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Sim Racing System now available for AC

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Offline Gratulin

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Sim Racing System now available for AC
« on: May 02, 2016, 09:34:09 AM »

Offline marty

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #1 on: May 02, 2016, 10:58:09 AM »
Just had a look at the thread, servers all based in portugal and currently being all run from a single home pc setup in Portugal. This is having fairly major issues due to server load so interesting idea but would need way more resources to be a worthy thing and who is going to pay for that?

There is a reason Iracing has a monthly fee to cover costs plus profits and so your just not going to get anything close to that for free. Charge a fee then the number of interested users will drastically drop and so its more like a lose lose system atm the way I see it. It needs large number to be a success but as is it cant handle that and in order to handle the numbers it would need a fee that will quite likely kill the user interest.

Offline Bird

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #2 on: May 02, 2016, 11:04:15 AM »
There are reasons I'm not iRacing, and that system is one of those...but I maybe an exception. :)

Offline Gratulin

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #3 on: May 02, 2016, 11:26:11 AM »
I just wish the AC booking system would allow you to book a race at a specific time, see who else is booked and then allow you to go do "other things" notifying you when the race time approaches. I really don't want to hang around hoping to get a decent race on public servers. Many times I have gone online, seen no one racing only to find out later that 30 minutes later there was some good racing occurred.

Just to clarify. I am not looking for the iRacing booking style. I don't really like to wait an hour for each race. What would be good would be to just have a booking overlayed on the existing server structure that listed who planned to race during a specific time period on a specific server. Add to that the Stefano idea of "idle server" reconfig requests and you have a pretty good multiplayer environment for casual racing.

Offline Wally

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #4 on: May 02, 2016, 11:42:53 AM »
I approached Kunos about a way that my server browser could do this,but was met with silence.  You could register interest in a server with my phone app (Android only though).
“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”

Rolz

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #5 on: May 02, 2016, 01:56:57 PM »
never understood why I need to lock in a time to race...

"hey, I'm here now who else is? ok cool - there is a server bam lets go!"

thats what annoyed me about iRacing - and the towing a caravan sensation  :P

Offline marty

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #6 on: May 02, 2016, 02:25:45 PM »
never understood why I need to lock in a time to race...

"hey, I'm here now who else is? ok cool - there is a server bam lets go!"

thats what annoyed me about iRacing - and the towing a caravan sensation  :P

Kunos seemed to think this is what people wanted as the initial MP implementation included only this, it pretty well bombed and so booking servers simply arent as popular as they assumed they would be.

It seems some may want this but id rather just jump in and race whenever I can without needing to wait for a set time, this is why shorter races are more popular in pickup server racing. For longer stuff you really need some more organisation as in league races and only if the mp casual numbers where very large with lots of reasonable drivers wanting the same thing as you would a booking system ever be of any use I think.

Offline Bird

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #7 on: May 02, 2016, 02:32:27 PM »
They'd not need a booking system, if they've implemented a voting system akin to LFS.

People joined, voted for the car & track (if the server allowed), then people had fun.  Simple, straightforward & powerful.
And a handful of servers can serve a large amount of people.

Offline Wally

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #8 on: May 02, 2016, 02:32:51 PM »
The only good thing about a booking system is that it gathers more people together in one place/time.
“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”

Offline Gratulin

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #9 on: May 02, 2016, 03:26:39 PM »
Perhaps the whole online interface should simply be a voting system. Servers are never visible to the user.

Users vote for a combo and a suitable server is selected in the background. The online interface then lists current sessions in progress and also queued requests for combos. Specific combos launch when a quota of drivers are available. Various rules can be implemented such as Minorating etc. Also, server admins could setup pre-defined combos for people who want to just join in.

Then if a league such as XGN posts on the forum that there will be a fun run at, say, 8pm tonight, the vote goes up and is shown as a pending event.

I know you can do a lot of this now but this would be a total paradigm shift from a list of  servers to a list of events and voting options.

Offline marty

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #10 on: May 02, 2016, 04:06:45 PM »
Perhaps the whole online interface should simply be a voting system. Servers are never visible to the user.

Users vote for a combo and a suitable server is selected in the background. The online interface then lists current sessions in progress and also queued requests for combos. Specific combos launch when a quota of drivers are available. Various rules can be implemented such as Minorating etc. Also, server admins could setup pre-defined combos for people who want to just join in.

Then if a league such as XGN posts on the forum that there will be a fun run at, say, 8pm tonight, the vote goes up and is shown as a pending event.

I know you can do a lot of this now but this would be a total paradigm shift from a list of  servers to a list of events and voting options.

I dont see any reason why someone would want to pay for run and host servers that others have full control over, sure if Kunos supplied the servers but then who is going to pay for them all. You also seem to forget we are in a fairly isolated part of the world so we would need local server unless you want to always have a 300-400 ping racing other aussies with a 300-400 ping making you have a combined ping of 600-800.

Lots of people have all these brilliant ideas but when it comes to putting it to action how do they expect it to be funded? If the devs themselves were to run a large array of servers world wide then somehow they would need to recover costs just like any other group of people wanting full control of servers supplied by others. I personally would have no issue paying for a good service but then I wouldnt run my own servers, many dont ever want to pay for anything beyond the game and struggle to even cough up the money for DLC content.

Any large organised system needs to be funded somehow and all those that want everything provided at no cost will never get what they want, I also wouldnt waste money paying for a service if I know it wont have a large enough user base to justify the cost they are asking and this is pretty much always going to be the case. Nobody will be able to make a system for reasonable cost that can provide what the majority of these people want and if charging even the bare minimum to to cover costs then the user base will be so low it doesn't justify running it in the first place, where it could be run on a cheap solution at no charge to the user. But then it would be overwhelmed if free and massively under used if it was a paid service.

I cant ever see anything like this taking off and its pretty much what Iracing based their entire model on and I think those that are so desperately wanting someone to redo Iracing on another platform would be better off just going there. Its cool that people have great ideas and want to try diffferent things, but your simply limited by more things then just ideas and someone dedicating the time to code something.

Even look at things like minorating, its a great service being run by a very talented and dedicated coder. He mostly funds it all himself too along with the odd donation. His server is very limited and already overwhelmed same as RSR needing fundraising drives to simply continue providing a useful service many have used but not many have given even paid 1 cent beyond the base game and the odd DLC. These same people all seem to want everything for nothing and continue to wonder why they cant get that.

Offline Bird

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #11 on: May 02, 2016, 04:11:49 PM »
(in response to Gratulin)
They've tried something similar Cod923 (I'm very correct with versions, as always!) and it was a spectacular failure as I recall.
Especially if you don't get enough people similar to your taste within one region, it mixes people up with high pings, sometimes on crappy servers.  It's not good for online gaming systems IMO.

Offline Sin

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #12 on: May 02, 2016, 04:21:13 PM »
I signed up but doubt I will use it. iRacing I got over pretty quick in the early days and am a casual gamer, so if I am going to book in for a race it will be through a league on a forums like xgn, arse etc.

And as pointed out above, the idea has merit but you cannot expect a massive fan base if your servers are in your mums basement in portugal.

I like the RSR live timing app for "competing" against mates for lap times. Racing is best organised through the forum

Jump and race, seems to be enough servers to do that anyway.

Rolz

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #13 on: May 02, 2016, 04:23:57 PM »
Even look at things like minorating, its a great service being run by a very talented and dedicated coder. He mostly funds it all himself too along with the odd donation. His server is very limited and already overwhelmed same as RSR needing fundraising drives to simply continue providing a useful service many have used but not many have given even paid 1 cent beyond the base game and the odd DLC. These same people all seem to want everything for nothing and continue to wonder why they cant get that.

This is really sad considering Minorating has almost 29,000 grades classified...

Friends ask if I can get any money out of my server hosting,  I laugh and say no... I do it for the joy of it as I'm sure Marty you do too :)

Offline Gratulin

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Re: Sim Racing System now available for AC
« Reply #14 on: May 02, 2016, 04:28:01 PM »
The suggestion is to only change the online lobby interface. Nothing else changes. Instead of a list of  servers there is a list of events registered to the lobby by the servers. These events have various attributes such as MR, cars, tracks, lap counts, minimum drivers, time-of-day/continuous, Steam friends, League members etc. Add the ability to queue for an event which is either not available or the combo is listed but not scheduled because there are no drivers. This then gives a interface for what people are currently doing manually.

 

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