Interesting thread. For us we setup our community to offer what we did not feel was available elsewhere, and will continue to work on those ideas as they thus far have seemed to work. Luckily when I planned the idea/launch I had help from some great guys and still do from various areas of motorsport (drivers, photographers, marshals, WEC driver's PA's as well as a couple of my team and myself having worked for a racing sim company) so we hope that our community will reflect that as we continue to grow. It's fairly slow going but we was never in a rush to over expand and cripple the service. When it comes from support from else where such as software houses etc, totally not expected from us. I'm sure if you think that if we come to expect help they would end up just supporting communities and not the product because there is so many communities worldwide. It's a un-realistic ask imo. Cost's wise luckily enough for us I own all of our dedicated servers (poweredge)/switches(cisco) etc from my previous hosting business so our outgoings are far under the norm if we would have had to "rent" from other providers. It also gives us total control from start to finish of the service we provide. That was an essential part of our planning. We don't charge anyone for racing with us, however do offer a donation system should anyone like to of which we do have some great members who have which always eases the end of month bills. I think if you charge for anything as a service you have to add value to that. It's something we may look at in the future as we have quite a raft of new features coming soon however time will tell once we start launching those. We also now offer a advert free environment by standard. For us starting the community and running it gives us creative freedom to "have fun" and do what we love and as we evolve it's to become a opensource community where anyone can get involved in virtually any level they wish to from creating site content, running events and more.
I belong to www.simracingaustralia.com , we have been in operation for approximately 8 years. We were setup by 2 guys ( Sterling and Schmickle ) originally running on some South Australian servers. We raced both Thursdays and Monday nights and ran Rfactor exclusively. things got a bit hectic once the SA servers where closed down and we had to chase up some reasonably cheap servers. Monday nights got a bit busy for the moderators so myself and 2 others asked if we could take up the running of the Monday night racing. We as in myself, Mr Mum ( deceased ) and liftalot , who no longer races, setup The Monday Factor. The Monday Factor runs GT and Touring class racing, basically all forms of sedan racing, we have never really stuck to one mod and run multiple series through out the year. Rfactor League, our Thursday nights servers run by www.simracingaustralia.com run open wheel class racing. Over the years , we have had many members join us and leave us but our racing has always been very competitive and total fun, our Team Speak servers ore not controlled in the way racers take the mickey out of each other but if someone goes to far, they are soon told where to go. We have had many sign ups to each series we have run, usually get some drop offs but people mainly drop out when they think they have no chance of doing well as the series get into the later stages. As with all Leagues, members have other lives and naturally we lose members through that as well. At first we had Australian servers only because of the time differences but now our servers are US based, www.hostilecontact.com , due mainly to pricing. We have reasonable ping rates, around 180 max, now people may think this is high but you would be surprised at how good that is and how close the racing can be, extremely close in most cases. My mate , Mr Mum passed away from illness a while ago ( 2 years in fact ) and I sort of lost interest in the management of the league so I handed it over to now our main Admin, who with some assistants, has kept the leagues running extremely well. Montah Steel runs it all, looks after the web site and the servers and does a massive job at it. Both website and servers are paid by member donations, we charge no fees what so ever and until there isn't the donations available to cover them, we never will. This sim racing community was setup for some guys that like sim racing to be able to race for fun. We only have 1 main prize event, The Mr Mum Cup, in honour of the work that he did for us. Sometimes there are minor trophies awarded for each series. The biggest drop we have had is for the switch to RF2 totally, we lost a few people that didn't like RF2 and wanted to stay with RF1 because of the available mods and tracks, but the ones that have stayed do so because we think that RF2 is and will be the way to go for the future. What I am trying to say is that we don't need to charge a fee because the guys that race donate because they know that they can race fairly and have a great time doing it. We have some very good ( alien ) racers and they are hard to beat, but nobody is perfect and everyone makes mistakes. So if you race in a community, then do it for the fun, locked servers aren't that bad. And if you're looking to race down under, no matter what time zone you're in, come on down to www.simracingaustralia.com and say hello and have some fun.
I dont beleive we need any companies help. A community is a community and it should keep this way sustaining itself. Donating is a logical way to make ends meet, if people cant cope I guess a small fee is the best way to go. We are running our League 2 years now, target for donations is 50euros a month, we almost always top that every month, members (Im one too) keep supporting, after all we dont want admins and owners pay for our fun. I really cant see what the discussion is about, communities are communities, they dont need outside support, they just support themselves imho.
If you cant even say hello to the community you shouldnt be there, communities are for friends to gather formost
totally agree, I also don't see any reason for ISI and the like to give anything either, they give enough as it is...................if it wasn't for them, there would be no communities
