Simracing communities

This is an issue not so often discussed along simracing fóruns.
Simracing communities.

As a community owner i feel the need to express what i think about simracing scene as a whole. Sorry for any gramar error.
Simracing scene is done by a variety of things. In my opinion, 4 important ones. The software companies, the mooders, the simracing communities and the final costumers, the drivers, the players.
For what i know, a huge percentage of simracing communities have no interest in money and they work for free to deliver simracing events and championships to whoever wants. Some have a small fee (not so small in some cases). But the majority are free.
In our case we have championship races every monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday and sundays. Also some events on fridays and saturdays. We have a 5 people staff. We dont have any fee to drivers, all are free to join our events.

We make all this for the passion of simracing and motorsport, nothing more.
This brings me a question to all other simracing communities around here. We have a regular annual cost of around 1000€ (servers, some few prizes, domains, etc, etc). All our costs gets out of our own pockets and from some contributions from our members. And your community? How do you support all your costs?

Simracing is a small market where advertizing has small importance. How do you feel this will be in a couple of years? Do you feel any support from software companies?

My opinion is that we're all in the same boat but rowing in different directions. A better relation between the (refered above) 4 major roles would place simracing in another level i suppose.

Tell me what you think about this issue as a community owner.

 

We run home servers for website and game. Here the home-line is up to 100/100 and in our case we have 2 different computer: one for website, TS, download(mod for league,..) and another com. for runing rF, rF2,....

We run 3 championship per year. So the only cost are the winner prizes (let say 200€ for domain and prizes per year)

 

Its a mixed bag for us, we have an annual donations appeal and all we do is pay for server/site/domain bills. The majority of the bills are paid by admins with a bunch of members contributing every year (even some whom haven't raced with us for a long time) and then with a bit of luck we see some coming in from newer members. but never mandatory.
We don't do prize money though, we fear it brings the wrong kind of drivers in and possibly increases bad behaviour or worse.

Due to the changeover in simland, old sims getting abandoned, new sims not quite embraced by everyone, this year was the first time for us that we had doubts we could even pay the bills. It reflects the state we are in as a league, we kinda have to start again from zero and build it up with new blood.
We recently started a new championship in a final effort to get things going with rf2 otherwise its probably the end of it after 21years.

Typically its about 3 to 6 admins taking care of things and a stewards office where members become stewards, we have week-events with official races on a sunday so that gives a bit more breathing space in organising things and gives member plenty of time to practise. 4 championships per year normally, including an off-season with fun events.
Its the community dictating the pace however, without members voicing in and pushing things forward its not going to work, no matter how passionate admins are.

I really hope we can get going for another 20 years in whatever shape or form but its probably always going to be a struggle. For example the balance between recruiting allot of new drivers and at the same time keeping driving standards up and not get sucked into a more pickup-racery-atmosphere, its a double edged sword because you need both in the end.

Support from software companies? not sure if I understand you there. You mean ISI or other sims?

 

I started Pitlanes.com just over two years a go now. Doing so because I wasn't aware of other communities, having only just got in to sim racing..... a little naive.

Primarily on iRacing for the majority of this time and also being all of my own work and out of my own pocket. I do have a trusted "Right hand man" that runs a weekly event on iRacing in our name.

On the money side of things I have always strived for that to be firmly on my shoulders as I see it as it being my idea to start the community. Recently, with more and more sims worth attention such as rF2, AC and the PiBoSo titles, I asked the community if they wanted to chip in for a dedicated server so we could run our own events in more than just iRacing. The response was huge and now we are running a series here with the URD GT content and also two Indy Servers. If the guys don't pay, we won't have the server, it's that simple. Being a student, I cannot sustain such a thing myself though I am happy to put the work in to advertise and support it.

On the admin side, Like I said, It is basically me. I have a few guys I trust and they make sure servers for different games are up and post to the facebook page on rare occasion.

As for software companies, I am not sure what you mean by it? The only communication I have is with sim-related staff. Tim from here at ISI, Steve, David & Tony at iRacing and have communicated a little with "someone" at PiBoSo. I also have ties and a little advertising deal with D-Series Off Road Simulation. I just try to be open and communicate. It is nice when Tim sends out the media mail-shot with info in, for example, because then I can spread it through my community and associated social media in an attempt to support and promote each sim.

I also feel that communities should work together, where necessary. For example I was taking part in the PRC URD GT series, but the times ended up not working for me. I started my own, but specifically avoided "their" night so as not to tread on toes within a sim community (rF2) that my community is still finding its feet in. I hope that makes sense?

I've gone on a bit.... sorry lol

 

I mean all. My question was if any of the actual simracing communities feel some sort of support from software companies.
Let me express a little better since english is not my primary language.
I think that a huge percentage of simracing fans, one way or another, ends racing in a simracing community. As a community owner i feel no support from anyone on "their" side (apart Tim here on ISI). What i mean is that, if simracing communities have such a great role in using their software and a great role advertizing it, this link between both sides should not be better worked?

I think both sides should work to level up simracing. It would be better to both.
How? There are tons of things that could be worked.

I think i cannot express better than this in your language. Sorry.

I was just trying to see how everybody who runs a league thinks about simracing scene present moment and the bound between everybody.

 

What about this as an example? Is this the kind of thing you mean?

I contacted the creator of D-Series simulation to ask for some of his logos as I wanted to add them to our car liveries and our website as a show of support to his vision. One-man team creating what I think is a really cool sim. I made it very, very clear I wanted nothing in return. But when he got back to me, he sent the logos and also asked for mine as he said he would put in a few visible places on a track or two as a show of thanks for my support.

I obviously said yes, but didn't expect it. Is that the kind of......working together you're talking about? Increasing the exposure of both, as best they can?

 

Your English is fine mate

I don't expect much pro-active support from ISI or anyone really. not in a face-to-face way anyways. The fact that rf2 and other sims are constantly evolving and that they are aware of our wishes and issues and even seem to implement those on occasion is support enough for me.
Sure, I could list a whole bunch of items that I feel benefits me or our league and i'm sure you can too, and thousands of others users as well. And that's one of the reasons we don't get them fulfilled right away or at all. its just too much and too diverse for them to respond to.
And its their philosophy that we take on most issues by ourselves. whether that's good or bad, it has been like this since rf1 and no sign of change.

But i'm pretty sure they know that a happy userbase is key for their software and future, so they are likely to focus on that, within what is possible.

Could you be more specific on support you are not getting and would want to have?

 

Care to hear from someone on the other side of the fence?

I'm not a member of a sim racing community. Why? Because almost all leagues make it so damn hard to race. You have to sign up to their website, maybe even sign up again to their forums. You have to find a teamate, say hello to the community, officially post in the sign up thread, make a paint, go to another thread somewhere to find a password. All way too annoying and is the reason why I loved R2P because it was just so easy race. Only reason why I'm not there is because it wasn't worth scouring the upcoming races list to race against 4 people. Anyway there is my two cents worth.

 

Understand that im not criticizing nobody. im just trying to figure out what can be done to increase activity between both sides (and modders also). I never had a negative response from people here (ISI) at any of my requests, quite the contrary i must say.

Example. Do any of simracing communities have any word on what content they think its the best one to work on? Shouldnt people on software companies listen to who manage 90% (could be 80% could be 10% who knows?) of their costumers?

Many things can be done. Another example, one that makes me mad, is that we had a thread some months ago asking to simracing communities what they think its necessary in rfactor 2. None (or almost) were implemented.

Other example was the request from simracing communities needing some sort of anti-cheat to prevent all the stupid guys.....what were done on this subject? Nothing. That makes me think that actually we are not listen.

I will say again, im not criticizing ISI or any other software company. Im just trying to change something and some heads. ISI, even with some flaws, are here in fórum answering to us. Others simply ignore their costumers.

Anyway, that was not the main subject of this thread. It was to see how you all support your costs and what you feel about the future of simracing communities.

 

This I don't understand. I thought the whole Vmod thing makes it very difficult to cheat? If you're talking RAM cheats well every piece of software has that.

 

I think it is important to remember things take time, Valter, that's all. Was the thread you speak of here? (I missed it).

Regardless, it's not like they can flick a switch and say "Tire management variable to ON!"......."Wind variable to ON".... It may be that these updates you speak of are coming. Just have to be patient

 

Sounds to me like you have little patience or just not found the community that fits you yet. Not all of them are overly complicated.

 

As i refered, this is not a ISI did, ISI did not, thread. That was not my intention, and our talk is going in the wrong direction. Was more interested in community scene rather than this subject.

 

Hi.
I think i understand what you say. Im with you that if modders/comunities work hard for free, doesnt have the sim creators (Isi in this case) listen and help them. It seems there are no comunication betwin them.
One thing is sure that if there werent comunities/modders working in rF2, wich will be the future of it. Will you buy a game like this to race against the ia?
We are new as comunity, www.racesimleague.com and we are trying to go on by our own. Actually, running a home server in the ours we can and we dont have any fee at the moment. But when we were more drivers, dont have another option to rent a dedicated.
Maybe some help by Isi in anyway would be wellcome like servers dicounts a few months to start, or whatelse.
When i started in rF1, there were too much movement in the sim racing that i can see now. Hopefully, the are many games now, but maybe this is one problem for the comunities. We can see many of them gaming to rF1, rF2, Race, AC, and another ones at the same time. This makes only a few in each one.
Dont know what is happening but think we should have some help .

 

My group grew from a common interest in the mod. Shabo offered to run the site and we both admin the forum. He's the dedicated race steward and I am the organizer putting together events and the series. After the BSS championship, we will do a short indycar series then season 2. It all gels pretty well but numbers are failing.

To join races you do have to sign up for the forum but that's not a huge thing IMHO. No requirement for a skin or team just show up and drive. We have a 24/7 practice server but it hardly ever has people on it because look at the server lobby- it's usually sparsely populated anyway. Rf2 has not gained enough momentum since launch and it's killing leagues trying to use it. Isi is responsible for promoting their product but has not. It's the best sim out there but all we hear is the negative. Isi needs to advertise, buy ads, compete with iracing, AC etc and stage a media blitz and scream from the mountain tops why rf2 is simply the best. People don't know and the demo doesn't showcase the important subtleties that put rf2 over the top.

Rfactor 2 needs more people racing online.

 

We started back in 2001 with GP 3, then on through N2003 to rfactor. We had various admin teams through the years, the only constant being me!

As I founded the whole www.racing-leagues.com and now www.touringcar-simracing.com I have always paid for the servers/domains and created and manage all our websites. Our costs run at around £800 a year currently. I do it for the passion for simracing. Many times its a thankless task and as you go through the years you ask yourself why, but then all it takes is that one race where your coming off the final corner leading to the line and it all makes sense again

What I will say is that rf 2 has been the hardest work to get any momentum going for a league. For the members and especially getting new members involved its not very user friendly and as easy to jump into

Sent from my KFTT using Tapatalk

 

Very true Aero, difficult to get it going. But I have to say, even in rf1 we have seen many disheartening moments, at least a few times per year where an admin or two is ready to give up. its not something unique for rf2, its part of running a community and the majority of admins are doing it because they are passionate about it, from organisation to technical stuff.

@Valter, how do you see a collaboration with he modding community? as far as I know modders are either part of a community and serve them with their skills, and the rest of us simply use what they created and made available.
But how would leagues support modders and the other way around?

 

The main reason I started a league was because there were no leagues running the types of events in which I like to participate.

Running lap after lap around a 4km course is fun enough, but it's not nearly as fun to me as being alone on a hill climb or loooooong temporary road course. Thus virtualhillclimb was conceived and launched.

I'd be willing to bet that all of the leagues out there exist simply because of the league creator's love of racing. None of us are in it for the money.

In my world, modders are nearly as important in the success of a sim title as the developer. Modders are the reason I do what I do. And the modders are the guys I hope to build some sort of relationship with in the future. Without them, I'll just be doing laps

 

Hi guys,

Phill Routledge here, Co-Founder of www.simracingoz.com sim racing community based out of Australia.

This topic I found very interesting as a league owner myself, and it's a topic that always fascinates me.

Over the years our "membership model" has changed significantly with our maturing as a community, but also with the changing times and demands the newer platforms place on bandwidth.


My league has seen some domain name changes, admin roster changes and other market place forces effect our direction - until we have finally settled on what we think works for us as a community.

It has taken some time to find the right balance between what we offer for free, What we offer to our mid range supporter and what we offer our 100% dedicated member whom chooses our community as his only chosen place to race, or his home if you will...

Initially when we started out as a league we offered everything for everyone for 100% free and I myself personally covered off all teh running cost's the league generated.

I felt that when we started we had too do this to garner members and entice them to join us, race with us and choose us. Then outside pressures came, Marriage, Children, Mortgage. And I found i could no longer afford to cover the running cost's of the league any longer.

At this point we brought in a "Voluntary Donations" system where we advertised our monthly target to cover off cost's and while this was working successfully, It was also very unfair in that the same dedicated people committed to our community 100% were continually offering up funds to assist us, others were actively abusing the system by competing in everything we did, but never offering us anything in return. Using and Abusing the system.

Here in Australia it seems using a league's services and not offering up financial support, for many, is par for the course, However as a league owner I note that in the Euro zone, members are far more accepting of the "user pays" mantra - actively supporting the cause and this is very honorable of them

So, again we changed our Membership model. This time around we have gone to a true "user pays" system adopting the ethical approach successfully used by many larger communities in the northern hemisphere.

We offer up three levels of membership each with a different level of desirable feature's that continually scale up.

Bronze Membership offers the bare basics, (Free)
Bronze level gives the new member basic forum access, basic files database access and basic mods and tracks for accessing our weekly Wednesday night fun run. This is 100% free and essentially used to allow members to dip their toe into the waters of our community and see if they like what we do and how we operate... They can choose to stay this way, or scale up to compete with us in the more 'juicy' stuff we run.

Silver Membership offers the next level experience. ($60 AUD / year, paid up front).
Silver level gives our members access to everything a Bronze member has, but scales up giving them more. More access to our expanded forums, Access to our silver level expanded files database for mods and tracks (A lot of what we have in our DL database is exclusively converted by our selves and is not available anywhere else), but now we add Music - All our members upload and share their tunes. But most importantly this level membership provides the end user with eligibility to race in our Formula 1 season. A year long championship closely mimicking the real world series.

And lastly,

Gold Membership. Our top shelf content package. ($75 AUD / year, paid up front).
Gold level membership essentially gives the member the "keys to the city" in that, It opens up everything to the member without usage restriction or access restriction. The Download files database is further expanded to include content not available to Silver or Bronze members, and it now not only includes Music, but also video. Further and most importantly it not only provides all bronze and silver level content/events but it add's our premier race series - Australian V8 Supercars - Our main draw card. Attached to our Gold Membership is our "Search for a Champion" prize package - A year long competition where over $1500 in prizes area available to our overall drivers champion. Championship points are gathered across the racing content run within Bronze, Silver and Gold level events. So this puts a impetus on attendance - If you race more often you can actually beat the faster guy who only shows up 75% of the time. Good for the league, good for it's members because more people show up more often.

So along with this new user pays system we have garnered some extremely good support from sponsors with advertising agreement's on our website in return for free services and prizes;

- Mega.co.nz provide us with a Pro Level II cloud storage facilty. This is the key to being able to provide user restrictions on what content they can and can't access via what membership toolpack they are. Our members have reported Dl speeds as fast as 4.5mb/sec down with this service - extreme speeds for Australia at least, so this sponsorship was a real coup.

- Computer Age Systems, Pagnian Imports and The Gamesmen round out our other sponsors portfolio and they advertise on site in return for providing the community with over $1500 worth of prizes each year - recurring.

The fact is that the road to get where we are now has been bumpy...

The new user pays system for sure has been contentious with some of our members who much rather proffered the user pays nothing system we previously had.

Those members no longer race with us and that's fine - they no longer burden us, they are now some other communities anchor to drag.

The user pays system has done one thing for our community, It has sorted out the "Tyre kickers" from those that truly love our community 100% with dedication, commitment, and their ongoing faithful support.
It has in fact improved the quality of racing within the community by way of the drivers that are willing to pay membership actually show up every single week to race with passion, respect, and cleanliness.
They don't drift in and out, following four or five different communities, and racing with which ever one has the "flavour of the month" mod running.

In closing the system we have now see's our community completely self funded from within and with assistance from a few sponsorship arrangements, the cost's are shared evenly and at the end of the day the user decides to join up financially or not.

This has slowed the membership sign ups a little - sure, but the members we do manage too retain, who do go financial generally are of a much higher standard and this is for us, is what's most important.

Quality, not quantity.

To other league's owners out their, don't be afraid to commit to a user pays system, It's worked wonders for us at www.simracingoz.com

 

In rF1, I ran a pick-up-racing server for a couple years, mostly NAGT content once that came out because few others were running open servers for NAGT. Bore the cost myself (electricity for surplus computer at my house), never advertised, and it worked because I'd contact a couple friends and, <poof>, several other people would come join.

Typically we'd have 7-10 people running the half hour races and I got to know several other racers. It was a community much like the F3Fanatics group is today.