Oh really? Open letter to the community, this time from a dev...?!

@christopher: I do see the appeal for mini races, but it's a choice that I made to offer something that wasn't already offered by other public servers. I feel short 5 lap races attract a less serious audience (more intentional wreckers and beginners) than longer races do. And yes, realism.

 

All is in progress. But having a blown "community" forum here would - or better to say "could" - be a mess. There is only one relative sidesection which is the Chit Chat and even this one do sometimes suck energy from Staff from time to time. Kunos dont earn much money by driving a community forum, or views and clicks.

Managing a community can be a full time job for one and more ppl. an I dont think that kunos would hire ppl. for community managing at the moment. But who knows what the future will bring.

 

I really think you misunderstood him here. Because I remember him saying the only reason for not having more sub forums is that Kunos can not handle to moderate them, simply because of company size.

 

I think even aloog would struggle to keep an 24 racers going for an hour. I'd bet only ten drivers would finish, and if them only about 3 would make it before the session change.

Pity really because I quite like hour long races. I may have to look for twenty lappers somewhere.

 

I don't discuss tips in a forum thread, I discuss them on track. Our league has regular scheduled races and the week before a race we do a "carb day" where we discuss driving tips, setups and all that. Thee's so many tips that are specific to every track that you can't just jump into a forum and start a random conversation about the camber of Tarzan, or how slippy the turn in to the T8 at Vallelunga is if you brake even 1 meter too late. It's just difficult to remember and recall.

 

Everyone says that this moderating is taking a lot of time and energy from kunos and such, but in the end it's all speculation. They don't even try and other great examples have shown that their speculations aren't right. LFS for example. Only 3 staff members. 1 made the site, 1 coded, 1 modeller. And still they have everything where kunos hides from, because they think it take so much time and energy to moderate.

 

Go back and re-read your posts @TCLF
Would you honestly spend a couple hours a day of your free time helping out people with attitudes like yours? I know I wouldn't.

 

If that's the only thing you can come up with, I'm pretty confident about how well I have my opinion substantiated

 

Its a bit pointless to talk about. I did managed a com (much smaller) in my freetime in the past because I thought It cant be that much work and its fun... lol. How ever... All is easy and can be better done as a spectator from the sidelane. Welcome couch footballers.

I would love to have a place where I can talk about AC and racing and Italian food and cats and leagues and cars and girls etc etc too, but its not here at the moment. May change.

 

Pretty sure you can talk about most, if not all of that at racedepartment. There is even a section for sharing setups.

 

Back in NR2003 days we settled on about 45 mins for league races aside from one per season as long as it'd let us ( about 2 hrs I think? ) and even then we'd be lucky to get 2/3ds finishing, although admittedly we did have a comedy back of the grid ( I was so surprised when one of them managed to get and stay in 2nd place for the first 5 laps of one race I nearly went off ). For average racers 45 mins is quite a while to hold concentration - actually even for front runners it's easy to start driving on instinct & lose your edge.

BUT: it also makes mistakes less disastrous, you have time to recover and I don't think that's generally appreciated enough ( rather than specifically appreciated by league racers ). Maybe someone can try adding a couple of laps to a pickup server every week & see what the retention is like.

 

Talking about cats around here is fine by me.

 

well, I think kunos wants to know what we think/want. But indeed there atm is no point in going further into it. It's up to kunos.

Enough negative opinions about kunos from me, time to get positively into league racing again.

 

I knew it when mentioning cats....

@Micha: Thanks, everytime thinking about to register on RD but then always forgot. Maybe this time.

Meow.

 

That looks to me like a reason we should race cats, look they are too stoned on catnip to be bothered moving, HUMAN WIN! Cat need morecheezburger! Maybe they are reading material on the Flying Pig forum, possibly they are terrified of that flowery curtain, purrhaps they are watching a catastrophy!

 

I assume this hypothetical scenario you speak of would be in MP and not hotlapping or AI races. Someone could gloss over a brake fade parameter when setting up hotlapping or AI races, but that's on them. Showing up in a MP server and having your brakes go out from over use is another. Even now, in the server some parameters are not so clear.

Since this is most likely MP related; one solution to this would be to add an information window about each server in the UI before entering the track. For instance, I have wondered about mechanical damage or ABS/TC restrictions while scanning the servers. Since brake fade (and all the other features I mentioned) would be an option added by the server admin, the information for that server could be displayed. If that information is there and accessible both in MP and single player modes; then after this hypothetical idiotic post is made we flame them horrendously before you even need to respond. They go to get consoled by their moms and the world keeps spinning. If they are playing a racing sim, and don't understand, even remotely what brake fade could mean then TFB. At some point the lowest common denominator shouldn't be catered to.

 

First, Let me thank you Aristotelis, from the bottom of my heart for this topic !
I really think we miss a lot of fun by not talking enough about DRIVING.

The forum is a very good media to talk about the game, mods, bugs and of course complaining ^_^

But....
I often saw, or participated myself to driving and setup discusions while being online.
Of course it's a chat, so we don't have all the time and all the space we need to really go deep in the subject, but it's a good start !
unfortunatly, as you said, no real driving topic on the forum !

What seems to be the problems ? ... (or one of them)
After years of driving about every simulators since Gran Prix 1 (gosh I'm old !!) I realized one thing !
When we talk about "Racing Simulators", people are more focused on "Simulator" and less on "Racing"...
I mean that people are more talking about how they imagine their own simulator and all the missing things or
unaccurate reactions of a car. (because, of course everybody here had driven a GT3 on a racetrack, so they know better than anybody).

Long story short : Lots of player are just looking for the PERFECT simulator. And as in a lot of games, some players are spending more time
to make the game better looking than playing the game itselfes !

Another problem would be that A LOT of players are thinking that a good laptime is almost only based on a good setup, so the common mistake
is to find a "good" setup BEFORE practicing on a combo ! o_Ô ... But these guys forgot that you need hundreds of laps to first master
the car and the driving lines, then, when you are at the limit, you can start thinking about setups !
To make it clear : A good laptime is 95% of skills, 4% of setup and 1% of

Here are the classic reactions when someone can't do a good laptime or when the car is hard to handle (like the F40 S3 for exemple) :
"This car don't have front grip", "Not enough grip on rear wheels", "It's not realistic, I can't even do one lap" ... and so on ....
Don't blame the game, blame your driving skills ... AC is accurate and realistic enough to focus more on your driving than on the quality of
the simulator !
I spend enough time on racetracks in real life to tell you that AC is very good ! (not perfect, of course, but who's perfect ? ...)

I think that the word "Simulator" is not trusted enough to let people talk ONLY about driving.
It looks like a "web social and cultural" problem ^_^ (it's my own analyse, so i'm open to any discusion about it) !!

What can we do ? ....
Maybe we can open a "driving" thread ... and only driving !
I'm just afraid that it will become a thread where we'll start talking about driving, to finaly compare laptimes only because one guy doesn't
agree with you on a driving topic, so it would become a "my laptime shows that you are wrong topic" with no real discusion.

Another idea (utopic one) ... Is to find a way to make the word "simulator" being understand as it have to be...
A simulator simulats (thank you, captain obvious) ... so deal with it, accept it, then you'll be ready to focus on your driving and talk about it !

An in-game solution would be possible too... In the futur we can think of a driving school as in Gran Turismo !
It's a big load of work, I know it, and i'm not doing a request, it's just an idea...

I thought about a multiplayer option too. Maybe, when you are on a server, it would be cool to be able to talk to one player,
and maybe we can add an option that allow you to show other players that you want/need some driving advices.
Could be a button you enable and an icon on the drivers list.
Exemple : You're driving and you have enabled the "help needed button"... Another driver who wants to help will
watch you from the pits and would be able to talk only with you... So he could help in real time, while you are driving !


Sorry for the long post ^_^, but this driving discusion is a very important thing to me ... maybe the most important .. why ?? ...
because it's a RACING simulator !!! , dude

Thanks for reading,
Have fun,
Donnie

 

I just came here to say that Black Lagoon is awesome.

 

That gets my vote for the most off topic post of the century