AC online CAN be decent if you mind some rule of thumb. Always look for Minorating servers no less than AB. If you enter with C grade or less, it will result in the pick up server racing we all dread. SRS is another good way to look at for competitive online racing. On a side note, trackdays can be fun in AC, just tweak your expectations.
Just looking down the rF2 list of occupied servers and notice how varied they are! Of the first 30, only Sebring 12H (3 entries, 10%) was used more than twice. Then the next thing one notices is that official tracks are used very seldom... saw Portugal, Zandvoort, & Brookdale. Presumably because F1 Bahrain happens this week, I see Bahrain is used heavily today. Mostly further down in the list.
Whilst I understand where you are coming from, you also need to go with something that is likely to actually generate some enthusiasm for actually showing up to race. rF2 has too many obscure (mod) tracks and carsets for anyone to show up in any amount; mostly, it'll be closed leagues who run these combinations. AC has only 12 tracks, and 3 of the most popular are DLC (Brands, Barcelona, Nords all laser scanned). Several are somewhat obscure Italian club tracks (or at least, less well known) and they lack many of the other popular worldwide tracks like Watkins Glen. When they release ACC, it is likely to only feature the 10 tracks that make up the SRO/Blancpain series and not on day 1. I expect them to expand ACC (e.g. to regional GT series) but it's going to take a while to do that; 2-3 years possibly. rF2 has a major, enormous, massive gap for tracks and especially fully licensed versions. This should be a focus of development, but it doesn't seem to be. They've got a good Endurance racing carset coming (LMP2, LMP3, GTE x 3) but no tracks to race them on. R3E has over 30 well known fully licensed tracks, as does PC2. Even AMS, with its primary Brazillian focus, has more RoW tracks. In my opinion, S397 have to offer some 'arrive and drive' hosted series with their stock/DLC content, or at least, some organized competitions to showcase what they have. Maybe a GT3 series, an Endurance series, an Open Wheel series (when Tatuus cars arrive). We already saw how difficult it was for them to do WFG with only Silverstone and a barely finished Zandvoort to use. If they are releasing 6+ cars per year, they need the same number of tracks too.
Kunos only supplied a small number of tracks for AC, but that's irrelevant because their excellent quality control and mod support brought in a large player base which led to a large selection of quality mod tracks. We'll have to wait to see if ACC is going to be a stepping stone for AC2, or if ACC will be the main focus for a long while. If the latter is true then I won't be surprised if AC remains more popular than the new game, much like the rF1/2 situation.
i have a feeling that ACC is going to have better graphics than pc2 already the tracks are very well designed
I wonder how the contract is written? I'm thinking once they meet their obligations with the Blank Pain project and have the Unreal 4 coding working smoothly if Kunos could use that work for a different project/cars/track? I hope they can and wish them/us (the sim community) the best! I still think all this publicity is good for all the sims on the market!
It would be really nice if they use tiled resources like Gears of war 4. The downlod size would be huge but they could have completely unique textures. Which would be something really special for the art of a laser scanned racing track.
They're preparing AC2, you'll see, this will be good for them to test without too much pressure or "noise" from the outside, once they have the base, of course (and i don't see why not) they'll have half the work done for the new project...
I'm not quite sure if Kunos prepares AC2. There is no intention or information they're working on AC2 so far (I know). Early Access for ACC will be this summer. I don't think we can have the full game until mid of 2019, perhaps later in 2019. Because of that I think a successor is far far away.
Intellectual property belongs to the developer, not to the owner of the brands. I have never seen a license of a real life racing series move to another developer and they take the whole code with it. I could be mistaken, but if happened would be a rather dumb deal (unless the developer actually sold it)
Russians and the authors of Content Manager, managed to creat 24h cycle and dynamic lights. Still in beta phase but looks promising. I've made a quick test in Acura NSX GT3 around the Nords in night:
For ACC I think kunos mentioned that the physics & ffb will not change from AC1 which is the reason I have very little interest in the new title I’ve always felt underwhelmed at AC Plus these pretty much no damage modelling it’s like a beta sim
I heard the same thing in an interview and feel the same way. I launch AC every now and then mostly for cruising with mid-powered road cars at long maps, but when it comes to racing GT3's (soon GTE's and pretty much everything else), it's always RF2...the physics and FFB are unbeatable.
ACC will be scratchmade and the physics will be an evolution of AC physics. Hoping it will be on par with RF2 when it is at its best but only time will tell. https://www.racedepartment.com/threads/assetto-corsa-competizione-–-community-faq-blog.147970/
Considering it is using an existing graphic engine and an update of AC physics you cant call it "scratch made"