Endurance races are still boring

First to say sorry for the bad English i hope you understand my point.
This is not to say Assetto Corsa isnt a good game because its on a good way so far it is.

But i miss something essential with these and i think all the race games.
In a endurance race its still verry boring after a few laps when the field has setlled.
You drive youre rounds , lap after lap and...there is nothing happens.
The ai drives like robots there laps, they even have no problems and retirements.
When you drive exactly the same laptimes within a second then you gonna be on the place where you drive for the full time (1 hour-2hours-4 houres, it doesnt matter)

Now this weekend i watched the Nurb 24.
There are a lot of things happening, cars come in with failures, cars crashing, cars retire etc etc.
Even in the formula one happens a lot in a race.
But its still is no succes to program things like that to give the game a lot more realistic feeling.
I will hope in the future game devs will reconsidder this point, because for now there is not a single racing game who got this good inplanted.
At this moment thats for me dissapointing, you make such a nice good game but i dont play it much anymore because of that.

 

Try online endurance races, it is much more fun, even if AC does not have any and all features for endurance. In any event you must be prepared to lap alone; do multiclass races if that is annoying.

 

wait for brake temperature simulation and weather transitioning in a future

 

Humans would be fine with AI having mechanical failures not so much if it happened to them.

 

just simple things like tyre punctures would add a massive dynamics to endurance races.

 

This is the old problem that AC is not a "game". It's the perfect sim, but not a game at all. It's a driving tool. You are right in what you say, but you are talking about gaming elements. I think AC was designed from the start to be only a sim.

The mistake they made in my opinion was that they still added unfinished gaming elements to it, instead of focusing on the sim part 100%. For example, nobody plays the career. It's completly unsatisfying. Also events are not properly done, even now, after years they are still heavily unbalanced.

Random retires and AI mistakes in races are also gaming elements that need to be faked to be exciting. That is not physics programming, it's game programming, and it seems they just don't do that. I don't know if it's a creative decision or not, but it's pretty clear.

 

While I agree with your separation of gamey and simmy stuff, I find it a smart move they added game elements, even though they are not all polished. Hope they will be for console release. I think this is good because Kunos gathers important experience this way.

And any sources for the claim that noone plays the AC career? I'd say quite a lot of folks do. I got no source for that claim myself...just basing it on the fact that career and event bugs are reported in this forum on a regular base.

As for OP's concerns: I'd love these features, too but don't expect to see them in AC. As mentioned before it's not what AC is meant to be.
Is there a game (reasonably realistic) that did this really well? Maybe ToCa race driver? Or the 24 h of LeMans game for PS1?

 

For online yes. Singleplayer, hell no.

Nobody wants random failures in a game, it has to be someones fault if not your own.

 

try ams or rf2.

 

@LeDude83 No sources, it's just my opinion. Besides the AI races not being balanced, I think career more doesn't fit AC. It should remain a pure sim, that's what Kunos is so good at. In my opinion they should drop completly the AI-related gameplay and focus on online only. Official servers, driver ratings, leaderboards, etc. I realize that's probably hard to do financially, though. Imagine something like or better than iRacing with AC technology... it would be amazing.

 

They've been balancing the special events in 1.5 and 1.6 update. Give them a go again. If some specific event is unbalanced, like being too easy on the hardest difficulty, then open up a thread as it helps reporting a problem, or possible problem.

 

We dont need mechanical failures, this is a thing for 80's.

We need AI select more strategies, like, some cars go to pit 1 time with hard tyres and others go 2 times with medium tyres. This make the race more interest.

 

I don't entirely get your point, "pure sim" means everything else than MP and hotlapping should be forgotten now and no longer improved?

I hope AI is not at it's final stage, and will have improvements. Simulating hotlapping is cool, but simulating racing needs better AI (while the AI has already vastly improved, but it's still too predictable and could be a lot better). After 500+ hours in AC I have barely touched the career mode, but driven A LOT of single races against AI. The AI very much matters to me, career not so much because it's just a bunch of quick races really, I rather pick my own car / track etc... but the AI is very central part of enjoying Assetto Corsa. Doesn't need mechanical failures or tyre punctures, but needs more drama of the race, more human-like AI.

Being a simulation, doesn't mean it shouldn't have a good AI, as it's also a simulation of a race, not just simulation of car and track. Especially now when it's becoming a console game.

 

@Quffy I don't think there's anyone that posted issues about events more than me. I also made videos with guides for gold achievements as well as reporting bugs. Below are the threads I started regarding events:

Kunos, when are you going to fix the achievements? (November, 2015)
https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/i...-are-you-going-to-fix-the-achievements.28807/

List of broken special events after 1.4.3
https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/i...l-events-after-1-4-3.29784/page-5#post-692543

New lap times for achievements?
https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/i...lap-times-for-achievements.26007/#post-579825

AI too easy for slower cars?
https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?threads/ai-too-easy-for-slower-cars.32812/

Gold achievement times videos
https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?threads/gold-achievement-times-videos.29628/#post-614685

Lotus cup event impossible?
https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?threads/lotus-cup-event-impossible.28170/

@ShredatorFIN : By "perfect sim" I mean focus 100% on physics simulation & multiplayer and forget anything that is "gaming" related (AI, career, achievements). That's how I'd do it. More drama in the races as you say, means to fake it, you cannot simulate drama. And faking it means gameplay programming which currently they don't do. They're extremely good at simulating so that's why the focus should be on that: just make it the perfect sim. Practice singleplayer and race multiplayer, with ratings, servers, leaderboards, racing events, etc.

 

The AI isn't bad at all, while has it's weaknesses. Without offline races AC would be a much lesser product. I'm just thinking how offline endurance racing might be more interesting. Fake, real, doesn't really matter to me as long as it's entertaining. Simracing is "just" entertainment too, after all.

 

@ShredatorFIN The biggest problem with the AI now is inconsistency regarding car class (my thread "AI too easy for slower cars?" above). Any singleplayer race involving slower cars is trivial. You can go from back of the grid to 1st in one lap on 100% AI. And for fast cars it's impossible to keep up. This results in unbalanced career and events. Of course in an ideal world it would be nice to have both AI and online racing, but as it stands now, I'd focus on multiplayer only since the simulation is so good.

 

I thought punctures were already in AC in some way?

 

Thanks for the links. I noticed they were from several months ago, so the balancing was done in 1.5 and 1.6 updates, so probably those reports aren't good any more as special events were rebalanced since then. About the recent one you posted here is something to do with AI performance in slower cars, not caused by special events races. Then about Time Attack, is just the nature of how this mode works, where you need to make slower lap times and with each lap increasing, so to score more points, and not post a very fast lap time and then not able to improve it, which will end your Time Attack soon.

 

Whilst this is true it's easy to fix, just treat lap 1 like a pseudo-formation lap and only attack the pack when the AI stops playing follow the leader.

I'm guessing the AI becomes passive when the number of cars within a certain distance gets too high for it to handle racing, hence the polite, double-file, queueing. I think of it as British mode.