Suggestions: part one

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by mysterious man, Nov 24, 2021.

  1. mysterious man

    mysterious man New Member

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    It's been some months since I made a very similar topic. The FFB update came and went, and absolutely nothing changed or was said to be planned to change (at least that I know). I don't know on what R3E is working now, but I think that this should definitely be their priority... Although I have 0 experience with businness and such. However, I have my experience as a player, and I'll explain how it relates closely with what I am about to discuss.

    Part one: What I think that should be changed now.

    I really really really love Raceroom. And as such, feeling that it wastes a L O T of potential makes me very upset. That's why I'm here. So, my biggest problem with the game is that it has an AMAZING library of content, and basically throws it into the trash. Why? Because it doesn't know how to monetize it, and organize how it will be allocated. Let me explain.
    Raceroom works as the usual simulator businness model: selling content access. For me, that's a terrible mistake. It can work perfectly with a big enough playerbase, but that's clearly not the case for this game. Also, as I said, I don't understand anything about businness, but it seems to me that an one time purchase is not a very lucrative way to monetize a product that has virtually an infinite lifespan. Think about the likes of Dota or Counter-Strike or LoL. I think that these games excel at making people spend unlimited money forever without changing ANYTHING, gameplay-wise, for the rest of the players. You have unlimited access to what the game has to offer in gameplay terms. Why am I talking about this? Because for me, Raceroom and other sim titles has a lot of similarity with these games playerbase dynamic, but they just choose to mimic iRacing's dated model. It works for iRacing because there is some kind of collective craze for that game that is kinda incomprehensible. Their financial success is due to this kind of collective delirium, and not the game itself... or at least that's what it seems for "laymen" like me, that doesn't know how businness work.
    So, why is this a problem? Well. If you don't have some tens of thousands of active players, you'll probably have to make a compromise: to underutilize/limit severely content, or to fracturate the playerbase so much that you'll end up racing with 5 or less people in a race if it isn't everytime the same track/car combinations. Want a full grid? You'll have to play the same car/track EVERYTIME. Either way, what end up happening is 1. players don't care to buy different content because it is not interesting, as it rarely appears on schedule and when it does, the player count on the races are ridiculous; or 2. players buy content packs and end up angry that they are buying a lot of cool stuff to only realise that even when it appears in schedule, no one plays those races. I absolutely LOVE classic, manual race cars. I can count on my fingers how many opportunities I had to race them with a full grid. I'm tired of NSU TTS, and the game has SO MANY interesting options. And you think, "hey, why don't you buy them, then"? Well, maybe because people just don't care about them. Why? Too many options. I'm not proposing that people should be forced to play these categories, but I think that you shouldn't give players too many options when there aren't enough players to fill more than one server at once. That's like creating several transport lines to a place no one goes.
    What ends up happening in this scenario is the illusion of choice: you can race the content you want everyweek, as long as you don't care about racing alone. Everytime you open the game, you have some 5 different race options, but only one or, some fortunate times, two full servers. And this depends on the time of the day, too. I'm not complaining about that, it's just a fact. What should be done, then? Here's my suggestion.

    Ranked schedule revamp

    When I want to play the game, I usually want one of these two things: to either race for fun, or to race for competition. Supposing that this reflects most players disposition, here's how it would work PERFECTLY for me:

    For fun
    Every 3 days, there should be a "triple" combo. Three tracks with three different cars, in an order. For example: Bmw m23-something-i and Zandvoort, F4 on Hockeheimring, and NSU TTS on Portimão. These fast races would cycle in order through these options, and would NOT have practice/qualifier phases. It would be ONLY racing. Grid order should be determined by the player's best circuit recorded valid lap, be it offline or in online play. For those with no recorded laptime, random sorting. Wanna enter the server? Queueing. Suddenly, you have an AMAZING option for racing for fun, that is almost everytime up, has no unnecessary waiting time and that removes that dumb waiting for a server slot when it's full. Also, chaining different circuits and cars makes if fun to play for prolonged sessions. I had times where I literally gave up just because I didn't want to play the same combo again, and the other options had no players. If the only option is the same cycle, the playerbase would be concentrated on it, and it would be too little an inconvenience for people to just give up playing just because they want so desperately to play gt4 and it changed to NSU. Also, there would only be one fast server for region. One for Americas, one for Europe, one for Oceania. Wanna play but they are all full? Just queue and wait a bit. It's MUCH better to wait for a full server than having multiple empty servers at your disposal.

    For competition:
    There should be ONE "pro/elite" category race every hour. As I said, too many options with too little players backfires horribly. Limiting options would concentrate players. Again: it's MUCH better to have less options with a full grid than a lot with 4 or 5 players. These would keep the practice/qualifying/race model. It would have no queueing, and practice duration would be 15 minutes for people to connect. For these 15 minutes, there would be no fast server starting new races. This means that, every hour, would be a pro event starting, and when the practice/connection phase ends, the fast servers shoot with everyone queued: it then runs three 15 minutes races, and stops for the next pro race (it wouldn't be that precise, as players have to finish their last lap before jumping to the next instance. However, this extra time would surely not go over the 15 minutes practice period of the pro race, giving it time to "reset" properly before restarting the cycle. There would be only 10 minutes for qualifying (as everyone will already be connected, it's more than enough) and 35 minutes of race. The pro category combos would cycle through the week enough times for people to have an opportunity to play it no matter when they can, and would ensure that, being the only option outside of the fast races, it would be at least halfway full even if it's not a very popular configuration. Also, this would ensure players that every hour, you'll have something new to try if you want more serious racing, while ever having the fast cycle at your disposal if you just want to floor it.

    Conclusion/ last bits
    This way, the playerbase would be far more concentrated, with less options. And I think that this is excellent! As I said, there is no point in having multiple options and none of them being viable, as people just don't play them. Also, limiting choice by hour is just too small an inconvenience. Far better it is to have less options but being sure that whatever configuration it'll be on the hour, it will have people playing. For example: the only time I had the opportunity to really race the Carrera Classic was when it was a daily long race. It always got full. When it appeared as a rookie combo, it was ALWAYS empty. If you give too freely something not that popular to players, they'll ignore it. Make it limited, and numbers rise. That's why I think that this model would work. Want popular content? It's always up on the fast servers. Wanna something different? Have a pro race.
    There are some other things that I think would make this model work better. For example... making the pro servers use all the content in the game, and giving limited access to it. Imagine opening the game and finding out that today, we'll have Slovakiaring/FR17, Bathurst/GT3 and Macau/DTM20, AND that it has free access for anyone with 80+rep? I would play the s**t out of this game lol
    Of course, this raises other questions, like... what to do with the monetization model, then? Well, these would be much more radical changes. Changes that I want to propose, but I'll do in another topic as this one is too big already... and I kinda know that it will never be implemented. A ranked schedule revamp is possible, as it is not that radical. But anyway! I hope all of this serves for something.
     
  2. mysterious man

    mysterious man New Member

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    Addendum:
    I also hate how obscure it is to determine when the pro races happen. There should be an ingame menu, time-left counter for when these races will happen. That's not something very hard to do...
    Also, I'm f***ing tired of playing a game where I own at least 25 tracks and EVERYTIME I have to play either Hockenheim, Zandvoort, Portimão, Raceroom Raceway or Suzuka. It is a SERIOUS point for me to look for other simulators. I can manage to play the same cars, but playing only the same circuits again and again and again and again is rage inducing in a game with so much content.
    Also, a printscreen of the available servers: upload_2021-11-24_16-10-28.png
    That's 142 online players. You could have 5 servers with 28~29 players each, but instead, we have two with 28, while the rest of the playerbase is scattered. And notice: we are talking about the weekly event, wich means that there are more players than usual. Also, you have ELEVEN servers with 5 or less players. To me, that's a failure.
    Of course, I'm supposing that limiting the amount of servers would distribute these players between them, wich is not guaranteed. However, being really really honest: I think that there would be MORE players in the game if that was the case, simply because I did many times and still do races wich I'm not interested, but just because it's full. Hell, racing a shopping cart would be fun if it was in a full grid.
     
    • Disagree Disagree x 1
  3. mysterious man

    mysterious man New Member

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    Oh, and a last thing! Why don't we have bigger races??? Imagine having a weekly 64 slots Nord???? It would be LEGENDARY! Hell, even Spa! Big one hour races with ridiculous amounts of players. It would be literally a feature, I mean, who wouldn't consider that when comparing sim titles?
     
  4. ravey1981

    ravey1981 Well-Known Member Beta tester

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    I don't really understand what you are trying to say. Could you explain in a bit more detail?
     
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  5. Super Nova

    Super Nova Member

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    The R3E problem isnt player base or multiplayer (which is pretty good). Sorry but Non-existent communication, we can see it for over a month nothing...old and ill-balanced stereotypical touring content, no day-night cycle, no dynamic weather, very poor replayability, we quickly get weary off with game modes from the 2000s. Usually I come to raceroom to buy the content I like, I do 2 or 3 races and then I go elsewhere ...
     
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  6. 16sth

    16sth Member

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    There are some handy programmers out there who have built what you need ...
    here
    there is also a pretty similar android app.
     
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  7. mysterious man

    mysterious man New Member

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    that's pretty amazing, but... why did someone outside sector3 need to do that??? Couldn't they implement this in the game themselves? :sweatsmile:
     
  8. mysterious man

    mysterious man New Member

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    I got too carried away, I guess. What I tried to say is that having too many servers and track/car combinations at the same time divides the playerbase too much.Concentrating them would bring more players together, making it a lot better to play. I rambled a lot about business/monetization model because I think that it relates a lot with this problem, too, but a solution for this would be a lot more radical than just reorganizing ranked schedules.
     
    • Disagree Disagree x 2
  9. Maskerader

    Maskerader Well-Known Member

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    No, it's the same list as https://game.raceroom.com/multiplayer-rating/ but better looking and with server settings.

    Is there a schedule of upcoming races, with countdowns and your local time?
     
  10. Maskerader

    Maskerader Well-Known Member

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    @mysterious man My preferences are different than yours, but your arguments make sense to me.

    There are rumors of changes to ranked in December update, though. Let's see, maybe some issues will get fixed.
     
  11. 16sth

    16sth Member

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    I know. But it's developed to make things easier to view. Like realtime countdown timer and which drivers are in the race, what their rating is etc. Its far more intuitive than the raceroom multiplayer page. You cant even join the proper server from the multiplayer page.

    I don't care anymore. There are no one in ranked when I go on. I've given up. I don't even show on the ranking list. If I wanted to know when a race was coming up, I'd be in the game anyway.
     
  12. Maskerader

    Maskerader Well-Known Member

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    But then it doesn't solve the issue the guy was talking about.

    You can. There was a bug but now it's fixed.
     
  13. 16sth

    16sth Member

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    I need a tl:dr

    Good to know
     
  14. Maskerader

    Maskerader Well-Known Member

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    Come on...
     
  15. 16sth

    16sth Member

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    That is the addendum to a long post. So tl:dr.
     
  16. Maskerader

    Maskerader Well-Known Member

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    That's a different issue. You quoted the part where he describes another issue, but the site you suggested as a solution doesn't solve the issue you quoted. You don't need a tl;dr for that.
     
  17. 16sth

    16sth Member

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    This was the addendum issue. As the races start on the hour, quarter passed the hour and half past the hour, a simple clock/watch/phone/pc would suffice to know when races were due to start. The page you link is static and doesn't countdown unless you mash F5. The 2 apps I pointed to countdown in realtime for practice, qualifying and the race.
     
  18. Maskerader

    Maskerader Well-Known Member

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    The in-game server list also has these countdowns so obviously that's not what he needs. What it lacks is a countdown for servers that haven't started yet. Using a clock (that isn't even available in the game) and a static picture for schedule is not very convenient. Especially for longer races where you also need to do a time zone conversion.