One of the things lacking with online racing games is the ability for players like us to come together on a racing server and have a quick race. Having said that, iRacing has achieved something close to this as one can go online, check the available servers, you know exactly at what time the session starts and you also know who has subscribed and will be there racing. Now I mainly care about R3E So, lets say there are some of us around the globe who want to do a quick race on R3E. What do we do? We fire up the game, check the server list, see a combo we like and jump into it. Fair enough...but what if there was more visibility to this? What if I knew who is online and which combo they would like to race? See, there is no communication and one has no idea of the other and what he/she would like to race! Some might see nobody on a favorite combo and just leaves.... Now imagine, there is this online portal with all users that want to race. Imagine this portal shows a list of all servers with its tracks and cars and starting times. And imagine I can choose which session I would like to join. People can see what others wish and can also subscribe to it (kinda iRacing). But we can take this further! So, we all want close racing no? Lets say the app records all drivers lap times. So it knows how fast I am compared to all others online. Lets say the app intelligently checks all online users lap times, checks your favorite combo (car and track), for example, my most favorite from my records would be GT3 @Spa and the system tries to auto match you with people having the same combo as favorite and also having a lap time, lets say +/- 1 second of mine so that we are matched. Users can choose preferences and settings so that their auto match will be closer to what they want. So in a nut shell, this app will bring people together, adds visibility to what others wish and automatically brings them together for a quick race. I'm of course thinking out loud here and all this is easily possible with a few APIs or API updates from Sector3. As is, this is not currently possible... So what do you think of this Smart Match Maker ? Crap or maybe it will make our online racing more enjoyable? Cheers
Not convinced that the average lap time stuff is worth the effort as there just aren't that many players - I'd be happy with a full server, regardless of how fast or slow the opposition was. This might be something worth doing in the future as player numbers increase (partially driven by your super new tool). Having said that, the rest of it sounds like a winner. The current server browser isn't good enough. You look at the populated servers and try to guess which one might end up with a decent sized field. Then you join and hope others do the same, but you're always wondering if another server has become full, fun and awesome while you sit on a boring mostly empty server. So you leave after waiting around for 5 minutes, only to find that no other server has become full and the server you just left is the best of the bunch, but because you just left it the other players assume there's a better alternative and leave too. So now there's no decent full servers
True, this will only work if there are many drivers online. But like I also said, one can change his/her settings to match the lap time more that +/- 1 second or ignore this setting as well. The matching for favorit combo and close lap time can be ignored at the beginning until many players are online. But most importantly, it brings drivers together. "Hey look, Jim is online and he would like to race on combo X! let me join there!" if you know what I mean The below are some stats that I am gathering for example. Clearly my fav is GT3 @ Red Bull at the moment
That's a good point, who wouldn't want to race with The Great Jim? In fact, you could save yourself some work here and just write a "Jim Tracker" which told all my millions of fans what server I was playing on
My take is, I really like the idea. The "talent" matching interests me more than the car/circuit combo though. I can find any number of servers online with my favourite car/track combo, but nine times out of ten I will find myself qualifying last and finishing last (or not at all!) as I am quite a slow driver in the grand scheme of things. The ability to find a server populated only with drivers of similar standard to me excites me. I guess if you ask ten different people what they want from such a system, you will get ten different answers, but I think there could be some mileage in the idea.
cool idea. One could have a few checkboxes what race/track you are generally interested and then once enough people can be combined it sends invites and starts the server in qualification or so. And if there is enough people, do the "talent" matching... what I'd like to see is that this is a "background" thingie, I could be doing singleplayer or competition and get a notification to join or not. Sort of like a alarm clock, either continue to sleep (continue SP play) or join.
It will be flexible as in one can choose whatever settings he wants. I think that the biggest problem with this system is that the number of online players at the same time might be low, but you never really know until you try something I had wanted to do the same concept for rF2 as it's quick MP is totally dead. But I did not get much interest there. So I'm trying the waters here.
Having said all this, this idea is NOT currently possible as not all data required is provided by Sector3.....
Honestly s3s better should do this themselves for the sake of making sponsors happy may be a big chance blown if that is done by a 3rd party as the portal may draw a lot of traffic... (people loving stats and such). It also helps justify the whole always online better... while its nice that people run leagues on their own, the "many communities" clubs... if this was more centralized, would be cooler imo. A common calendar, common way to present results...
If I was you, I would code it assuming the information from s3s exists, and then sell it to them in the end they have a webbrowser engine already...
The problem is online isnt busy enough to get a grid full in your or my abillity, if there were many hundreds online at any one time it may be useful, but as it stands the game has a very small select group of drivers who for whatever reason like it and play it regularly, its a great idea in theory in practice it would need to be 10x or more busier online i think.
Do you know that right now there are 100 people online racing!? Count them And that excludes people like myself who are just waiting or looking for a race
Ahh theres a gt3 race see you in a bit I dont mean you cant find a race, but to find a full grid of close\equally matched racers would be hard. Then you have the variation, im crap at some tracks and less crap at others for something like that to be of real use it needs 8 or 10 full or close to full servers (imho). 100 isnt a lot in reality, peak time on a Monday night i think that is quite low myself.
Agreed They don't have to be equally matched really as such filters can be turned off. But who knows if people are brought more together and have visibility of others if the number increase? I'd love to experiment with this. All I need is S3 to add Shared Memory to Dedicated server
exactly, the big benefit of the system would be that a lot more "potentials" could be activated? You would just say, okay I am ready to play something in the next 30 minutes or hour, and then once enough people are found server is setup and you get invited. I bet a lot people are now also not playing because the servers in their current state don't look interesting to them. That doesn't mean they would not be "generally" available for playing.
That's exactly what I mean! People need more visibility to what others want to do It would bring more people together
and then do this for the other racing games as well and create "the" anti-iracing portal, do a kickstarter and work fulltime on it automatically uploading replays and whatnot, could be professionalized very well I guess
Naa, I wont be doing all this myself. I'm only collecting data and getting a feeling of what people want for someone I know who wants to do exacly what you said Unfortunately I dont have time for such a big system and I am only interested in R3E