Welcome to the niche that is simracing. And if there are many players in one lobby you can be sure that it’s GT cars at Monza or Spa most of the time (in other sims obviously). I’ve stopped hoping that people actually show interest in other cars or tracks and embrace the variety but well… Regarding AMS2: offline it is for me. I’ll take a look at some online lobbies from time to time but I do not have high hopes.
there's really no incentive to public lobby MP right now. no ratings, no goals, no reason to finish races and worst of all, no reason to be respectful. there are leagues though, which I would recommend looking into. One other thing though, because the pop is so small if you race against 1-2 people, you get to know them. if you like racing with each other, send steam friend requests and look for them when you are playing. build from there.
For the moment organized racing is the way to go, eg. there is a super nice Caterham Superlight on Actrolvision and there is open slots, clean and fun racing. I suggest giving this one, or other leagues or 'for fun' events a shot.
I realised on weekends there are a good number of lobies with players but there is nothing "organized" what AMS2 needs is a good multiplayer system and i Think Reiza should provide it. I understand reiza is small company compared to other ones but having for example 10 servers actived and managed by reiza with diferent category cars, 20 min practice, 15 min Qualy and 25 min race and then start the cycle again during all day ,and changing category cars every 1 or 2 weeks is too much expensive for a company like reiza? I am thinking a lot and not sure why they invest in I.A instead of multiplyaer, I want think/dream taht they want a be sure the base game is working before create/implement some multiplayer of XXI century. Being honest i think AMS2 is an excellent simracing game but without good multiplayer for me like a simracer fan make no sense. I want a challenge me against humans not against I.A. We can expect something organized by community, there are some communities that are betting for AMS 2 but i think it should be complementary to an official multiplayer system.
It's not that I'm against online racing, have been a very active Iracing user from 2013 - 2018 (something around 500 races perhaps?) but the last two years I noticed that I don't have the time and commitment to practice for two or three races at the weekend (during the week is difficult because of work and relationship) just for being taken out on lap 1. Happened too often and my time is too precious for something like that. So....what's left? Casual open servers in all those sims we like or AI racing. Leagues are no option for me as I don't want to stick to a schedule.
Probably because eventhough some people does fancy MP racing then the majority of racing game users prefer single player racing. Even the former 100% MP based iRacing acknowledged this and integrated AI bots in their 24/7 service. ByTheWay: Since that some surveys does show that a great part of iRacing members use solely the AI service - eventhough they mandatory also have to pay for iRacings MP servers.
If I may add something to my post above then I was a longtime iRacing member before AI bots was introduced. Hehe and when I heard the rumour about possible comming AIs I was completely sure that almost no members would ever use it. iRacing is MP country you know. It was wasted dev resources I thought Oh man now in the mental rear mirror I can see how wrong I was
What you are proposing a lot harder than just having 10 or so active Reiza servers. The problem is where those servers are geographically located as that has an impact on latency to all the players that connect to those servers. Say they have 5 in South America, then they would need 5 in North America, 5 in Europe, 5 in Asia, 5 in Africa so that latency isn't horrible for people of that region, I'm sorry but netcode can only do some much to counter latency. There is no substitute for low latency when racing especially when decisions are being made at a fraction of a second. Now Reiza is paying for the cost of keeping those servers online and the up keep on them. Which means they need to start charging their user's a monthly fee for these servers and it's basically turned into iRacing at this point. It's much more economical for them to have user's host their own servers but then everything is disorganized and basically a crap shoot. Not to mention lack of documentation on how to properly setup these dedicated servers (DS). It would be a good thing moving forward, if those running the free DS came up with an organized way of listing where their servers are eg: put a short 3 letter prefix for country code in the front. eg: have a minimum license rating to join their servers. eg: rotate cars and tracks. But that means, someone would need to organize and put in the work. I've basically gotten to the point where I've given up on running a DS because I can't get it running the way I want to for my league. I just run the peer to peer system but that has it's own problems. But I really wish multiplayer was more organized and easier to impliment in AMS2.
Principally you are right - but.. When I was an iRacing member I had no latency problems joining their US server farms (from Europe). I could even connect to their Australian farm and most of the time have (or feel) no latency problems. But often when I checked other drivers latency in a race I could see that there was large individual differencies between as example europeans connected to US servers. So their individual connection quality was probably a larger problem latency wise. But to repeat myself then the latency problems in RL are not so huge as you are saying. ByTheWay: I can remember when I was a member of a NR2003 league (forerunner of iRacing) positioned in US/California(FSB League) and I had never latency problems - so it isnt that hard ByByTheWay: But as long as there are so few AMS2 users online as now it would be waste of Reizas money to host own server farms.
