hi mates, in my opinion that is one of the biggest problems of rfactor 1. it is really dificult to catch all the mods there are available. If we have to pay money to use online accounts, i want more services with mods, for example steam does it very well. all games are on one plattform (and i even dont need to pay for it , just for the game). it would be great to have a tool thats download a mod by click. so you need one place where mods are stored. to get sure that there are no "stupid" mods, they could be signed by ISI (of course for free!!!). Because ISI should be responsible for the quality of the mods, because many people dont get the difference between isi and community made mods. that could be the reason why many people think rfactor is a bad game, and not realistic and kind of that stuff. what do you think?
I agree that we need hosted mods, all avalible mods should show up in-game as "installed" or "downloadable" as soon as the ModID is generated. however, I dont think we will see any service from ISI hosting all the mods, its a large cost running servers, storage and internet connection to cope with that. That said, there are other solutions that might work just as good, P2P hosting is one, built in torrent client in another, this would mean that all users hosts any mods they have avalible, no server costs and better bandwidth for the popular mods. But, ISI would then need to create this by hand, sure they could use the already defined torrent API, but history tells me ISI likes doing things there own way and staying away from any market standards to gain control of their product and scale and define it as needed. If i recall correctly, ISI mentioned hosting Mods as a "possibility" with the new ModID structure, that tells me they have thought about it, but nothing is planned as other things get higher priority, that dousent mean it will not be done, so who knows, we might see this implemented, just not in the near future. I have thought about it aswell and in-game list of all avalible mods with some sort of hosting is the way to go, hopefully ISI reqognices this. Sorry if I´m not making myself clear or I misstyped something, English is not my primary language.
