Until then admins will have to do their job and hold onto old builds until new builds meet their requirements. TBH I haven't noticed a drop in MM numbers. I'm seeing the same daily spike in numbers just as it has been for years. I'm not saying 250 - 300 users at peak time slots is all that impressive. I'm simply saying it isn't dropping as so many people seem to be spreading as fact.
You know a lot of stuff Noel, but your memory is not so good. I was talking of the last 2 years - all of those things have happened. You skirted around some of the issues by not using the faulty builds. But they existed and they hurt the multiplayer and game in general in precisely the way I describe.
My memory is fine. As you said, we skirted around some problems. It's really not that hard for a league to do. Lets take Microsoft Windows for example. Look how many companies refuse to update when MS releases an update. Sometimes even MS gets stuff wrong. Are we all rushing to Macs? Nope.... why... because they get stuff wrong too. Corporations do their own vetting of new iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows, Linux and OSX builds. Oh hell... I could go on and on.... MS Office... ect ect. They all mess up sometimes. Here is another example. On iOS I've had a bug which prevented me from swiping to unlock the phone when a call comes in. I think it's due to the proximity sensor because it only really happens if I rip it out of my pocket and then try to answer. Most of the time I can put my thumb over the proximity sensor and then swip again and it will work. I've had this problem on my 3G, 4, 4S and now 6. Then finally iOS 8.3 comes out and this line is in the change log: Code: Addresses an issue that sometimes prevented swiping to answer a phone call on the Lock screen I about fell out of my seat. Not every bug is as clear cut and easy to fix as so many people want to think. My point is, no dev studio gets it right 100% of the time. Treat new builds just like large corporations treat updates to windows. I really don't think these few bad builds are the cause of the low numbers though. I think it's a combination of things. Personally I think rF2 would do much better if it had a MM on par with what iRacing is offering. Then again, look at leagues in iR. The sim as you say is stable yet leagues in iR can't compete with the default series that iR runs.
The Gen 6 cars WON'T bring anyone from iRacing. They have all licensed content with all the tracks in the Cup series anyway. Plus it's a "lifestyle" product. If ISI or anyone is interested in creating a buzz over there their best best would be to get dirt oval going. That is the only thing that would interest the iracing crowd.
Or a full endurance series with more than one car per class. With their licensing budget I'm amazed after all these years that they haven't expanded on the individual classes that much.
Some of the iracing oval guys I know (granted VERY small sample) are super excited about the stock cars here. Mainly because of realroad and such. I also have to side with Noel on this whole online discussion. The only times I've seen funky player behaviour online I've restarted my dedi and it's been fine after. The only proper issue I have ever had while being a server admin in this platform was the join button problem. Numbers did suffer in that period but they came back up when it was fixed. I simply don't feel the situation (or rather lack of one) is as bad as you say, hard. My community are enjoying higher numbers here than on iracing (we run series on both). There is no issue for numbers here. Admins just need to run the right events at the right times for their audience.
Nothing and I never said it was. No need to waste my time on that, I can show you precisely what you ask for here. Your memory did let you down Noel, we are talking about different builds re the faulty collision detection. That was Jan 2014 not B930. That may look like lag in video, but it is not it is faulty collision detection, there was a lot of fresh air between me and sirBodo. Look at what happened afterwards! Monzageddon! 30 guys practiced and practiced for that race, hundreds of laps! Some drivers 1000+ laps. 30 guys practiced for at least 2 weeks, and at the end ONE LAP this happens. Total farce. Now that is ONE example on ONE day of ONE player in ONE race in ONE server in ONE faulty build WELL over one year ago. How many driver hours do you think went into preparing for that ONE single race? Look at the carnage! How many man hours at ISI would it have took to issue a hot fix or a rollback? Just hardcode one setting only, a 10 minute job + the time to make the hot fixed build that is how much. Shall we do a quick costs/benefits analysis in our minds or should we not waste our time? If that is one race, how good for the game is it do you think to have that in every race, on every server, every day on that build that did not get fixed and did not get rolled back? What effects might be caused on the RF userbase because of these things do you think? Positive ones? Many players leaving the game that would otherwise be joining and staying. Commenting out ONE line of code, issuing a hot fix and making the whole god damn mess go away seems like a BIG cheap EASY win to ISI for me or I am just being too negative here? We have discussed the pros and cons if individually rolling back builds before Noel and we were of differing opinions, I did not change my mind since then. That does not matter anyway, and this is why. What is the thread about Noel? Ashes! Ashes wants to drop in some servers on weekday nights and do some racing! And we want players like Ashes to be staying on with the game rather than walking away after a couple of months right? You are running a specialised endurance league with 6 hours race or whatever they are. Most people that log onto RF2 are not looking for a 6 hour endurance race and Ashes is one of them, he is looking for 20 minute sprint races. Ashes, a relatively new player who is still here thankfully, arrives fully equipped with the latest build of RF2 to do some racing. These players are the future lifeblood of the game! There is a big difference between public server 20 min sprint races and your private specialised endurance league. Are you seriously telling me Noel, that these new incoming players - not to mention the rest of us (!) should be required to scour up and down forums finding out workarounds, not to mention downloading and installing the whole god damn game to a previous build just in order to do some pick up racing? That is absurd! Would this have much of an effect on the burn rate of the all important new players coming into the game do you think? Those are the guys that might be signing up to your 6 hour endurance league before too long! Don't you get it? This is NOT about the inconvenience it may cause to committed players like you and me Noel - as you say "It's really not that hard for a league to do". Your right it is not so hard, but it is irrelevant! Your guys race every 6 weeks or so once for 6 hours, Ashes and pretty much all of the new players coming in are looking for something different, and these player are future lifeblood of the game. Will 100% of them all say 'Hey OK! I will go through a lot of inconvenience and reinstall everything just to do a 20 min sprint race and fight this sim like a war just to play it!'? Will they? No! There is a serious loss of new players for a start! That is seriously detrimental the RF2 userbase and multiplayer vibrancy to say the very least! When I first read your posts a few day ago it was 2am Noel. That means it was 9pm for you in Florida - prime time USA week day evening slot There was 30 people online at that moment in time. 30 people racing in the big old US of A. Your right it is not that impressive, but it is what it is. It was 30 2 years ago too, wouldn't it be better if it was 100 today? I am sure it could have so easily been that way Noel. Just roll the lemon builds back. Some of you may feel I am doing RF2 no good myself coming here talking like this. I say no! I am the most positive person here! See Noel and Rich with all this 'oh they are trying their best, blah, bugs happen, blah, the match maker is not declining blah, we must live with the burden, blah'. Not declining? So stagnation is good? The chart should be going UP this is the best sim out there! -I- am the positive guy with a better vision for the future, THEY are the negative nay sayers saying we must accept all this crap and just because it is not totally dead then that must be ok. NO! None of it is necessary! And the upside maybe significant for the whole game and all of us! This requires ALMOST NO extra work from ISI, this is a decision making issue only! Yes! A nice break from the usual proceedings now Noel, I fully agree with you! That is correct. Your a software engineer, so am I. I know all about c++. These guys are not having their arses wiped for them by the dot net platform like you! What they are doing is TOUGH! One stale pointer and boom it is all over! And lets be fair - RF2 almost never crashes whilst on track - the crucial time. It is very solid there. I have never sought to demoralise any of they devs in my rants, they are wizz coders! They are a small outfit, iRacing get hit in the face with wads of cash every morning, these are the underdogs and these are the guys that made the best sim. Now the short lived break is over Noel I am afraid. Firstly. Because the above is true - and it is irrelevant! These boys made an F40 against the odds, and then give it to us with three wheels? How much use is an F40 with three wheels Noel? Don't you see the tragedy of it? When all that F40 needs is one missing component to roar, they do not give it to us! They do nothing and make us wait 6 weeks for next build! They should put that damn missing wheel to UPS and get it to us overnight! Not some workaround in a forum - a hot fix so everybody gets it not just the determined hardcore players, the all important new players and casual too. Stupid not to really, isn't it? And secondly. That is not even the issue anyway! It is not the issue for me that the bugs happen - they will always happen of course we know that! But this is the thing Noel! The is many things that has gotten on my tits over the last 2 years. There is only 2 things that I will never stop bitching about though. The join button fiasco, and build 930 CPU spike (and serious server bugs too actually). BOTH god damn occasions they had the solution and ability to make the whole god damn mess go away VERY quickly VERY easily! It was right their in their hands the whole god damn time! How so? It sounds too miraculous to be true! It is simple Noel. You ROLL THE BUILD BACK for join-button-gate. For 930 you ROLL IT BACK - OR - you find those small lines of code that is screwing everything up, fix/revert them, and put out a new build immediately as a hot fix. And the whole damn mes goes away. That is MY POINT. It takes them very little effort! The huge damage that is inflicted on the game, the multiplayer, the players and our leagues is almost completely averted - almost for free! Again, a BIG cheap EASY WIN for ISI here - but no - ISI get a bag of weed and stare out the window for six weeks whilst blazing it!! That makes me angry. Our league is all messed up, they are smoking spliffs, I will never accept that! Not doing that roll back/hot fix when they have the solution in their hands, that is a sheer arrogance! And all of us suffer badly for their arrogance! As you say, maybe Apple feel they can get away with such arrogance, but not ISI! Not with me anyway, that is for sure. And I KNOW they had the problem located very early Noel, within days of 930 being released! Because short before 930 I did email Tim about the mysterious vanishing of Ari Antero from this forum. Then 930 comes out and I am hit myself, we exchange messages about this, I am offering to test etc - Tim tells me they gonna send me an exe to test on my system. Then very soon afterwards, another message to say do not worry! They devs have located the problem! No test was ever sent, that was days after 930 release. Then we have to wait 6 weeks for 946? No! That is a terrible mistake! They should have put that multithreaded physics back to the way it was, and nothing else, and send out new build. Problem solved! But they do not do it, serious harm done to game and mulitplayer for NO reason. RF2 is the only game I have and I don't want no more. Last gaming I did was in early 90's playing Indy 500 on 16 bit Atari ST. During 930, even me, a committed player did feel like packing up simracing altogther and selling the wheel. I did think what the **** am I doing running a league 12 months year on a sim that only works 9.5 months a year? What the **** am I doing running a league THAT I CANNOT EVEN RACE IN MYSELF - when I KNOW DAMN WELL ISI have the solution in their hands all the time but they cannot be arsed to give it to me. I did think these things. RF2 is not for pickup racing I hear some people sneer. RF2 is for leeeeeeague racing they say with an aloof tone in their vioce. Well there is very little pick up racing for sure - not a good sign for incoming players - and I almost never completed one league season without being knocked out of races by faulty builds that never got rolled back and never got hot fixed. During 930 I did try GSC-E just for something to race. I resented ISI so much I felt THEY should pay for MY copy of GSC! I bought this sim, I have one already it is RF2. I paid my years subs. I WANT TO PLAY IT. In January, June and November I wan to be able to start races, finish races, and not have anything silly happen in between That is all, the very basics is all I really require. If committed players of RF2 only are driven to that, what the hell do you think the effect is on the userbase at large Noel, and all the new players coming in? You worked around it in your endurance league, good for you, that does not mean nothing! Well I got my money back on GSC pronto as I found a stuttering RF2-930 beats a 100% functional GSC hands down. I am a VERY patient man! This ill feeling started for me actually way back with that lola crash in the video above, Jan 2014. Faulty collision detection Noel. I did fire off a pretty stiff email to Wheatley at that point and was surprised to receive a rather pleasant yet unhelpful reply. Then the join button fiasco. What a god damn joke. THAT - 1 year ago now - THAT was the straw that broke the camels back for me. That's when ISI really blew it with me. Way back then 1 year ago. But always my mouth stays shut. Then I end up taking over an RF1 outfit that did not manage to make the jump from RF1 to RF2 very well - one of the oldest if not the oldest active sim racing groups of all they was gonna close it down - mainly because nobody could ever get into their server for their first season on rf2, and yes the admin was a very experienced pair of hands and he could just not make it work. Not with a password anyway. They just gave up with it! So I step in. So I run their 2nd season on RF2. Things get a lot better! With the help of a popular mod the place is full of life once more! Many guys in the server all the time! Practicing religiously, taking it really seriously! Fantastic! Many hundreds of practice laps. Hours and hours! Refining setups, sharing them with everybody. These are not gamers these are simracers taking the championship seriously! On race 2 one of them guys missed the race cause of 'server connect failed'. That really pissed me off, because now I am the guy running the show, what is this? Then race 3 - build 930. Boom. FOUR of them players who was really enjoying that league and putting in great amounts of work and helping other drivers too. Whack - they are gone - CPU spikes. I was one of them! That is not what really pisses me off, it is the bigger picture that is the reason I having begun railing on this forum. 930, that was straw that got placed on the large pile of straws that already lay on the collapsed camels back. Now, my patience run out guys. Now, I am really ****ing pissed off. 930 may be gone, but I am still here. I did a race on weds in FR35 and I knew then I will carry on simracing as RF2 is so awesome. I will never play anything but RF2. That means I am going nowhere, you are stuck here with me guys, I will always be here. Until ISI change their ways I will always be railing against the failure to anything whatsoever about the critical faults even when they have the god damn solution in their hands the whole time. I have this drum here. I will keep on banging it and banging it and banging it and banging it and I will NEVER stop now! You pissed on me too much too long ISI. Let me be clear. All this HAS EVER been about is the CRITICAL FAULTS. The join button. The CPU spikes. Nothing else. The game can have 500 non critical bugs, I do not care about that! Unless Tim or Gjon come here and say "Hey hard, your right we ****ed up a little bit too much, in future we will roll the builds back for the CRITICAL faults" then I will always be here railing against my experiences. I will not tolerate it any more. Somebody gotta do it! I will bang this drum now on and on and on and on I will never stop until ISI shut me up by doing what is right for me, them and the game in general. I demand the most minimal of basic requirements only - that you can universally start and finish the races 12 month year. 9.5 months year? Sorry Gjon that just does not cut it with me. Beta - yes. In development - NO. Says right here in my game - "The community starts with - hardtohandle". Well here I am! I hope you understand me now Noel. ISI : THIS IS COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE! FIX THE CRITICAL PROBLEMS OR ROLL THE BUILDS BACK! GIVE US A SYSTEM THAT MEETS THE -VERY- BASIC MINIMUM STANDARDS ANYONE WOULD EXPECT! 12 MONTHS A YEAR SO THE LAWN CAN GROW WITHOUT YOUR REGULAR DOSES OF WEEDKILLER. ALLOW THE MULTIPLAYER TO GROW SO THAT ASHES AND OTHER LIKE HIM HAS SOMEWHERE TO RACE AND STAY ON RF2! Many thanks.
Yup, that's how collisions were prior to ISI getting them sorted. There was a build they tried to fix it with some new system, which made it even worse (it was early 2014, I bet it was same build as in your video). After that they nailed collisions and has been pretty ok since. It's how Assetto Corsa was as well when first released in multiplayer, only recently has it become somewhat playable with collisions (even that is still very far off rF2 current collision prediction). It was a fiasco, but it was over a year ago, give it a rest. rF2 should simply had kept Beta status for one year longer, only 2014 spring things started to come together. After that FSR league has used every build (our season is March-November), we didn't have to skip a single build last year. Including build 930 this year, CPU bug only concerned 1 or 2 of our hundred racers. You can still install old lite build over the old, isn't very complicated process. The day rF2 moves to Steam this option is gone though, will always be latest build if you want to play online.
That doesn't matter because he wasn't one of the 1-2% of supposed people, or for example paid for his 12 months of online and didn't get the service he paid for.
The GEN6 IMHO will bring more iracing players here as they do not have the features ISI has with RF2.
Why would they switch over if they have dozens of Nascar tracks available and a dedicated championship?
Just put rF2 back into a 'Beta' stage,simples. You can cover a multitude of sins under the beta flag. I hate trying to race online with rF2. Some servers easy to join but in general it's a PITA.
+1 It truly is a PITA. I love ISI's vision. I love ISI's approach to pricing. I love ISI's driving model. I absolutely hate what has happened to multi-player. As it stands right now, I don't see myself renewing the multi-player service next time around. It's not about the small fee. It really isn't. It's about the fact that I'm not getting value for it. I can't tell you the last time I was able to join a multi-player session, without being rejected for not having every component. I finally into a small karting session yesterday with two other guys. It was the first time I have ever tried those. It was also after clicking to join ten servers... unsuccessfully. It's absolutely ridiculous.
