This is probably going to be quite an unpopular post, if it is going to attract any interest in the first place. Perhaps I should just create some kind of blog, where I could post stuff and it could just stay never being read by anyone, I guess I just need to express and share... First of all, this is not meant to be targeted to anyone personally, but at the same time it is targeted at everybody - well community of simracing as a whole, myself as well - I am never fully happy about myself, I know I could do better. I have no idea how many will agree, or disagree with my observations about simracing community, but I just feel like it is very important thing to care about which is directly related to how happy we are, and how interesting simracing is for all of us. I have started simracing long ago, and for a long time I haven't reached for online simracing, and even longer I haven't reached for simracing online social spaces. My first proper dive into simracing community was with Assetto Corsa, there I begun participating as true community member, even got deep into modding. It was rather epic community tied around the official forum, it was only getting better till one day Kunos decided that it is too good and just told whole mods community (the true core of whole community) to move out, eventually modders that kept on modding moved to racedepartment. Ever since then community just wasn't getting better, although it was still epic for couple years. In racedepartment all was fine, except that being located in sub-sub-sub-sub-subforum let alone being suddenly dislocated never meant that things will be as good as before. And it definitely wasn't. It still was great, but momentum was decreasing and usual simracing friction increasing naturally as people tend to disagree about things, and it turns out to be problematic to disagree over postings, which wouldn't be so if persons would talk face to face. I constantly check RD now, but it looks like it has lost its community momentum. And RD is important place of simracing community loop, so thats not great. One time over Kunos forum I got into rather strong discussion over realism. Regardless me being right or wrong, I tried to keep it intelligent and clear, but I was holding on my position and was banned out because I have disturbed too many fanboys, and it was just better option to let me go obviously. I don't care about being banned, I think that was worse as one more precedent as person being deeply interested and passionate about physics was viewed as offense. Doesn't matter being right or wrong I think it is very nice when somebody is interested in understanding the complexity of reality which is aimed to be simulated. However it proves more and more to be detractive for many, especially as it can provoke strong discussions, and this is a huge shame to loose this "mans area" of simulation - the main area.... to the shadow. I also spent some time in reddit, there were some moving discussions for a while, but it soon turned out into simracing hardware advertising platform. Well... I guess thats more lovely to show boxes than discussiong about what the hell the tire is till it gives the headache... keep it simple, don't ask, consume. I also was a member of our country simracing community in facebook, and we also had a lot of great moving discussions, interesting conversations, lots of support and great races together. However it also turned into mainly hardware related platform, where people just trade stuff after they done with simracing after a year or two. Right now it is this place which I base myself at, unfortunately to you guys to suffer me. So far best place for true simracer that I know. However, I do notice certain bad trends. Surely I see some awesome guys here appearing, and becoming active that surely adds to great positive of whole community of rF2, but I also see a lot of awesome guys becoming less and less active, and thats where it all begins. The mechanism is simple - creative and most intelligent people creates a quality community, then it becomes more popular. As creative people slowly backs out, the more simple and ordinary guys starts their shift, with their new ways (for example posting truly meaningless threads, with clickbait titles, and never engaging to proper interesting stuff... well I guess that particular "interesting" does no longer mean "interesting" then. I think the saving grace of rF2 community is that popularity is growing slower, and creative guys are leaving slower. Some day when numbers will grow larger, I wonder if there will be second life in the community, or it will just implode because of vacuum caused by emptyness and vanity. Last but not least, it seems to be a law of the internet and anything. Everything successful is created and developed and maintained at first by best people. The rest comes after, and whole thing just gets averaged. I think maybe some things has to die out sometimes, just to reappear stronger in the future. ***** The developers of simracing titles are gods in this virtual reality business that we like to immerse ourselves every once in a while. But even they are powerless against the community. They either has it, or no. Developers has an impact of deciding how good is a life of a modder. They decide what they need more: throusands of simple guys having fun online/single player racing, or they need to occupy the esports where few chosen ones are competing and the potential revenue from sponsorship floats. The problem of modding is that it might work against developer in the long run in terms of consumerism. Take Assetto Corsa for example, the main competitor for ACC for a long time was AC, and I believe that it still is very real competitior for ACC. Modding has created longevity and numbers of AC users aren't to be seen diminishing soon. There are better options than AC now, but once some simracer gets so familiar with particular "version of reality", he may be very slow to release it. How many simracers still "live" in GPL ? rF1 ? Thats just my personal speculation, but Kunos saw that comming so they halted modding and community growth during its peak at their own forum, they possibly had already planned out ACC by then. It was craziest event I have ever witnessed in sirmacing, and if simracign history is ever written, than there must be whole chappter about that. It was crazy power move that Kunos did there, and I think if they wanted to prevent AC over-longevity (like for example rF1 vs rF2, people ignoring rF2 and stayign in rF1) they probably didn't halt modding support in official forum early enough. There might be many people that will on continue in AC for years and years spoiling the progress and not supporting devs with new titles. But as a side effect, I think that was big hit for whole simracing community of whole platforms, I think it was strong first sign that creative people in simracing aren't really that much needed and beneficial for developer as it might seem, especially when it breaks through and starts selling bigger, and this keeps on making negative impact for community side of simracing. Thats a big shame, we all love modding. But i think it is our fault, if for example more advanced better sim is being released and it is not loved enough because it is: more underdeveloped, more complex, less familiar, more demanding, more professional (less simple).... I mean just look at rF1 vs rF2... rF2 seems to be balancing on the edge where modding is still necessary to hold half of it together, but other half of it seems like it would hold well together without modding. So we kind of do have good modding support, but also at the same time not too good. rF2 is likely to be supported on for more than few more years, so it may not make sense to abandon relationships with modding just yet. Once modding in simracing dies out totally, the communities will die out. You'd see even more people sharing and talking about hardware referring to it as their simulator, and software will be underrated as some cheap game with annoying DLC and full of bugs. You will see people talking more and more about cliche stuff as it can't be that real because you don't sit in the car for real, and how you aren't qualified to judge it because you haven't driven real one. Otherwise FFB servo, the rig and steering rim are all real since you can touch them - so they are the real deal, put on wheels and engine and drive your rigs for real guys. You will see people talking about FFB over and over, never about physics and any observable nature of cars. You will see people accepting physics compromises for more comfort and certain perception myths. And all of that is perhaps the reason why I increasingly more often miss things like: Creativity, vivid and entertaining personalities; Good humor ; Being a man and not a soyboy, females are welcome too (but we all know that there are no females in simracing anyway); Technical involvement, knowledge and interest; Curiosity, and asking good questions; Empathy and sympathy for one another, forgiving; Good discussions, meaningful posts, especially on complicated matters when disagreements are inevitably met and must be taken; Respect for developers; Interesting things being done and said, and not just repeating same things over and over almost daily; Deep insights, especially for complex matters that are inevitable in simulation; Just simply love and appreciation overall.... At the end it all just adds up and gets mixed up to how well we have our time spent, did we get most of simracing, are we as happy as we can be about it ? I hope rF2 will last for a long time, and improve a lot (hopefully quicker than it has been improving in past years). rF2 will probably remain the last sim that it is moddable. If all is well, people from AC will move to rF2 as they will sqeeze all the juice out of AC, and they will discover more only in rF2.... if they are type of people who discover - creative and interesting people.
Godamn thats big a$$ post !! I agree on part that people just don't talk about physics stuff,vehicle handling etc. Its just FFB or immersion talk mostly. Which is necessary but is "game" part of a simulator. My point is people mostly talk about "gaming" side of simulator (e.g AI, UI, safety cars etc) but the core of any simulation is vehicle dynamics. How car itself behaves and generally when someone makes a negative or unpopular remark it just turns into bad arguments. This is especially true in Kunos forums (guys at reiza are way more focused on game part of AMS2 that what the heck is physics engine doing and capable of , this is the main reason why i don't own AMS) P.S ->> if i had tons of money i would make a simulator that will simulate every millimetre of a car as accurately as possible then other stuff.
Interesting read. I have been doing simracing competitively for over a decade now, and have been in many communities. I have seen many discussions, I have seen many mad people leaving, I have seen many fanboys/haters, I have seen people get the name of a hater/fanboy even if they weren't, I have seen people rage quit when they were proven wrong. The reason you see it more these days, is simply because there are more sim racers, and a lot more racing simulators and wannabe simulators. There are lots more opinions around and a lot more people who think only their opinion is right. For example I heard about a modder that was modding a laserscanned track, but refused to filter out the noise of the laserscan. That person decided that, even though everyone told him that that was wrong, he was right and got mad about it. That's the thing that these days gets more and more the norm. People don't discuss to learn. People 'discuss' to convince people that their opinion is right. This is what causes the big catfights between people, and it happens quite often as only 1 person has to be like that. The AC forum thing I find interesting though. I am quite outspoken if I have an opinion I can back up with facts. I have said some pretty on the edge stuff and on the forum directly called out Kunos simulazione for having been misleading and I think I called them pathetic even for not daring to say that they were wrong. You know what's funny? I didn't get banned once. I got warned once when I got into a heated argument with the infamous Michael Hornbuckle (for people who don't know him, he is that real fanboy of AC). I have absolutely talked about how bad the AC physics were in some cases, even called it borderline simcade. But as long as you can give a proper explenation on it, don't go around in circles, and don't go full dumb "I am right and nobody can make me believe otherwise", it's very hard to get banned. To get banned you really need to be doing something on the edge, or even clearly over it. This counts for pretty much every single official forum I have encountered. I have to say too, that even though you don't believe it, on both this forum and the rF2 discord there are very good discussions (between the pizza, My Little Pony, Karaoke, and My Little Pony Karaoke, there are good discussions going on) and on the physics side Most people agree on what should be improved and what the current problems are. Pretty much everyone agrees about the tire compounds for example, the extreme setups, track temp not affecting the tire temps etc. Most of it is done in a constructive way and based on facts. This I have not encountered in other sim forums as much. Definitely the iRacing forum is bad in this aspect, but that might just be American culture (to explain, there are a few Americans I know are great, but I know a lot that will laugh at you just because they don't understand the thing you do. Those were my own teammates too). Short version: Rotten apples exist, always look at yourself first, get in the community, make friends.
I know some of the physics problems of rf2 like tyre pressure but i don't know about extreme setup and tyre compounds. Do these broken stuff exist on GTE and GT3 cars ?
In general: There is no reason to choose anything else than soft, and removing rear anti rollbar usually is best too
I haven't played anything other than soft compound as my playtime is quite short but it should definitely be looked into immediately. Haven't tested detaching rear ARB, i have played with ARB settings seems to do what i know about them.
What you are describing is just a normal progression of life. People are born they grow older they create aweswome stuff and really blossom then they settle down. It happens in all communities but we are not that old that we have to despair just yet. I totally get what you are saying. And on another note.... don't even get me started on Kunos. Netkar pro might have been good but imo they really dropped the ball with AC(there is no weight transfer! And the sounds are synthesized as hell). Btw AmplifiedNL is a good friend of mine and he was showcasing his sound work to Luca in the early stage of AC early access and he got banned. Everyone love it and it was deemed to outshine the masters at kunos so he got the big boot. Without back talking them too much i will just say one last thing about Kunos and that is that they kept booting the creative and intelligent until only the brainless consumers were left. I believe the creative and intelligent ended up here and on other places on the sim racing forums but many are also being given the boot even here and so you are left thinking what is the point of modding for these games anymore if it's so capitalistic they can't even recognize true talent anymore behind fog of greed.
So i tried removing rear ARB on Ferrari 488 GTE and the difference aren't that huge. It might be a placebo or driving error but i think when i added 3 clicks of rear ARB (2 on front) the car gained some turn in understeer at all speeds. At high speed it felt understeery throughout cornering (relatively more than detached rear ARB) I was expecting some noticeable aerodynamic platform efficiency loss,Too much roll hence bad camber gain etc. Need to see how it affects on longer playtime though. Developers should definitely look into it,and for time being (or even permanently) remove the option to detach the ARB.
