Anyones personal feelings on being online aside, it does have its merits. Namely, RR is the only game I know of, perhaps besides iRacing where the content has never been stolen. Every other sim out there has had their content stolen, hacked, ripped, converted, you name it. If the goal of RaceRoom was to provide a hack free, cheat free platform for people to race on... while never having the first party content stolen or ripped... then this is objectively a success.
Yup, good point. S3 have every right to protect their content in the best way they see fit. But companies who choose an always online strategy, must ensure their infrastructure can support the high levels of traffic, which inevitably occur after major updates. Btw, this doesn't affect me at all, as I'm having a reluctant break from sim racing. I've moved my gaming pc from my gaming room, where it was connected to my triple panels, to my lounge, where it's now connected to my big TV. I have so many non racing games in my Stream library to catch up on. Playing many of them in 4k or 3D and loving every minute of it. I'll probably return to the world of sim racing, at the start of the new year. Hopefully, by then S3 would have ironed out all the kinks so I can really enjoy this great game once more.
As I said in another posting in this or the other thread, if they have a personal benefit from this as a company - than only by putting all disadvantages on side of the customers. Also, if you go back some years only, when the first companies started to release games that demanded permanent online connection, or music CD producers started to digitally encode CDs and by that deemed it illegal to build backup copies for own private use (which in Germany for example is perfectly legal), these companies got tons and tons of Flak and fire. All this was claimed to be a battle against piracy. But that is only the minor part of the truth, the main point was to dry out and prevent second hand markets so that music fans or game players could no longer sell their legally owned and full-price-bought CDs and DVDs as second hand anymore, and the new customer is forced to buy new. This is also the reaosn ebidj the massive explopsion of gamer-account business and personalization of game access accounts. Its prevention of second hand sales, wrapped in colourful gift paper. In other words: it was and still is a frontal assault on private property rights and rights to own stuff once you bought it. The differentiation between copyrights (protecting intellectual or artistic property: the content not allowed to be used for commercialising by the customer) and material property right, got invalidated, so to speak. Its rendered pointless to vital ammounts nowadays. That is the reason why I principally avoid digital sales of books and music, and do not like Steam at all. DRM means that you do never own what you have bought. Amazon can centrally delete stuff from your Kindle ebook reader, and has done so when texts were found by activists to not correspond with the latest swing of politically correct editing, even phrasing of fictional words that in the end got practically censored in new editions. Also, if you take your Kindle from the US to Europe or vice versa, and then try to use it for buying a new item in the new, foreign location and the new Amazon shop domain, Amazon reserves the right to delete your account and delete all books you have bought for that account, without revoking it ever, and without paying back compensation. And this also has been demonstrated to have happened, repeatedly, in past years. You never own digital stuff, may it be Steam games, streaming videos, ebook literature, whatever. You pay for making yourself depending on somebody else who forever is beyond your control. And if this other entity decides to take it away from you again while keeping your money, then there is almost nothing you can do about that - as long as you are no competent hacker yourself and break laws. Property? Buying...? Not in the digital age. Leasing only.Server-stoarage only. "Its the cloud, stupid!" There are some things in modern present that I dispise, completely. Cloud and remote-controlled own system (Microsoft Windows) not excluded from that contempt. And the young ones today have never known a time when it was ever different. That is what makes these distorted developments so hopeless, and depressing. Those wanting to replace market economy with monopolism this way, have as good as won. "Markets" need competition, private property and diversity to choose from, in order to function.
You can't beat the piracy around digital software, it's like worldwide fight against the drugs, absolutely nonsense. For some people stolen, hacked, etc content is the first step before they get into licensed content. Also, piracy has a positive side for developers, because it's free commercial for them. If the product is good it will generate money, no matter how many illegal copies were made. Piracy is like enlarged version of demo. You can taste it and if you want go further and challenge on-line – please go for a license, as long as, this is the only way to get in touch.
Your comment has nothing to do with mine, if you quoted it for any reason. If you just wanted to rant about DRM, then cool. I agree it is annoying that these systems are in place, especially for those that only do single player. But there is no denying that this has prevented content being stolen, or hacked apart.
Well, there's different forms of piracy. What you have in mind is pirating the whole product, which indeed one could argue can broaden awareness. The other form of piracy is the one olden-times SimBin had to deal with a lot and that was stealing their indivdual car models, tracks, even sound files from their product and introducing them into other games as "mods". And this doesn't help you as the original creator a bit cause nobody will know or even care about who made those originals. And regarding that kind of piracy RR's system seems to work afaik.
I don't really like the online requirement but if it does truly eliminate piracy then I'm OK with it - a necessary evil for software developers. I don't know of any rich small developer, they have to protect their work.
No rich small developer? Notch? Edit: And I do agree the current system favors only S3 and not the userbase. At the end of the day I as a user do not care that someone ripped ACs nords into rF2. And Kunos is clearly not struggling for cash.
Disagree with you here. Personally, I like that the leaderboards are clean of cheats and hacks. I like that the top 50 times are legit, and not reading as 0:00:02 like Pcars for instance. I like that people cant rip the cars in the game and alter the physics of them to make them faster, or have more grip, and then cheat in online racing. I like that everyone is on an equal playing field. And RaceRoom does this well. I guess morals and ethics comes in to play for this one. Whether you believe that the person who made a piece of content that is being stolen deserves compensation for their work. Or whether you think, "hey, i got mine" and use stolen content in other games. Knowing some modders who have had content stolen. It is heartbreaking for them. I dont use any illegal, stolen, or ripped content out of respect for the original creators. Not saying people who do use ripped mods lack personal character or anything... just one other perspective people sometimes overlook.
Didn't say I drove the ripped Nords, I tend to stay away from ripped content, usually it's never quite at the quality of what it ripped and as you pointed out the ethics of it. Still I don't loose any sleep over it being out there, doubt Kunos does either. I remain thoroughly unconvinced the current always online model is what's keeping the leaderboards cheat free, iRacing has had cheaters, if the current Esport venture takes off I'm convinced R3E will have to deal with potential cheaters as well. Data packets can be spoofed, and there will always need to be information sent to and from the client. Even if leaderboards were hacked, hacked times could be removed. Instead we have a system that in the name of anti-piracy and anti-cheating, neither of which have any impact on the majority of players, has seen the entire playerbase having had trouble even navigating menus this week.
It has everything to do with it. You said earlier that RR's online mode has prevented that content got pirated, I already before that said - and replied with that to you again - that if a company maximises its benefits at the cost of leaviong all disadvantages to the customers, this is not acceptable to me. It seems it is even less so for very many others - those many who refuse to use Raceroom, or play it just with free session content. The argument of no cheating on leaderboards, links it to multiplayers again, while I put the emphasis on single players who do not care for all these online gimmicks at all. Anyhow, last night I was able to drive a bit (SP) , AI was nice. Just an hour ago it was white screens again (SP).
humans are constantly online nowadays. At home, on their phone, at work... then they get mad if you have to be online to play a game. For me it doesn't matter. Their servers are 99% of the time up and running smoothly. To ask for an offline mode just because of the 1%, and go the road of potential rip-offs and piracy... no.. nothing I want to have. If my ISP fucks up and has downtime, I play another game in the meantime. But that's just so rare that it never would justify an offline mode. Whenever I wanted to play R3E, it failed me something like 5 times... 5 times out of hundreds.
Imo the online/offline discussion is just pointless The original game (hot lapping etc.) was 100% built around online. The whole infrastructure etc. They never changed that, and they never claimed to changing it. You can after so many years either accept that, or not. Bringing up reasons like piracy, etc. all doesn't matter anymore (whether in favor or against). The system is what it is. And the dev stream hinted that the online aspects will get more. That's imo where the new simbin game would come in practical, that probably will have some offline via steam mode etc. At least that is what I would expect. They are not gonna go through this again and clearly separate the two games primary focus. Singleplayer will be for "training" in R3E, but not the primary aspect of the game. Because it isn't today either (no career, hardly any atmosphere between races, nothing that makes it a good SP game: ability to race SP doesn't make a good SP game), and I say that enjoying the SP driving. Now the patch going south could have killed an offline game just as much. Yes it's the online infrastructure that triggers most issues here, but it could have been something else, too. And I would guarantee that if just the online part was broken by such a patch (no leaderboards, no mp etc.), people would be in rage just as much.
I know many people who are NOT online all the time. And I am certain that offline players still form the majority of race sim players. Not as hopelessly dominant as three years ago maybe, but still: the majority. Many games today get designed by the in-game purchase principle, especially on mobiles. Also often called as free-to-play games. Sort time ago there was a nice documentation about this business model on TV. There game publishers admitted that not even 10% of reuglar players of such games actually ever pay. Still, those 10% players that like a game so much that they buy things in its app store, still compensate the producer for the 90% of players taking the free ride and never paying anything. If this is so, then at least the general validity of the argument to fight piracy by enforcing online mode, must be questioned. For the games mentioned above, it does not matter whether the producer looses 90% of paying customers due to piracy, or due to the free-to-play model. Whether or not he can live of it and form a profit to invest from the 10% of players paying for a game - that is what decides the issue, at least economically. Ignoring pride in your work and hating to see it gettting stolen here for a moment, I speak strictly on the pays-for-the-daily-bread-and-butter side of things here. I think Raceroom looses more money and customers due to people being kept away, than it would lose if opening up a bit, allowing modding, allowing offline mode, and having the pirates trying to take a free ride as well. You have to take into account: the small player numbers that Steam charts show month for month, must be reduced even more if they should have an economical meaning, because these numbers show free players and paying customers together. The paying customer numbers thus I expect it to be even smaller than the already low number in Steam charts.
You fail to see my point, what you are going on and on about, is not a discussion point at all anymore. You are wasting your time. Independent of what you say is agreeable or not. The ship has sailed! Just accept that. You are not in charge, you cannot influence this, no matter what theories around monetization etc. You do not know how the studio is financed etc. They actually have the hard data. Now assuming their producer/management "sucks" and cannot make a good business decision, then data or not, it doesn't matter you can complain 24/7 Assuming they don't suck completely, it seems the data they have and the situation they are in suggests otherwise. It's a matter of trusting their capability in running their business. And even if you don't trust them, what do you wanna do? Is it your job depending on this? We had so many threads around the business model, around everything surrounding this game. And the one announcement we get now is that they will invest even more in online experience, rather than offline. So it makes zero sense to keep pushing in the other direction here. And given the existing infrastructure of the title, their announcement makes sense.