Incentive for all players to increase their ratings

Let me correct your English there so it’s a tad clearer:

All the core ingredients are already in the game.

 

Yea, by worst I mean difficult to implement, not a bad part of the system. Thank you

 

But that goes against the principle of expanding the sim racing community, which seems to be the intention of Kunos and seems a good goal to have.

iRacing is behind a paywall and that discourages people from joining. They have a very lucrative business model there. But that should highlight how good the iRacing online experience is. And it’s actually rather limited at that; I occasionally take part in leagues set up by third parties too so I get a bit more value for my money.

Matchmaking to a server is not matchmaking to a race scene.

 

Of course that goes against what we want, I was only looking at the best case scenario of the worst case scenario, 1.0 without a good MP system

 

I agree with you. All the important elements are there. What Kunos needs to do to avoid this becoming a single player game with an online VIP club, is to get some servers up, structure races in series, and design an interface that doesn’t list servers, but gives you instead the series you want to take part in. They will then do the matchmaking.

Now, the only issue with that would be the player base. If the player base that has an SA above 50 is too small, even those series will be either empty, or populated with wreckers. What we then could do is help Kunos build the community: if Kunos gives us the servers for free, we will build their community for free.

 

Well, if at first the player base doesn't have SA, there can be a series that you can only enter without SA, like Safety Rating D in iRacing

 

I think Kunos dont want to lose the pick up & play / console / GT sport people which I can understand. They want to bring good physics and realism to this crowd. Scheduled racing is not for these people, they need matchmaking. So pity for us but fair enough...

Some good races today! People finally figured out not to bump at the grid lineup, amazing faith in humanity restored...

 

Yep

P.S.
It’s Rookies in iRacing. Then you get promoted to D, C, etc
It’s the iRating you don’t have access to when you join: they force you to focus on safety first.

 

Could they then expand the Special Events section to also include that?

Imagine a special event, on a weekly rotation, which you can enter on very short notice, which is multiplayer.

This limits their options but makes the whole thing have a purpose.

 

The opportunity is when the game launches, that's when the game will have tons of players and the most potential for the community to actually start forming itself. If by then the MP remains as it's, I'm afraid it will be over. First impressions matter, and even if you implement it later that won't bring enough players.

But let's say, there's no matchmaking at launch but they do plan to implement it later. It would be necessary to launch together with a big content patch, that will attract "old" players(those that quit because of no matchmaking) and actual new players. That could be the 2019 cars/track patch, or even a paid one like GT4 cars and multiclass races.

 

I think you didn't understand what I meant with "scheduled racing".
Instead of having practice, qualy and race one after the other, every session would start at a fixed time, like 14:30, 15:00, 15:30 and so on. It's not like "there will be a 1 hour race next Wednesday at 23:00 and you have to register now", so it's not much different than what we already have, just more organized. And if even so that's too much for them, then they can just join a community server.

 

I am trying to resist the temptation of making ACC a clone of iRacing. And I don’t think it has to be.

We just need a good schedule to start with, and a good matchmaking system to other players, not to servers. This is key.

The rest can be open lobbies, open practice events, open series.

 

I hope the BMW driver of the #102 car got a juicy SA penalty for ramming players going into the first corner, half a lap later and then me and another guy in turn 8 or "variante ascari" without braking.

It also just happens that when it happened, he was coming for us at full speed and managed to break our wheel physics; which somehow got detached and the guy in the Ferrari bounced around like crazy.

I also noticed I managed to post this in the wrong thread, oh well, feel free to move it somewhere more appropriate or delete, just really tired of the ones who tries to wreck it for everyone...

 

I’m in central time zone and when I joined a mp session at 9pm, there was literally one server that was populated. I’m thankful to MrGit who seems to have cracked the code on running populated servers, but this is a little worrying. I know we will see a bump in player count at launch, but still.

I agree with the urgent requirement to implement scheduled races, a la iracing. One additional thought though:

Could Kunos encourage the formation of racing “clubs” structured by geography? So have a European club etc. each club would have its own dedicated server with at least one scheduled race every weekday evening, relative to that time zone, plus more on the weekend. The club community would be nurtured with club specific leaderboards in game and a club specific section in the forums. And so on.

I think if Kunos did something relatively simple like this, the need to go full iracing might not be necessary at least in the short term, and we’d encourage the community to grow, particularly outside of the core in Europe.

Yes this is similar to private leagues, but I think something officially sanctioned is important to help the growth and engagement of the community overall. Just my two cents.

 

I don’t understand the need for scheduled racing here for open races. One of the more popular servers has been Kunos #2 which was recently at Misano with a five minute Q and 15 minute race. Always populated. If the Q was increased to 10 minutes, you have a race every half hour. With another server, you can have a 20 minute Q and 30 minute race, basically a race every hour. Bam! Scheduled (almost) racing without a formal schedule. If it could be arranged that the sessions start exactly at the top of the hour, or :15 after, or whatever, then you would have actual scheduled racing.

To bring SA into this, and a little dreaming, if more people could join Q than the current 24 limit, when Q is over and you have more than say 20 drivers, you could have a split by SA. So, “almost” scheduled racing with an SA split. Don’t know if that could be implemented, but it would seem to take care of a few major issues many of us are expressing here.

 

Scheduled races can also give more feeling of accomplishment. For example winning in top split or just making it to the top split where you know the level of driving will usually be pretty high. Etc. Won't get any of that from random open lobbies. Can be fun for a while but personally I would probably lose interest pretty quickly, just like in pcars2. Even SRS level of scheduled races/system would be fine but sadly seems that Kunos plans are based on the lobby browser consept.

 

This!

What keeps me going back every week to race the Radical in iRacing even though I’m bloody slow and iRacing has a crappy tyre model?
I’m number 2 in division 6. I want to win my division and be promoted to a higher division and be promoted to the B licence at the end of the season.
Years of that has shown it works.

 

I have very limited time to race (it's probably why I suck so bad) and having scheduled races posted way ahead of time means that I can plan and prepare well in advance. It also gives a sense of occasion, if you see what I mean. I know it's not the same for everyone, so drop-in races should also exist as both are useful, but some sort of regular, schedule racing would be awesome. There's a reason that iracing is successful, and it's not the graphics ;-)

 

You can’t always have races every hour *and* a full grid!

Last night I was on mrgit’s server on my own. I raced on my own. Because I wanted to see how if anyone was going to join mid race. It was a 65 SA server at PaulRicard
The track was damp, and I had to use wet tyres because the track took ages to dry up.
Not fun!

 

To everyone saying there doesn't need to be scheduled races, I ask: what's the downside?