Can I get an AMEN!! Can I get another AMEN!! I keep rf2 installed for Sebring... when rf2 does it right, it does it really right.. it jsut doesnt do much right anymore. sadly.
Has anyone noticed how much things that people in the internet say are completely meaningless ? That includes positive and negative. It is just that positive is what is wanted to be heard. And it is meaningless because it is all emotions, no rationality, no logic. You can have same guys having biggest cheering, and then reversing soon after. Is it some kind of bi-polar disorder, or just being a child ? Most likely in second quarter there will be good update and everyone will be raving again for a week or so. Then start get frustrated after a month when abstinence kicks in, due to not receiving dopamine rush of updates.
I said for month this sim is DEAD and stays like that. Sometimes i look in the forum to prove my confirmation. RF2 the road ahead - to the graveyard. Dig it Amen
So what are you doing here?! You are so wrong . With the new UI a many many sim racers are coming back to rfactor2 and I know so many sim racing community’s are using rfactor2 for their leagues/endurance races . Rfactor2 is far from being dead.
And what is the use of posting this without making any comment ? I can share one very simple observation - it appears that most games has experienced 10-20% percent decrease of average players amount in past two months. You could explain it being so because weather is improving and people are more inclined to go outside. Also being on the edge of WW3 while living in eastern Europe does not really feel like time to play games, at least to me... Finally, rises are expected with proper updates, and normalization of players comes after. Of course you could argue that if there was some kind of tremendous update, with vast amount of improvements and fixes and no issues at all it would probably have much longer lasting rising of players, and a lot later and a lot slower decline. Sadly rF2 in the past years wasn't developed in such great success that it would be able to hit consistent rise of players. Last but not least, I think COVID crazy ending also means people gaming less.
replying to p I was replying to the post before mine, which is claiming that new UI etc was making players come back to rf2. Actual data posted shows they did, very briefly only though, before slipping back to even lower levels. People want substance, fixes to the years old bugs and glitches they have been begging for.. not flashy UI's.
Even though i care more about physics updates and fixes the new UI has set a good base for rf2 now, bad ui turn down more players than problems in physics for example...so i understand this move. but now that this base is sorted i hope the resourcese are more diverted towards physics, gameplay improvements and fixes. also graphically sparks would be much much better option than anything this sim lacks (graphically).
User engagement is now at about the same level as before the new UI was released, yes, and at levels before the pandemic started. So yes, the UI hasn't done that much it seems, but then again it seems very difficult to bring about a long lasting change with fixing one aspect. The same thing pretty much happened when new content was released under S397. We saw some temporary increase, which was nice, but it felt like artificial inflation as it backed down again a few weeks after mentioned content had been released. The only thing that really has bought more users to rF2 over several months was the pandemic. When you trace the graphs far enough back, you have to go back all the way to January 2017 to notice the previous big increase before the pandemic. What happened then of course was that S397 made rF2 work Steam-only, so even that increase was probably largely artificial, as all non-Steam users now converted to being tracked by this statistic. Then again another peak in May 2017 when DX11 was released, but that also went down quickly. So the conclusion is, rF2 has been able to maintain its player base, which is better than nothing, but not to any significant degree increase it. I'm skeptical that any single feature improvement or bug fix on its own will be enough to lure in lots of new players. It clearly needs something more than that and at the moment I don't have the answers at least.
Who honestly knows. A lot of people talk about bug fixes (which obviously should be a priority to be fixed) but will it really bring in new players? Honestly how many potential mainstream or even hardcore players out there even know about the bugs? I played rF2 for years and I didn't even know that there were all these various bugs until I came on the forum and read about them. Maybe players get turned off because they think the handling in rF2 is too difficult or somehow too hardcore... but I find that ironic because I feel like the ffb and controls are so good in rF2 that the handling is actually pretty easy (maybe too easy!). Has anyone played GT7... it's stupidly difficult to pilot a car around the track consistently at a reasonable pace - probably not so much because of the physics, more so imo due to the controls not feeling as progressive and direct. And there's the graphics thing, but again rF2 on high settings (and latest tracks) actually dosn't look too far off the console racers (maybe in some aspects even better). Maybe it is just down to brand recognition - normal people that potentially might be interested in the game simply don't know what it is or that it even exists. Some people probably watched the the Virtual 24 of Le Mans and just assumed it was iRacing. I do find it a bit strange that there is now so much rF2 content on YouTube (much of it is very positive) and there's also the Esports stuff, and yet the player count hasn't seen a huge increase. I remember back in the day there were about two or three YouTubers (like emty Bawx) and that was it, now there's a huge amount of content creators covering the sim for the most part in a positive way. It is good to see though that the amount of players may not be huge, but they seem to be sticking around over the years. I just hope that more Aussies get into the sim so I don't have to search for online races at 5am in the morning!
I think there is a problem with comformism in people here in RF2 is pretty evident: people want more people playing RF2 not because their gameplay is affected by this, but because this will make them feel doing the right thing. Here people are more worried about other people playing RF2 than themselves playing it. They measure the success of RF2 by the sheer amount of players and not for what they do with it. It's a natural human behaviour to feel part of something, and more than this is natural to want to be part of a winning side. So, in our mind there is a "us vs them" scenario, and we crave to win, to be right, and the only meter of doing so, is see other people play RF2. Has this something to do with the qualities of RF2? No. Marketing could wipe out all this bug fixing if only more people choose RF2. Here UI and bugs are just witch hunts.
For sure this is a factor. But when you're a bit over single player and you jump on day after day to see practically no one online, needless to say it does make you wish rF2 was a bit more popular.
No one online? I see plenty of servers many passworded or with content that I don't own. I often see them populated. The fact that I can't join them doesn't make online non existent. I only play offline or the CS at the moment, and yes, often the number of people in my server is low, but here time zones are a factor too, you race at an hour and there are many people, the race immediately after that is empty.
Definitely not saying that online is dead and there are literally no players. Merely saying that 'for all intents and purposes' for me, there is basically no one online when I jump on. I wish more people in my time zone were into the sim, so pick up and play races were more of a thing. Even with the sim in it's 'current state' and all the known issues, it still doesn't make sense to me that there aren't more players. I guess that could just be my own bias.
Some time ago I gave Iracing a chance, and in all honesty, despite the huge userbase, the mazda mx5 competition (a basic entry level free content competition) had races with just few players as well, yes , I've made some with 12 14 players, but on average I would say that 5/6 was more norm. This just to say that a lot of factor are at play, and only userbase can't change it dramatically.
