Hi - I've noticed that each night I am on our AMS dedi server with fellow club members and have it open, that several unknown people try to join and get mis-matches, likely due to the car and track mods we have loaded. We've tended to do most of our recruiting of new members or just regulars in Project Cars through having an open server well administered and while I know the user base is much smaller in AMS, I can’t help thinking that our use of mods is damaging us building our own wee community around the game. Wondering what others experiences are in this respect and what you think? In the meantime I'm going to start running the server with single series cars and standard tracks as much as I can to see how much it helps stimulate things. It's a difficult situation as getting club members over to AMS is helped by having the more well known tracks (almost all mods) and cars (EEC GT3 mod the main one) so it's a bit of a double edged sword. Cheers.
The VX portal started helping it as you can use the MOTD to post links to where to find a mod track or simply put a schedule there so people will know when to find people online. But.... thinking better about it after the release of the portal I can't find a reason someone should visit VX at all, this is a big issue. Maybe would help if AMS had a launcher you know, a good design with offline races option in the left (once you have all setup and start the game you go to car select screen) and the lobby in the right side with options to see time trial, etc. So people would be "forced" to see it. (of course I can be wrong and people are using the site indeed, I find it hard to believe tho)
how about shortcut to the page in the main menu? or live feed of most populated servers there somewhere, with counter to race (actual race, no warm up, practice etc, if i remember thats the case in r3e). Official servers with some bots would bait players to join too set up scheduled races on officials with bots, if race starts without any player, whole thing restarts
Well we ran with a single series and standard tracks tonight and got a few random people joining which was better than usual. Will keep trying it for a bit and see how it goes. My main point is that mods are damaging public open play (and don't get me wrong I love the good mods out there). This is not a demand to do anything about mods but the observation is worth making.
Agree there should be a link to the VX portal from the main screen in AMS otherwise people can only discover it from the forums which is a bit dumb. Using the portal should be optional though. You don't want the iRacing situation where if the portal or even just your net connection are down you can't do anything.
You could also argue that devs are damaging public open play with the sheer amount of cars and tracks they produce, just look at the variety we have in AMS, AC, RF2 for example. An already fractured public online base will become even more fractured when you add in 3rd party mods and tracks. It's been this way for years so nothing new, as has always been the case if you want a solid online experience joining a League is the best way to go. If you want a solid pick up online race environment then iRacing is (currently) the obvious choice. The only way around it and to have pure public pick up races with a constant stream of decent numbers is for the devs to make a sim with few cars and tracks...but then racers always want more so they'll eventually go somewhere else, I'm afraid public racing is what it is and I can't see it dramatically changing anytime soon.
Just put GT3 cars, and they must be absolutely totally and without fail licensed so you can put the badge in the shiny screen shots selling the game, and you got yourself a regular audience. Just look at how many people started playing the EEC mod. I dunno whats wrong with people but they all seem to be in love with those dreary little homologated rolling adverts for street cars you'll never afford.
Fair points and there are indeed many that work for and against getting momentum in a game. It's just a bit of a killer if you like to use your club servers in open mode to meet and maybe recruit new racers to your group and half the people that try to join get errors and kicked out. It doesn't matter what cars or tracks you're running, if they can't even join, you don't get out the starting blocks. Anyway, I'll report back on my experiment as it continues over the next few weeks. My goal is simply to get enough regular players racing with us that we can start a league or at the very least, well populated weekly race events. Once you have that, adding mods in is much easier as it can be communicated out and controlled.
That's not really what I meant tho. Where did that come from? lol I just meant a launcher where you have offline race options on the left and the portal on the right (something better than rF2 launcher), plus it uses Steam matchmaking anyway.
Missed this post for some reason. I'll check the portal and see what I can do but as you say, if people aren't using it and just use the in-game multiplayer menu to select a server (which I suspect most people are) it's not much use.
So I was just in a public server (not official Reiza one) and about 7 of us were in practice and when the session ended and advanced to Qualify it decided that 4 of us had a mismatch and would be booting us. Having just finished a race on the Reiza official server without getting a mismatch I don't know why that happened.
I had to delete 2 original tracks after an AMS update and do a Steam integrity check to downlaod them again so people would stop getting a mismatch when they joined. This can also happen with cars (already had a few issues with Marcas and Boxer) after update so server admin has to do a integrity check and if no file is downloaded delete it and check again to stop this from happening.
