Is rf2 too difficult? [lack of online players / leagues struggling]

Just given a language warning. Please don't say stuff like that.

Many sim racers use every racing sim. You're even responding to some people in this thread, who are rF2 fans, who also bought everything else out there. Indirectly calling them names isn't a good idea.

 

I'm not going to advocate iRacing or any other sim. I am a 5+ year member at iRacing and I often read this "like driving on ice" statement. It makes me wonder where it comes from. In any race car, real or simulated, you have to drive within its limits. I don't have any trouble with the cars in iRacing, but I often see other drivers taking big swerves and losing control. Maybe they need to slow down their steering. The less you have to turn the wheel the faster you can go.

For race sims in general, the more complicated it is the more I like it.

I've often wanted to check out a rF2 race league, but I live in Mountain time zone. Most of the people like other sports around here.

 

rf2 gets the ice comments as well. just ignore it I say. I often suspect not everything is understood for everyone and therefore it surely sucks.

Besides, checksum any professional real racing series and talk to drivers or check their interviews and every single one will bitch about the lack of grip.
So in that respect its pretty spot on in both sims

 

I ripped around in my dad's Toyota Corola yesterday so fast around a turn that I had wheelspin, my steering wheel went light, and the tyres felt like they were 2 inches wide (like bycicle tyres or something). Also, upon getting on the brakes the rear got light and had just a bit of rotation. The rear rotation was very little, I could not feel it through the wheel, or visually with my eyes either, I could only feel it because of the g's / car feeling around my body. If I was driving with only wheel feeling and visual cues, and if it wasn't for the feeling of g-forces around my body, then it would have probably felt like ice as well, and that was real-life!

Most people that complain of ice just have no idea what cars, even safe slow family road-cars, are capable of when pushed really hard, because they can feel very icy in real-life as well at certain limits and slip, and also if you take the whole g-force feeling out of the equation and go by just steering feel and visual cues alone (which was pathetic in my real-life experience above).

 

Then you have F1 drivers talking of 'zero grip' when they're doing laps 3 seconds off their normal speed (which in real terms is still ******* fast), or the old chestnut about hitting wet grass and "actually accelerating". Yeah, right.

 

Good point as well. I've experienced real-life rain races that felt as bad as rFactor 2 in it's absolute worst ever wettest rain session.

The diffence is in real-life it is SO SO SO MUCH easier to feel all these tiny slides and feelings of tiny rear or front lightness BEFORE you can even feel them through the steering wheel or see them through visual cues. So then in real-life we get SO MUCH MORE AND SO MUCH EARLIER warning (for the most part lol) than we do I sims , and then we drive by those feelings and we can stay in the "in-control" side of limits so much easier in real-life, where as in sims we much more easily go closer to the edges of limits/control because we get so much less feedback, and also because the little feedback we do get in sims gets felt MUCH LATER than in real-life. Therefore, in sims, it feels like we have such a smaller margin of space/error between when we first start feeling loss of grip to when we actually loose grip, and that is why sometimes things feel more icy and edgy in sims, and then everyone starts just blaming physics, sadly. Also FFB settings, without touching physics, can make large differences in perception of grip, "icyness", etc.

I feel sorry for the developers that get so much negativity because so many people have a difficult time understanding and grasping this. I am so glad for my real-life experience, if I just went by watching races and some odd track-days here and there then I would have maybe thought that RFactor 2 and IRacing (and some other sims) were way too overly difficult and fake (like sadly many do), and I would have probably been praising some other games/sims on the market.

 

my thoughts exactly, there's plenty of grip in rf2 & Iracing & also in real world driving
providing you don't try & drive round a sharp corner at 50mph lol
drive within the limits is the key what ever the situation or sim/real world

p.s remember having to drive on snow? how slow you have to go
(in the real world), we still have to stay within the limits to suit the situation

 

I totally agree with the seat-of-the-pants feeling missing from race sims. There is a lot of information we don't get. Probably some day they'll figure out how to simulate the g-forces at a price regular people can afford.

I worked in racing for ten years. Our driver often would say the "tires feel like hockey pucks." Two things a race driver never seems to have enough of: grip and power.

 

IMO laser scanned tracks has very little to do with what makes iRacing so popular. You could release a fantasy track with lots of bumps for rF2 and tell people it is laser scanned and people will go crazy over it. I think it's more about the structured racing that makes it so good. You know that at just about any time you can jump on and race with a full field. The auto updating content and all that makes joining races dummy proof. rF2 gives us most of the tools to have this same experience. Someone just needs to make it happen.

 

Hi Tim,

Didn't mean to bug you. I like RF2, and my sim collection includes iRacing, RF2, RF1, Assetto Corsa, Netkar Pro, Race 07 and addons, most of the Codemasters games, etc so I'm not religious about my choices. Presently I spend most of my online racing time in iRacing and my offline in RF2. The main reason I don't spend more time online with RF2 is that infrastructure.

1. Absolutely, I get that it costs money. It's not cheap (though iRacing don't help themselves by making their pricing somewhat opaque, one can run for a lot less money than most people think with all the discounts available). For me, that service is worth it, as it means I get good quality online racing whenever I want it. I do believe that it would be useful if either ISI or a third party (or a third party working with ISI) were to put such a structure together and charge an additional fee for it (all that hosting costs money).
2. Agree entirely on the issue of repaves, but the point is that you get a track with all the real life characteristics of the track at that fixed point in time. It means that the camber of the road is right, the details in terms of the turn radius, width of the road, etc. It's not the bumps so much (though having them there is nice and of course they affect handling, so one has to learn to negotiate them, this is all part of the sim experience) but the proper road layout, camber, etc that makes it, such that the nature of the road influences how you approach the corner, perhaps using camber to slingshot around a tricky hairpin or whatever.
3. I take it as both. As I have previously said, the positive is that it helps with the cat-herding (ie getting enough sim-racers together in one place to actually get a decent race) and the quality control. ISI's own stuff is pretty damn good, the cars especially being vastly better than most mods, but that is a smaller selection than iRacing offers (in tracks at least, the car selection is pretty good). To get a good library of tracks one must search the web. At that point it gets quite murky, and finding the right version to run on any given server is a nightmare.
4. And I'm happy to pay for that. Perhaps there is a need for (as I mention in point 1) some similar infrastructure to be offered for RFactor.
5. With a league there will be 20 guys of vastly differing ability levels, so not much racing. In iRacing, I can go and race a skippy once an hour and know I'll face a bunch of guys at a similar ability level to mine. I'm happy to pay for that quality of racing, and what iRacing does enables that to happen, both through ease-of-use and iRating keeping people in the race and enabling proper separation of drivers by ability.
6. Yes I pay for that. And yes most rF2 servers are in people's homes. So what do we do about that? Perhaps you guys can offer hosting services for people for a fee? It's a bit more income for you, better online experience for your users, etc.

I'm thinking over the means by which I could build some of that infrastructure myself (I'm a developer, I build software used by all the major telcos in the UK so I know my way around code and hosting) and will probably post some thoughts on that when I've formulated it a bit better. I'm not here to cause offence, I'm here to try to improve things.


Cheers,

Ryan

 

Is rf2 too difficult? [lack of online players / leagues struggling]

We're picking up rF2 this year - running it now concurrently with our last ever rF1 league (that's what I hope anyway!)

I think it's terrific - I love its "honesty" & even its flaws; but I wouldn't half like to see the rain on the windshield & the pitcrew now!

But answering directly the difficulty thing that Densitro's asked: we (F1-S-R) don't go near the Howston G4 - it's just too wayward & difficult - It swings & sways all over the place, & after about 2 laps of a league race we'd have about 5 cars left racing..

I'd prefer the grip to be upped a fraction on most of the cars - to the levels of the Endurance mod by Ales Ogrinc - but before some of you go "...nooooooooo!" - that's just me & my ol' opinion

The Karts, Clio's, Meganes & Historic F3's are fine

And I would prefer the vmods to be easier to make (more like pCars & their "Browse Online" - Create your own race.. it's so simple even I can do it )

 

"[we] don't go near the Howston G4 - it's just too wayward & difficult"

Thanks for this. Quote of the day at my website

 

you are just nuts

Ps. @Tony: I've been running a Howston league because I like the car. There are days when I curse the car but usually I like the challenge Imo you can feel the grip just fine but there just isn't enough of it But that's the way it should be with this car and I'm glad that every car feels different in rf2 as they should.

 

Not sure if that's true though, allot of servers are rented. and sure you get cheap servers and expensive ones but to me the current MP capabilities in rf2 are not holding back multiplayer potential.
In fact there seem to be more servers then drivers

Besides the majority of the communities will have good servers and essentially we pay for that as well just as in iracing. servers are expensive and league members donate money to rent them. So same difference maybe? you pay for a system.

As for point 5, I think that's what people often don't seem to realize : allot of leagues work with weight penalties, car allocations , team restrictions, licences and other features that reduce the gaps between drivers.
When done properly it just balances things out, fast drivers can still win races or titles, they just need to work harder for it whilst medium/slow drivers also get the opportunity to harvest points or whatever and become successful.

At least that's how we do it and I think many other leagues as well. so on that topic one maybe should be comparing iracing with rf2 league racing and not with its public racing.
If I recall correctly the entry levels at iracing, when drivers don't have a rating yet, the racing can be as bad as anywhere. that's their public racing

This is what will push things forward and also one of the reasons why rf2 is open source I believe, we are basically on our own as a community with a bit of help from ISI here and there + what they do to improve the platform. but its up to us for the most part.
And imo despite the things we would want to see improved or implemented, that philosophy also creates allot of amazing stuff that would probably not have been developed if ISI was doing everything themselves. Not that they couldn't, but the push from a community and individuals can be so much more creative and will have allot of unexpected and worthwhile additions to the sim for all to use.

Currently working on a project myself as well which I hope will serve the community to some extend because one of the things this thread brought me is that its just not enough to go visit these forums and whine about things, if we want changes or push issues, we better make sure its going to get done. The waiting game will always end up in disappointment.

 

I agree.

This is where choice comes it. Some people will choose simulators that aim at accuracy (rFactor 2, iRacing), others will say these are artificially difficult and aim for something that feels more natural (to them, because feelings are subjective).

I believe it's important to respect that choice, because that's what it is - a choice. I prefer simulators like iRacing and rFactor 2, even if they're more difficult to handle than real life. I choose them for accuracy. The difficulty I can handle.
I don't expect other people to follow the same philosophy, though.

The only thing I expect from them is not to start misjudging other simulators, when they don't match their preferred philosophy.

Some people drive for fun and enjoy it, some people have more scientific approach and enjoy it just as much. Let's leave it at that.

Developers can take it, because they know where they're heading with the project.

Who I feel sorry for are racing communities that get divided by such pointless arguments. We should get together and start racing. Even if each sim feels different, it's only a matter how you take it. If you take given sim for what it is, then you can enjoy it. There will always be the one you prefer the most, but does it mean you have to go to war with others, because they have different philosophy?

If anyone would say yes to that question, then he sucks big time

 

Well said !

 

Perhaps this is off topic, but it has been several months since I migrated to steam. People have no way of knowing how many drivers are on a given race because it is not being reported on the steam games. It is a shame, because it worked reasonably well in rF2. Frankly, I wish I had never made the switch.

 

Ehh, what's changed ? Lobby is the same ?

 

Yeah man. ISI should hurry to fix this.
Yesterday I went to a scheduled open race, when I saw the lobby the server showed 0 people online. I thought the race was canceled, was almost closing the game then I had that moment "I'm already here let me log in and try some laps since I never drove this mod before" when I joined the server there were 20 people online

 

If we are speaking about sim philosphies, most compelling one to me would be accurately behaving cars + maximised amount of information to driver. And to maximize the information given to driver i could accept some camera tricks and unrealisticly informative steering.