i can´t stay away from Raceroom cause of this feeling of the cars, its "Racinglike".......im sure Sector3 can screw up the pricetag if they are going to step up with that system.(and i will pay!)
For those who are interested in multiplayer ranking system, Georg talked about it in his last stream yesterday evening. You can check for the first laps and the 10 minutes last at the end. Hope and see guys EDIT: I thought Georg was famous enough but here is the video
Took the last option cause I love MP, but also love to race SP (depends on AI) BUT I almost never race on public servers anymore cause it's mostly a pain in the *** except for open events like with ESR and others. Beneath that I join or joined various race leagues cause it's simply the best way to enjoy MP Racing the most...and it's the best racing school anyway (for all those who still hesitate because of low self-esteem or sheer defiance )
I drive in MP occasionally and most of the time it was a good experience. I enter the public servers, but usually I avoid the ones with the free content that has little appeal for me. One thing that makes me avoid the MP and wasn't mentioned is practice sessions or long qualifying session. I just want a quick qualifying session to refresh my car/track combo feeling and the race.
A good idea was brought up in a recently watched youtube video: setup sharing. It was argued that because some players setup their cars and some not, groups are formed. I would also add that because of different braking points the collisions risk increase. Personally, I setup my car for hotlapping, but with so many track/cars combinations it's too time consuming to have setups prepared for races. So I usually just mildly adjust my car before races.
Functionality-wise, there is nothing wrong with MP. It's the preponderance of idiot drivers and rage quitters that keep me in single player mode most of the time. Give us a good license/points system and I think you'd have a big, big winner on your hands, because I think R3E is a way more enjoyable/approachable/credible approximation of driving a racecar relative to another well known, widely played sim with a license/points based system. Plus, R3E already has a nicely built out offline experience, so if I were ever not in the mood for the stress/focus of a race with license points on the line, I could still enjoy the content Ive paid for against the AI.
I really wish people would stop perpetuating the myth that set-ups are some sort of silver-bullet that automatically make people faster. Off the top of my head, I can name 8-10 people who could take a default set-up and still kick my ass in seven different ways. If you already have the basic techniques down, and if you're already driving the car to its limit with default, THEN a customized setup can gain you some time. And even then, it's not going to be all that much time. On one memorable occasion, I was preparing for a RD race, and figured I'd sit down and really get into the nitty-gritty of setting up the car. So I did laps with default until I had a solid baseline lap-time to work from. Next, I spent something like 4 hours tinkering with the setup, and in the process doing more laps. At the end of which I had cut a second or so off my baseline lap-time. Finally, just for the hell of it, I switched back to default and.......was 2 seconds faster. As it turns out, all those practice-laps while tinkering had a far greater effect than anything I did to the setup.
But I think this only applies to content still using older generation physics like classic touring cars or WTCC '13. You can be very competitive even with their default settings. But the latest edition of the physics became much more detailed and you can gain a massive amount of time with a setup which suits your driving style. Try to close in on the fastest times on the leaderboards in a DTM '16 or WTCC '17 car with the default setup, it's impossible.
Yesterday evening there was a great public race with the NSU TT on Zandvoort. Great Fun, nice battles on any part of the field. That was pure fun! To the Setups: Personally i don´t go to much for the Setups.And up to 90% my personal Setup isnt too far from the default one. For me its not helpful to grab any steup from an "fast" guy to enhance my speed - the setup is always a personal thing caused on personal preferences (over/understeer for example), or the Hardware you use. Signed this
^ this X 1,000,000. The benefits of a "good setup" are ridiculously overblown within the community. I've wasted so much time trying to unlock the potential of my car by going 2 clicks up on slow rebound on the front, etc that it makes me want to scream - for the most part, it has been a colossal waste of time (for me, anyways). The experience I have is just the same: 1. Ok, gonna get serious about setups! 2. Do an obscene amount of "book study" 3. Do an even more obscene amount of testing/tweaking 4. Get super frustrated 5. Reset setup back to default 6. Set new personal best At this point there is really only one conclusion to draw: "oh, 'Driver X' is faster than me because...he's faster than me!" Sometimes this can be a bitter pill to swallow - it's very enticing to think you are 1.5 secs off the pace because your springs are too stiff, but the reality is probably around 1.3 secs worth of that gap is down to (1) natural talent and (2) hard work (not necessarily in that order). After literally years of chasing the elusive setup unicorn, I am absolutely convinced that 90% of people who play racing sims should only be messing with 2 setup options: 1. Tire pressures (in sims that allow it, of course) 2. Gear ratio On tire pressures, it used to be a real sticking point for me that R3E does not allow monitoring/changes to pressures, but I don't worry about it anymore for one main reason: in the sims that I run that do allow pressure tweaks, you can get a massive laptime performance improvement by running correct pressures, but the process of arriving at those correct pressures is really boring (frankly). The 2 main sims I play other than R3E are Assetto Corsa and Automobilista. I really like both sims, but let me just break down the tire pressure set up experiences in both sims (and by the way, running correct tire pressures in both sims is critical - huge laptime improvements). In AC, the default pressures are generally awful (especially for the road cars, whose defaults have been set per manufacturer specs for road use - i.e. they are way overinflated for track applications). So, once you are familiar enough with the car/track combo, add Kunos's tire app to your HUD and start turning laps. The tire app is awesome - it's even intuitively color coded. Run a few laps/observe/back to the garage/tweak/repeat. The first few car/track combos you do this on it's an exhilirating experience - more times than not, you'll end up shattering your personal best. By the 8th or 9th car/track combo, it starts getting routine - "meh, gotta get the pressures set...sigh, here goes." Automobilista is a bit trickier - the trick I like to use is to load the car I want to drive in "Time Trial" mode. Once at the track, simply go out on the track and then hit escape as soon as AI hands over control of the car. Finally, go to the setup screen and voila, the tires will magically be at the pressures they've deemed "ideal". Now it's the same iterative process as AC - go into practice mode with your car/track combo and start lapping/tweaking. It's also like AC in that it's a thrill the first few times as you shatter a few personal bests, but it quickly gets routine (even faster than AC though, because you don't have the handy tire app at your disposal). Gear ratio are pretty self-explanatory - depending on how customizable they are for your particular car (sometimes not at all, sometimes only final gear, sometime all gears customizable), you want to be hitting your max HP rev mark at the end of the longest straight (for a race setup, make sure you leave a few hundred revs of head room because you'll likely end up in a drafting/passing situation and you don't want to be side by side with someone and unable to close the deal because you are against the rev limiter). There, hopefully I just saved a lot of people a lot of wasted time an energy. Set your tire pressures (if possible), set your gear ratios (if possible)...if you are fast enough to justify other setup tweaks, you probably already know it (because you're already usually at or near the front of any given race already - most of us aren't that lucky and/or able to invest that kind of time).
I agree, except on one point: the most important setup in my opinion is on wings. It's easy to improve a time by adding or removing clicks on wings, depending on the track. Then I often do a bit more or less clicks on springs or ARB to make car oversteer less or more. This can also give more traction on cars in turns, I think it's particularly important for WTCC (removing some front ARB) but I won't talk too much about this as I tend to dislike this cars... But soft springs/ARB setup was what made me able to drive them at the beginning. Getting a good consistent driving is the most important, then we improve even without noticing it.
Yes, it happened to me too a couple of times to improve my laptime after reverting to the default setup or trying different setups which made the car drive very different but achieve the same laptimes. Clearly practice is more important, but there are car/tracks combination where a good setup makes a good difference even for beginners (ex: right amount of rear wing on high powered open wheelers).
Don't forget about driving style. Downforce helps me, because I love to attack the corners... Badly.. Yeah, downforce, tire pressure, gears, and the pitch of the car. That is what I do, simply to 'help' my driving style.. Fooling myself, me thinks... Practice is the key, finding the right line around the track.
I honestly don't think that's the case. Though granted, in my case no amount of setup-work will get me anywhere near the top guys. I'm not about to name names here, but I do know of at least one RD regular who also frequents the leaderboards/competitions, and he's usually in the top 20s or higher. And I know for a fact that he doesn't do much setup work. He may twiddle with the wings and/or gear-ratios, but that's it. According to him, he doesn't have a clue as to the whole suspension thing, so he just doesn't bother with it. But I do agree with the statement that setups are highly personal. As so many others, I've tried using some of the setups supplied by the 'aliens', and I simply can't drive the bloody things. They're much too twitchy, and I have neither the reaction-times nor the skill to control them. The very first thing I do with a default setup is usually to soften the dampers. Doesn't make me faster, but the fact that I'm not spinning off every two laps or so does ensure I have a lot more fun. I'd add differentials to that list, but otherwise I'm in complete agreement. Tire-pressures and diffs, that'll get you a long way to get the car to do what you ask of it.
I don't have any indication anyone took my post this way, but I want to make sure I state this for the record - I dont in any shape or form consider setups a waste of time or junk science or anything like that. They are absolutely a real thing and I know first hand there are people with the time and talent to make a good setup that improves their on track performance. My main point is that those people make up what I believe to be a very slim % of the people you'll find racing online at any point in time. Let's build a hypothetical sim racing center - 100 identical rigs split into two groups of 50. All are running the same sim, but group A has full setup options, group B is locked down to just tire pressures and gears. We now take a random sample of 100 sim racers and randomly assign them to a group with the instruction to do the best hotlap they can muster (no setup sharing allowed, BTW). I think: - fastest overall lap almost certainly comes from group A - group B's median laptime is faster than group A's laptime Group A racers spent more time on the setup screen (which benefitted a few, but hurt many). Group B spent more time on track (a few were hurt by a lack of setup control, but many more were "saved from themselves"). Just based on my observations.
At RRLeagues.com, we are intruducing a licence to all our future championship seasons. We do not suffer too badly from irresponsible drivers at all but see the RRLeagues License as something for our drivers to preserve and face consequences if they exceed points limits. We already steward races and this cert helps to keep incidents to a minimum. Members genuinely seem to be appreciative that we are taking further steps to ensure as clean racing as possible.
I think it depends on the car/track combo, silky smooth tracks and you can get by with default setups but throw in a few bumps and negative cambers and time can slip away on every bend, some cars work better firmer, some softer, horses for courses. What did shock me is grabbing an Aliens setup of the FX17, looking at it and laughing out loud at the bizarre values, giving it a whirl and knocking 1.5 secs off my best time on my first flying lap, godamned wizardry, bloody thing feels so planted its ridiculous, silky smooth Suzuka cracked, onwards to somewhere new, I know Zandvoort, couldn't keep the sodding thing from pogoing itself off the track at every opportunity. So in conclusion, setups make a huge difference imho but only if you're pushing your chosen vehicle to the limit in the first place and for those that say setups make no difference, well they are the people that haven't found a setup that works yet, my advice, download a few setups for different car/track combo's and try them out, I've now slightly modified the setup to my driving style but I could have played in the garage for the rest of my life and not come up with these values and the difference from my original bafoonary is just ridiculous, going back to before my setup was sprinkled with pixie dust just made me weep, weep tears of inadequacy, some people know what they're doing, listen to them!