I'm going to post a couple of threads, this being the first, on the topic of "what would we like to see" in future developments. It's intended to cover what we may think are good ideas (that have not been seen before), what we've seen elsewhere that worked or didn't work etc. First topic is online competition. This stems from my frustration that we know the UI is being worked on in 2017/2018 and will include competition aspects, but as of yet, we've seen virtually nothing of the design and what capabilities will come with the system. This can cover various competition types. My particular personal interests are scheduled community races [beyond simply pickup races, but part of an 'official' series or specific events open to the full audience] and league racing [a closed audience]. I'm less interested in hotlapping type competitions but folks interested can post about those or any other types as they see fit. My main experience only is with F1 99-02/rF1 leagues, and then iRacing in which I compete in both "official" series and leagues, and also in the "special events" like Indy500 or Daytona 24hrs. For the official racing, you maintain an "iRating" that is basically a measure of your competition strength. These are applied to split a field into multiple sessions at a given time, and impacts points scored in the series championship. Official series run a 12 week set of events, most often with races scheduled every 1/2/4 hours apart. There is also a license class (Pro/A/B/C/D/Rookie) which are based on a safety rating measure and the series are open to people of certain license classes only. You can apply to join a league but there is not really a concept of organizing "public" races where you have to meet iRating/sRating levels; and those rating scores are not affected by participation in league races. The servers are all hosted by iRacing in the cloud. By contrast, pCars2 have similar rating schemes for competition strength and safety, and in fact something like this seems common in just about every online racing game. The difference is in how they structure the competition side. They have public events but most normally they are only for hotlapping. The 'servers' run on cloud in this case. For all other racing, the servers I believe run on the local users PC. I think you can restrict participation by invited specific people or suggesting to people of certain rating standards/levels that they might like to participate. Every individual race can be open or restricted to competition/safety ratings. Unlike in iRacing, this serves to act more of a deterrence to take part - makes exclusive groups rather than the iRacing official series inclusive groups. The admin/person owning the race event has discretion on who takes part, so it shares somewhat with a league idea but applies it to any individual race event. pCars doesn't seem to have official "pickup racing" events they host. In my opinion, the pCars system actually works against the goal of getting people to race together online as an entire community, instead people self-balkanize into cliques and clans, and it's driven by the design of what they've built. Discuss!
From my experience across a handful of popular sims with multiplayer is that anything short of an organized league is often a crash-fest. Even to some extent in iRacing; thats why former Redbull F1 driver Scott Speed got bounced from iRacing. There are a number of leased dedicated servers generally running in the rF2 multiplayer (MP) window but its hard to say which is or isn't. For that matter the window is missing a few easy details to query like which car mods are allowed in the MP session. I think that missing data alone stops 3/4's of the folks who might spontaneously drop into an unlocked server. At least with rF1 we knew what was racing. So when an open wheeler racer chooses say Watkins Glen it takes a while before they find out its a NASCAR or some mod they really don't like. Well thats 5 minutes wasted just finding out. No one wants to waste their time. Licensing etc adds an overhead burden that someone has to pay for, hence part of the premium pricing of iRacing. S397 does a pretty good job of organizing a few events like the recent McLaren rounds. They probably don't need to get into the Event Organizing business (without a separate fee) as they know they've got the most realistic commercially available package; thats their shtick.
Just need to be easily host online Then that server keeps the best lap times even after users have logged off Without the need for plug-ins or external software or websites Would be great for hotlap competitions perhaps running up to races
I have great expectations for the competition system and UI... and Marcel already showed up some images of the new UI. I played iRacing for three years and almost all simracing games. It's been a long time since I only play rfactor2 (about one year). Today I had great fun on Studio 397 server with new and old GT3 at Sebring (on one race there was also Christopher Elliott). I think Studio 397 should open some servers in Europe, Usa, Asia and Australia, for races and hot-laps competition... without haste ... but so many people will be able to enjoy rfactor 2
