After yet another price increase from IRacing I am seriously excited for this and will have no problem ditching IRacing if it takes off. The hype is real!
Yeah, I'm very excited about it too. We desperately need a sane and fun alternative to iracing. Combined with vr support I expect this to eat my life and scramble my marriage
Well not really the price going up, just that they are now adding VAT. So combined with recent price hikes and reduction of their Black Friday deal from 50% off to 25% off, I am now paying double for subs (around $100/year). It's becoming very hard to justify this especially when I'm having loads of fun with similar free services, like SimRacingSystem, and hopefully soon R3E's take.
Yep, looking forward to it a great deal and after the recent price hike of iRacing even more so. That said it's not just cost R3E has over iRacing for me, the test drive option is something sorely lacking on the other side of the fence for example, not to mention being able to race the AI if/when you happen to enjoy a series currently not very popular and/or you just don't feel like dealing with racing others due to a lack of familiarity with the car/track combo. But yeah, with the price hike from the competition R3E is really well poised to carve out a space as the European choice for racing.
I am hoping that R3E don't try to host too many races at once. IRacing have about 40 options available at all times, which is understandable as without a hosted race, there is a chance that you could own vehicles that aren't in service that week; R3E has excellent AI which can fill that need if required. Hosted Racing, with licenses and rankings and bottom spankings for naughty boys, is a bonus for R3E players, not the main draw, so it doesn't need to attempt keeping everyone happy all the time. (The AI option does that for me!) All-in-all, I am attempting to remain cautiously excited for the future of R3E.
I’m curious how or if this system will punish drivers who have one or two contacts too much with other racers or who ragequit when they notice they’re not successful. Just take a look at public multiplayer: these type of people can be found everywhere. It would be good to hear when these guys get some kind of penalty.
The IRacing model works pretty well here - leave a race early, lose rating. Intentional crashing can be reported, and lead to sanctions from a telling off to a temporary ban. The important word is intentional. The idea is not to punish drivers, but to encourage them to play nice. There is a lot of moaning on their forums about other people's bad driving, but most contacts are 50/50 judgement calls. Once people realise that they are partially to blame for any accident they are involved in, things get smoother.
I do hope S3 will release some sort of guide/rule set before this is implemented, as I am at amiss to know what is acceptable and what is not on the race track? e.g. 5 cars in a line going into a corner, lead car brakes earlier than every other lap, crash bang wallop, now matey in the lead had to brake early as he exited the previous corner to quickly. Who's to blame? Lead a race from start until the last bend when knobby behind brakes far too late, uses you as a brake and shunts you into the kitty litter? This move seems perfectly reasonable to some. So S3 will we get some idea as to what is expected from us as drivers or will it be a case of suck it and see? Oh and good luck, more grey areas in motorsport than most other sports, hope you have a huge review panel as I fancy they are gonna be busy!
People already know HOW they should drive/race. They can always recognise a stupid move when it's someone else doing it. It's just that good judgement is inversely proportionate to excitement. Try to drive fairly, accept it when others fail, remember that nobody lost a leg. The best racing comes when people know the other drivers, and there is mutual respect. You don't get that from a rulebook. But having said that, I hope Sector 3 have a big stick and aren't afraid to bust a few heads!
Agreed but the stick needs to be applied with reason, in many series trading paint is expected and if not actively encouraged, leeway is given. Something closer to what we see in RaceDepartments clubracing rather then the iRacing style processions that happen when the racers are more concerned with their precious safety rating than the race.
In my experience, the iRacing approach of assuming 50/50 blame in all cases works much better than you might expect. Yes, there are exceptions for deliberate wrecking and these are handled by a separate escalation process but blame for contact caused by drivers being too aggressive and driving badly is generally given equally to both involved in the collision. This has the effect of changing the way you drive - you race it like you own it, not like you borrowed or stole it. All collisions are painful and expensive, just like in real like. If someone drives into you in a real race (or even a track day), it doesn't matter who was at fault, it still costs you dearly. So even though it sounds unfair it does actually work. If there's a car breathing down your neck and you don't know the driver, you leave extra room in case he's a tit. It adds *loads* to the excitement and tension - as you approach a braking zone you're really nervous. Handling this is a big part of iRacing
I agree the 50/50 thing works well, it's probably the only decent way to handle it outside of having a marshal team for every official race and that's well beyond the scope of what any sim could handle. That said I'm not too keen on their two parallel systems of iRating and safety rating, far too often you'll find racers compromising their race to not risk racing in a lower series next season. No real team would hire a driver back because he let the rest of the field by and started from the pits to preserve the car. Touring cars and heck even GT racing is well known for banging each other up and it's calculated into the cost of racing, heck some of the fans are there particularly because they prefer it to clean procession style racing. Meanwhile it's generally iRating and not safety rating that will keep you in clean racing, the lower your irating, the more crashers, it has very little to do with ones safety rating/license. Skip Barbers are D license yet known for the series clean racing ( although that's not the case at lower iRatings ), GT3's meanwhile are at B license yet are crashfiestas. Glad I'm not the one who has to figure this out though, iRacings system has merit and has obviously worked for them. I remain unconvinced that it's the only/best way to go about it though.
Agreed, but it does make a good starting point. I sometimes think that penalties should only be applied if someone is spun/bounced off the track. Still applied equally. A little paint trading should be expected in closed-wheel racing. Most Iracers eventually come to the conclusion that worrying about either rating is pointless. The system seems to work more because it exists, than because it works. No intelligent man can understand this but yellow elephants are sacriligous. This is the law. Unless you don't want to boat it and that is ok cuz Saftey rating exists as the oltimatt orforutee. This is Fact. Oops, forgot which thread I was in.....
Absolutely it makes a good starting point. I suppose the case I'm making is that if there's ever a chance to introduce something more refined it's going to be now, before we're all attuned to the "This is how it's always been done in R3E"-mindset I'm sure we'll all develop to an extent.
What was the recent price hike? Last time i played iR was early 2015 and content prices were $12/car or $15/track. Have they increased this further?
The hike is them no longer covering the VAT but rather charging ~20/25% more than the listed price. Think that goes against EU regs but eh, for me the service is old and not worth it with what the new total cost is, mostly because I generally prefer other sims anyway. Edit: And for thoose that subbed yearly during the black friday stuff they dropped the discount from 50 to 25% making it more expensive there as well. Thirdly, and this is outside of iRacings control but the strengthened dollar must also be taken into account.