Latest Roadmap Update -October 2017

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Again it is most definitely NOT a scam.

Let's look at what iRacing offer, that most sims do not. They currently have about 40 official series running 24/7 with races hourly, 2 hours, 4 hours. They have full pavement oval series, road series of single and multi class both sprint and endurance, fixed and open setup racing, and 10 dirt oval series. Who else has that?

They have massive special events for users, with thousands of people competing simultaneously in that event (such as, Daytona 500 or Indy 500, Le Mans 24 hrs). They have had lots of connectivity issues with those, admittedly [and in some cases due to DDOS attacks]. Who else has that?

Hosting costs 50 cents per hour. And you have to do no wrangling with infrastructure or installing mods to do it, just set a bunch of values on a web page and away you go. They've got an almost complete league management system too. Who else has that?

They have over 80 laser-scanned tracks, and the quality of textures is phenomenal on the latest ones. Who else has that? They release 2-3 new road courses each year, and now are doing 6-8 short ovals as well.

They have over 80 vehicles laser-scanned or with 3D models built directly from manufacturer CAD data. Who else has that?

If we come to the physics and tire models, it is one of the reasons I am currently not racing much on there at present. I am upset that they are releasing dirt oval and soon rallycross, when they have longstanding major issues with the tire model especially on road courses. They also have issues with the aerodynamics and especially draft models. So I am tired of waiting for these to get fixed. But S397 is no stranger to these same issues and their content quality (even the latest pack) can best be described as "uneven". But worse, is the fact that they have maybe 10 tracks available of similar quality to iRacing, half of which are done by modders and almost none laser scanned. Again, look at the Zandvoort release; 0.2 is about right. Some of the older iRacing content needs reworking to bring it up to the current standards also; and I've complained to them about keeping releasing new stuff without fixing the old stuff. But regarding physics, even if the tire model has problems, they've released cars with DRS, KERS, and F1-current hybrid systems decently modelled and have inerters and other such systems that no-one else has.

iRacing charge a premium price for what they offer. But there is a reason why, and over 60,000 people maintain a membership with them notwithstanding that.
 
That 60k user figure is again a false flag from iracing,there are not 60k active members,it’s been admitted by even the iracing fanboys with figures show.

Last time I was racing in the iracing f1 car Drs didn’t actually work,it made no difference to your delta at all.

Iracing do a lot of things right,but they flat out lie about a lot of stuff.

The biggest lie for me is dynamic weather.

Only once you have paid to join do you find out the weather is the exact opposite,it’s random weather that is static for the entire session,nothing dynamic about it what so ever.

The ddos attacks were done by members to force some teams not to be able to take part too,yet this was swept under the carpet and only came to light by a few members of said team that were doing the ddos attacks.
 
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The issue is your choice of the word 'scam' which has a connotation of illegaility. There is nothing illegal about anything iRacing has done.
 
dylbie said:
Anything where you can pay £1000 and have nothing at the end of it unless you keep paying, most definitely is a scam.
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Utter rubbish. Did they lie that this was the case? They've been in business for nearly 10 years, they have never been successfully sued for this business practice. It's not illegal, and not a scam.

What about all the streaming music and film services? You don't get to own the content on those either, and if you don't continue to pay the subscription, you lose access. Same goes for MS Office 365. I could create any number of applications or files with them, but if I don't pay the annual fee, I can't access them. Or I could create a website, and pay a contractor to make it. If I don't keep paying the hosting fee, I don't get to keep using it.

If you can't control your own urges and spend $1000 on something you don't understand the legal ownership of, more fool you.
 
burgesjl said:
What about all the streaming music and film services? You don't get to own the content on those either, and if you don't continue to pay the subscription, you lose access. Same goes for MS Office 365. I could create any number of applications or files with them, but if I don't pay the annual fee, I can't access them. Or I could create a website, and pay a contractor to make it. If I don't keep paying the hosting fee, I don't get to keep using it.
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The annual fee is not the issue, the issue for me is having BOTH an annual fee and then having to purchase content even though you will never fully own it. Netflix and similar services make it clear that you pay for the access to the service. If iRacing was a widely used service like Netflix or Spotify, I have no doubt they would have had to deal with lawsuits by now. Sim racers are too gullible and there was no competition for online structured racing back in 2008, that's why iRacing got away with it.
 
It is not scam per se however ridiculous the pricing is but I can see how people come to the conclusion.
If you read the posts of iracers which defend this structure every time somebody questions it is not hard to come to the conclusion. Within a few paragraphs you'll get explained all kind of absurd things. How you can for example earn money on iracing or get the content for a price of a lollipop or that kind of ridiculous things without them mentioning how much you have to spend in first place and or what happens once you simply stop pumping 12 bucks or whatever it is now every month into it. All those sorts of missleading posts which simply do not mention the enormous downsides of this structure.

I have over 700 bucks in iRacing and the worst thing for me is even if I just want to try a new updated car which I have "purchased" allready I can't anymore. Simply bc they do not stop asking you to pump more and more money into it. And at some point you just realise no update ever is going to change the medicore driving experience iracing provides. DK is in his own buble and his experiment is a fail. I am not even closely a full content owner and haven't raced it more than three times since 2012 or so.

I see no benefit what so ever in it compared to a well organasied league. It is not like you can race at any hour whatever you want. Just isn't. Most series are not even populated that much, they barely have more users than rf2 has if at all. Just a huge well oiled propaganda machinery with a decent amount of investors pushing the messege boards.

The only part where iracing really stands out is the "easy of use". That is something they really stand out above anybody else in the genre IMO. Be it hardware setup, starting a race or server, replays, endurance features etc. All that stuff is quite brilliantly executed.
 
LokiD said:
sorry but who cares about iracing? It's not rf 2, this is a rf2 forum!! Bored of reading about it.
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Because its a discussion about the future for rF2. Before S397 took over, rF2 was pretty much dead. There were very few new mods of any quality being created, development of the base sim had pretty much stalled, it had no VR, and it had no structured online environment. People had migrated to AC or iRacing [damn them] because that's where the better development was, or they found an [expensive] structured racing environment and plenty of online players for the most popular series.

So what does S397 have planned for online? We don't know, its not detailed at all in the roadmap. Do they intend to build an 'arrive-and-drive' like iRacing? No idea. There have been mooted developments of something like and iRating and safety rating (exists in console games even now, and PC2) but what is the point of that if it isn't used in matchmaking races? Do they intend to build a better environment for league racing, which a lot of people feel is superior to arrive-and-drive? Again, no idea. But let me say, simply refreshing the code base a bit and putting out a bit of fresh content probably isn't going to help this sim recover and become relevant again. SPASKIS has shown there has been almost no moving of the needle so far, and AC has 10x the participants. A hint: the sim wasn't dying because it didn't have the best physics/tire model; we already know there are lots of people playing 'worse' sims, simcade, or on consoles. The audience exists.

And then there's the very huge question of how they are going to fund that development, and keeping it all going for 5 to 10 years. Seems like subscriptions are out. DLC? Because S397 cannot self-fund this, like John Henry (multibillionaire) did for iRacing.
 
burgesjl said:
And then there's the very huge question of how they are going to fund that development, and keeping it all going for 5 to 10 years.
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I seriously hope S397 doesn't plan on extending RF2's life for 5-10 years and we have RF3 long before then.
I mean, just think about the technology advancements in 5 years and with potentially GTR3, AC2 and whatever Reiza plans on releasing next, if RF2 is struggling right now, imagine once those and other games come out.
 
fsuarez79 said:
I seriously hope S397 doesn't plan on extending RF2's life for 5-10 years and we have RF3 long before then.
I mean, just think about the technology advancements in 5 years and with potentially GTR3, AC2 and whatever Reiza plans on releasing next, if RF2 is struggling right now, imagine once those and other games come out.
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I don't see the problem. They can develop the game further. rf3 is not a solution. The development of rf2 is already dead slow. I mean for us players. I guess s397 is happy because they keep achieving goals in their internal checklist. Imagine if they would suddenly switch to rf3. :D It would be even slower lol.

The thing is if they are doing these groundworks "right". Because this is groundwork.
They can update/extend the game further with new techs/content. They already confirmed that a new shadow system is on their list with high priority.

And this groundwork must be done properly. Just look at AMS for an example. They choose to not update the in-game hud instead include a 3rd mod which is more advanced. Well, it turned out that the 3rd stuff cause more problems so now they have to update the in-game hud.

The true reason for this situation, in my opinion, is that they got some unexpected roadblock during development. And due to this, they had to do other unplanned stuff which caused this massive delay.

I wouldn't hold my breath for significant technology advancements for Reiza's next game. Since they stated that they are not comfortable with rf2's tire model which is supposed to be much more complex according to people around here.
Also, they are promising weather (rain and stuff) since stock car extreme. Which isn't mentioned much lately. While they can push out features quickly because they have a stable base to build on. With their next game, this will be significantly slower because they will rebuild their graphics engine. Which means until that is done they won't be able to develop new content. D:

As far as I know, AC2 is not a thing yet. And no one heard about GTR3 for a long time. Also, GTR3 people said they will port back all advancements from GTR3 to R3E which is also in beta since forever and R3E is the base for GTR3. So with this in mind, I don't see why S397 can't develop rf2 for 5 more years.
 
fsuarez79 said:
I seriously hope S397 doesn't plan on extending RF2's life for 5-10 years and we have RF3 long before then.
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"RF3" is meaningless. If you were to pull recent changes apart we could be on RF5 or RF6; versions and number are meaningless in 2017 when you can push out game-changing (pun intended :p ) updates online.
 
What game changing advancement do you think will happen in 5 yrs.

To look to the future you have to look at the past,and looking back.there hasn’t been any real tech advancements within the sim racing genre,at all really,just slight improvements over well established titles dating back a whole decade
 
Miro said:
It is not scam per se however ridiculous the pricing is but I can see how people come to the conclusion.
If you read the posts of iracers which defend this structure every time somebody questions it is not hard to come to the conclusion. Within a few paragraphs you'll get explained all kind of absurd things. How you can for example earn money on iracing or get the content for a price of a lollipop or that kind of ridiculous things without them mentioning how much you have to spend in first place and or what happens once you simply stop pumping 12 bucks or whatever it is now every month into it. All those sorts of missleading posts which simply do not mention the enormous downsides of this structure.
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That's the point, instead of reading user opinions people should actually go to their site and read conditions and then check the ToS. I never joined iRacing and one of the reasons is that I'm aware of how it works without needing to ask for biased opinions in favor or against it. Obviously other stuff like physics become subjective, I'm not judging this. The lack of features is evident (such as day/night transition).
By going to the site I see:
It's expensive
I dont own anything (ToS is very clear about it, just like you dont own rFactor 2)
I pay to use a car that is inside an online only subscription based system so if I dont pay I wont have access to the system thus the content I "unlocked", and that actually makes sense even if I dont like it.

Looks simple and explicit to me, in no way a scam and no reason to feel like a scam. Why people fool themselves expecting what is not being offered is beyond me.
 
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if in the conditions of purchase iracing they say it is not a scam, but in my case it seems a very bad investment,

rfactor 3 is absurd now, it would be starting from scratch with a new graphic engine.
Now that studio 397 has improved the one we currently have, I do not think it is an option, unless they value a lot the investment of a new sale and if they compensate the income !!! money question
 
It is far easier to blame others, iRacing in this case, for our decisions. I have $700 or $800 invested in iRacing and havent renewed my subscription because I didnt see the value in going on. That can change as my perceived value of their product changes and all of the content I purchased will be there. If I return....and I understand the frustrations and disappointments of those who did the same as I did and regret the decision. This hobby, sim racing, is getting more expensive as time goes by with hardware requirements and just the cost of software increasing. And it is pricing people out of the market which is unfortunate . But it is the ever increasing demand for better graphics, better physics, licensed content etc, that users demand that is driving the cost ever higher. Many of us have been around long enough to have experienced the growth and the high quality mods that were donated to us and I sense those days are going away for the same reasons. The cost of time to produce quality mods is proving too much for many to give it away.
 
Indeed the discussions on iracing are tiring. We are less on a constructive discussion to better consider the future of RF2 (or RF3 according to some) than a topic off topic as we like :).

I just ask myself the following:

If I'm not mistaken rf2 costs about 32 euros for life including online and any free content (plus all the DLC).

Frankly I wonder if this is not a mistake : the double is about 64 euros would be preferable, with reasonably priced DLCs like the GT3. For a Nordschleife scanned laser (counter example), most people would put easily no problem 40-60 euros (almost twice as much as the game today).

I try to be brief because I already said the folowing on another topic :
--->>> S397 has only two levers to succeed better than a year ago :

- Make better priorities and stick to it.
But that would sacrifice some players :
o Those who want to increase the realism in priority [physics & FFB, realroad, aquaplanning, real datas for cars and tracks, other algorythms etc.]
o Those who are in favor of Immersion [graphics ...] and Ergonomics [superb UI] .Second possibility: more money that would strengthen the small equips, subtract an item, have more REAL content (car data, ultra accurate data from a tire manufacturer, scanned laser tracks etc.), better communicate etc. etc.

- Second possibility:
Having more money (by having a more expensive game, etc.)
o That would strengthen the small [but ultra skills] team, subtract an item, have more REAL content (real and accurate car data and track data, get ultra accurate data from a tire manufacturer etc etc.), better communicate etc. etc.

Other ideas :

- May be allowed to those who want to donate to S397.
- Or better say:
« we do NOT want to make the scanned laser nordschliefe (that’s an example) but if we get "such a minimum amount" we start the development. Otherwise the users are refunded. » The Nords is only an example (good example), it can be something else.


These are just ideas so be indulgent.
 
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