I have followed Sim racing extensively from 2003-present and additionally follow allot of the market trends within gaming. I am constantly keeping an eye out for what contributes to the success of products as I myself work within the games industry and my bank account depends on me having a good idea of how things work. I believe something that is often overlooked and not exploited to its full extent with multi player racing and especially sim racing on the PC platform is the offering of a uniform and consistent online experience for the general player base. Experienced sim racers and sim racers in teams are well catered for and will always be organized to the extent of creating there own servers and having specific race meet times allowing them to achieve a consistent experience. However the general public user and the majority of the market is largely neglected. I propose that the simple act of hosting some well defined servers ISI will be able to offer something that accommodates these users as well as many existing Rfactor users that simply want the ability to jump into quick races. I have outlined how the servers should be set up and then listed the reasons as to why the servers should be set up in this way 1) Server name there would be 1 server for each core car and named as such each server would always use the same car and be a 30 man server if servers become popular and are often full then ISI should add another server ( but only do it when they are full as to not dilute the race field) . It would also be good to add servers for top quality series later on but to start with they should only be for base content. ISI QRACE – Megane Trophy ISI QRACE – 1960S F1 ISI QRACE – Formula ford 2) Race format No practise session 3 Min qualification Ideally the servers would have no quail and allow people to join mid race and grid cars based on the last race result Exactly how Redline racing and (FM) servers on LFS work but I am not sure if RF2 supports this so 3 Minute qualification is a good compromise as it allows for a 35-40% of the time window for people to jump into the server. If people can join a server during race session but not race then there should be no qualification and cars should be gridded based on previous race results. 2-4 lap races race should last around 4-5 minutes maximum so race length depends on track length if this could not be set up for each race then 3 laps would be fine as a general rule ( this may seem very short but I will explain why this is important later) Track change every 3 – 5 races 3) Admin Ideally servers would be staffed with a general admin ISI could use community members and if not possible the servers would rely on a voting system , The general rule should be to kick people and not ban them , only constant crashers ( sum one that on the same day joins a server over and over ) should receive a ban from the servers. 4) Fixed setup Having fixed ensures competitive instant and fair racing although in general I like open setup for the nature of these servers it makes more sense for it to be locked to a good generla set Why these servers should exist and be set up as above 1) For new people to a simulator it can be very intimidating and many people simply want to get in and race and experience what they have purchased in a multi player setting. These servers would give a very good baseline and solid multi player experience out of the box 2) The servers allow new and experienced drivers to race together and learn from each other in a competitive environment 3) There will definitely be lots of crashes especially on T1 This is why it is imperative to have short races as this reduces the frustration of being crashed out ( by accident or on perpouse) 4) Short races and if possible Race position gridding also have the benefit of stopping users quitting as soon as they are crashed out of a race as they might as well finish the race to get position and because the next race is just around the corner. 5) The servers would guarantee a specific type and quality of racing that’s uniform and encourage users to want to simply jump on when they have spare time. This will make Rf2 a more popular game in general and contribute to more active users. There are plenty of times when I feel like sim racing but don't because I know it will take 20 or so minutes to find a half decent server and even then its likely to be stuck in P1 for 1 hour. Just reading over the forums there are a large number of sim racers with a wife or children that never know when exactly they will be able to jump on to get there racing fix these servers would allow for them to enjoy the game without significant time commitment. 6) Short races mean that if a driver is crashed or crashes out they know its a very short time until a new race 7) track change after 3-5 races reduces the burden of having the same track over and over and encourages uses to fall into that mindset of “oh just one more race” helping keep the server populated Its also a far more enjoyable way to learn tracks in a race context or with friends 8) The servers should have there own forum section and encourage community ( reducing crashing) and acting as a way to moderate and discus people that need to be banned from the servers , or specific server issues and suggestions. 9) Having these servers would be a huge USP for RF2 over other realistic simulators all the other sims including i racing have multiple issues or locked times at which you can race , the LFS redline and FM servers are the only examples I know of that are well set up but suffer from the fact that LFS has few tracks and the cars and core physics are unsatisfying in many ways. IF ISI do not want to do this hosting then I would suggest they contact a hosting service to run the servers as I’m sure they would love the marketing potential to be found in having the top 3-10 most popular servers listed in RF2 The compromise would be to just have the hosting company in the Server name. I am very confident doing what I have said above will help Rf2 gain more sales and Market penetration It would certainly be interesting to see what others in the community have to say about my proposal. Cheers – keep up the good work !
Couldnt you have posted this in here http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/2174-Online-Feature-Ideas?p=30118#post30118 ? Please point all online ideas/features in there
