Would you pay un monthly fee for a "iracing like" MP system in R3E ?

What I somehow don't like about these kinda discussions is this "you have to give me" attitude. If you look around in the real world nowadays, it's obvious that this is an outrunning model due to many reasons on a political, social and economic scale.
People(should) start to organize themselves for things to be better. In the germanspeaking area alone there are dozen (if not hundreds) of Simracing Communities and leagues, and experience shows that if you really want to participate there is always a way to do this , no matter how restricted your working schedule is for example. It's often more about the attitude to demand getting your breakfast directly at your bed, preferably served by a sexy Guy/ Lady . If you wanna race off the average open server funrace than do something about it , goddamned

 

As AriBo wrote, I think MP in R3E is in beginning and need serious update included functions you need to run some championship with flags, player management, admins etc. Now MP in this game is very basic. Asking monthly fees for that would be crazy.

 

I don't see the point, I've been an iracer since november and now I mostly just do league races like I do in r3e. R3e needs basic features such as those pointed out by skswat and better league support. The only reason for a system like iracing is to help reduce wreckers, which having a league does that quite well.

 

Yes, thats why I said that game would need to consider more factors (maybe average speed, etc...) to make points more accurate and hard to "cheat" this ranking by some method. More factors = more accuracy.
I think average lap speed would be nice, because it will cut drivers who will slowly crawl on track to gain points.
I mentioned this as this system we used in Live for speed game and it works quite well.

 

Also good feature would be: more drivers on server = more skill points obtained for driving, finish position..
It would motivate players to join servers where are more drivers joined, than just harvesting points on server where you are alone.
(no points for 1 driver race )

 

Are we playing the same game? One of the reasons I ditched iRacing was that as someone with an unpredictable evening schedule, in R3E it is so much easier to just drop in on a race and have a good fun race. with IRacing i was spending too much time waiting around.

As for the single track thing, again, not sure we're playing the same game.....

but, yeah, i don't want a subscription fee either.

 

First off, calling me out because I clicked the disagree button is crappy when you don't even know if I disagreed with just part of your post or all of it.

Second, I see MANY people holding up iRacing's multiplayer as some bastion of awesomeness that every single racing game should strive for. I threw way too much money and time at iRacing and I can definitely say it is not the best system in multiple ways, not the least of which is their incredibly poor netcode despite their large user base and huge monetary intake.

One of the largest downsides to the iRacing system is that if you do NOT have a large, constant user pool for each event you end up with massive gaps between drivers during long events that you already had to wait to enter. For example, if you drive in their GT3 sprint series you're likely to get plenty of people, at least 2 or 3 of whom will be around your pace. Assuming no large incidents to negatively impact the race, but it's GT3 so that's a joke, you get a 'good' race with some battling every few hours. Now you want to look for another series for a car you enjoy that isn't so popular and wouldn't you know there's only 8 total entries. The gaps between the drivers are enormous and you end up spending 30 - 45 minutes just doing laps by yourself with no real hope of gaining any actual positions.

This whole problem doesn't really exist for people who are constantly up in the top 3 - 5, which is why I've said repeatedly that iRacing is great if you're a really fast driver, but for the other 70% of us we end up either being forced into the same popular series and races again and again and again and again or doing laps by ourselves.

Most of these issues don't show themselves until you've moved into the B and A class range as the D and C just have so many people in them, before they've stopped playing or just haven't moved on, that you can generally find most of the non-extra content (cars and tracks you don't have to pay extra beyond the sub fee for) races having at least 20 people signed up for.

Now think of trying to implement that sort of system into a title that has a significantly smaller installed user base and you end up waiting for 30 - 90 minutes for a race with only 8 people only 3 of whom bother to even finish the event.

As much as people love the competition that rating/ranking systems provide, having those forced, particularly for a smaller user base, does more to alienate people and push them out of the overall multiplayer experience instead of bringing more in. Just take a look at the 'ranked' participation percentages for things like MOBAs. People like to think that what they see in esports, on Youtube, and on Twitch are the norm, but in reality that's the small percentage removed from the much larger casual crowd that just wants to jump in, have some fun, then be done for the day/night. The iRacing style setup so drastically limits the secondary crowd that it almost becomes detrimental. I, for one, think iRacing does enough for the hyper competitive hardcore fast racers and it does not need to be copied or emulated anywhere else.

 

Ratings systems only segregate user base.
I do think that it's high time that sector 3 look at their online system. They could learn a thing or two from blizzard and their platform on pc ( battlenet )
Easy to find matches, easy to find people who are looking to play/party up. Integrated chat system across the board( even while in game ).
You can see what they are playing in and how long they've been playing it or where. Maybe s3 could add a status line where you can say you consider yourself a rookie, intermediate, alien Ect..

Anyway this had been discussed many times, no I wouldn't want to pay for online for content I purchased.

 

So many awesome ideas being thrown in this thread

I think that the poll should have been worded differently. MP should remain free, its the extra services/tools etc that I would be willing to pay for. One can choose to benefit from and the other not without affecting him/her (ie like it is now).

Like that we can get the best of 2 worlds.

 

But lets look at it from this view....Even now there is very low amount of players in MP. What if you split those to another 2 groups?
Free and "Premium"? You will have even less players in each group. I think there will come complaints about paying for something where you are not able to make one bigger grid for race because of no players.

 

Very good point and I agree. I wont envision it like that.

All players (premium or not) can still join and race together. But the premium users can create leagues, or session, that is, can control what server/combos to put up, can have access to ratings, results, leader boards, statistics and so on and so fort.

All will still benefit from what there is now but the premium will also benefit from all the goodies.

 

This game is with big lead my most expensive game I own. And with new cars/tracks I am still spending more money to it. Why just cant be that "premium" part of normal MP? For free?
I dont want to pay for every feature separately. Honestly current MP is very basic and need to be updated first.

 

That's very true. Maybe one day they will add it for free

 

Reading all the posts promoting the idea of a premium MP area, this should not be a problem, as they do not want to race against the average drivers anyway. [/sarcasm off]

 

Hope so For someone like me, who own already all content would be not so terrible to pay small amount monthly, but when you want bring someone new to game and he will see that content will cost him over 100Euro + monthly fees, he ask you if you are crazy.
Even now its quite hard to bring new players here when they see how much everything costs.
It would be good to have ALL IN ONE PACK in store for interesting price for newcommers.

 

And vice versa! One of the reasons I stopped playing iRacing was that I am WAY SLOW! I was always at the back like a noob and also maybe creating some crashes since I was slow and faster drivers wanted to pass quickly. So it was not fun anymore as I felt like a fish out of the water.

So I like the idea that there would be the possibility to have racing sessions with mixed (for who ever do not care), aliens, noobs etc.

I would defo join the noob session

And the whole thing can be made very smart. The system would be able to categories players on various complex algorithms, based on history, like lap times, finishes, cuts, race distances, speeds etc etc.

I always hope for such an intelligent system where it makes online racing more fun

But yeah, the downside is that you need lots of players and months of statistics first...

 

I am coming from the flight simming community and we are used to totally different prices there. I brought in 10 flightsimmers to Raceroom and they were all happy how cheap everything is over here

 

Players "reputation" or some ranking based on drivers skill would definetly solve this. Then add possibility to create server where only players with specified rank can join. Or specified + higher, etc....

I understand, but this is more exception, than rule. I was also in Flight sim community for a while and I know prices there are crazy. But for average sim drivers is R3E quite expensive and they rather choose other sim.

 

True, I for one have not for example bought all the latest R3E Tracks/Cars/packs since Nords. I just dont have the money right now, but that's life hey! My wife still goes to the hair dresser though every week (and thats like some 4 R3E packs!)..go figure!

 

For me as someone that comes from flight simulation, too, the DLC costs in simracing are moren than fair and affordable. But I don't think that's the point.
Like Fairman stated:

If just the organized racing communities would get the necessary features to organize better events and even league stuff the player base would increase much more.
Why I think that?
Well, pCARS didn't deliver a MP that's much suitable for organized events. rFactor2 struggles from its out dated graphics and too few finished content, but it has the best MP service in the matter of its functional server and additional tools. Automobilista is promising, but its in a very early stage of development and has very special content, too, that could get it a solid niche. The only modern (yes, there are even in Germany a lot of leagues still using GTR2 or rFactor1 on a regular base for organized league events!think why?) one - I'll leave iRacing out as its a business on its own - left is Assetto Corsa that really competes with R3E at the moment, and that's quite ahead of R3E because of a better organizable event management with 3rd party tools and services and a solid Multiplayer system.
My conclusion: If S3 could improve the MP (and that starts with less 503 errors!!!) and deliver the necessary functions and tools (ther's already a thread that explains what is missing as basics) that would gain much more progress in the MP experience and would attract a larger players base (because of the organized communities all around) than any ranking system could deliver.