What do you think is the most significant reason AMS2 userbase is so small?

I absolutely never want to see them waste effort on implementing a feature to join races in the middle and drive. All it will do is allow trolls to join a lobby, crash into everyone, then leave to ruin the next lobby.

 

I also strongly disagree that the peer2peer hosted lobbies in AMS2 are in any way bad. The ability to quickly change car or track or weather is a feature, not bad. It also provides you with the opportunity to try out new combinations quickly.

Multiplayer in its current state needs this (in order of need):
1. Kick option for the host in order to ban crasher and laggers.
2. One minute timer at the end of each session so that the lobby moves on automatically if the host ist AFK, and no one gets stuck forever.
3. Once or twice a week, there's a "Reiza-sanctioned race" that gets promoted on the forums and on social media, which you can sign up for; maybe divided by continents in order to help stability.
4. Ability to create a multiplayer championship, so everyone knows what's coming and no one immediately leaves after one race.
5. No lobbies that you cannot join being shown on the multiplayer page.
6. Ability to adjust starting grid.
7. Opportunity to assign a replacement host should the original host leave the server.

 

I can’t deny that in AMS2 setting up a server is so easy to do. The big problems begin with all the issues you face once in the server, which have been listed by myself and many others many many times in this thread and elsewhere.
As I type this now on a Friday night at 7pm U.K. time, there are lobbies in raceroom with 30 cars, a few lobbies with 20 - 30 car grids and a total of 220 odd players spread wonderfully across many varied scheduled lobbies. As you can see in the photo of AMS2 lobbies that I’ve just taken, total players online is practically the same as one lobby in raceroom. ( I can’t take a photo of raceroom due to me being a vr player and you don’t get a monitor mirror, but feel free to validate my numbers for yourself ).
Look at the low or no ratings required to join these AMS2 lobbies, I can only imagine the quality of racing in those lobbies.
It’s not that I disagree with you about the terrible state of ams2 online, it’s that the vast majority of the online sim racing community don’t agree with you either.
I don’t own ACC or I Racing but I imagine they are substantially larger than raceroom’s player count.
It can’t be that sim racers have got it completely wrong and are playing the wrong sims surely?

 

It's not wasted, you aren't thinking about it from a server admin perpective. Give the DS admins the ability to allow or not allow the player to join a during the middle of a race. If the lobby is password protected and someone gets disconnected, they can log back into the multiplayer race and start from the pits instead of being stuck spectating. I don't know how many times people in my league have been annoyed by this because they get disconnected during the middle of a race for some reason or another and can't continue racing.

For the admins that don't want to allow people to join during the middle of the race, they can turn OFF the feature in the settings. AC and ACC allow you to do that. It would be nice if AMS2 allowed you to do that as well. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, public lobbies can be setup either way. Give us the choice to either turn it ON or OFF.

That way if you don't like someone joining in the middle of a race, you can join a hosted lobby that doesn't allow people to join in the middle of a race. At least you'll have that choice.

 

Well the solution to that is to fix the issues that cause disconnects, not to start implementing complicated features that will inevitably be left on in open lobbies and that just enable trolling. If you disconnect from a race, your race is ruined anyway.

 

Not so easily done as the nature of the internet is based on "best effort" communication. Packet loss, erratic latency, jitter and congestion are all part of the game. People get disconnected when playing iRacing which has some of the most mature multiplayer infrastructure. So what you suggesting isn't realistic as even Reiza has to set thresholds in the game where a person is considered disconnected if a minimum threshold isn't met. That has to be done so it doesn't ruin the race for people with decent connection to the server. I'm sure nobody wants to race against a person who randomly teleports on the race track due to high latency.

Also in case you are worried about these features being left ON, perhaps Reiza can have the default setting turned OFF. Or show which online lobbies allow mid race joining and which ones don't, so folks like you that don't want others to join mid race can only select server that don't allow join. Having more options is never a bad thing, IMHO.

As a server admin, I don't find any of these configurations complicated and actually welcome more options to control. Do you happen to host a AMS2 DS?

 

8 out of 10 most popular videos in this (very good) channel is about assetto corsa...

 

He seems to really like AMS2, so hopefully as the rest of the 2022 DLC is released there will be more AMS2 videos. Historic Nurburgring and Spa in addition to the historic track layouts DLC will be fun, in addition to whatever cars they inevitably add...

 

99% of open lobbies are 5 lappers...

It is incredible how many seem to link MP only to open lobbies, when the most satisfying and incredible online experience comes from league racing (or scheduled longer races, to some degree).

While I agree the solution is to find the root cause of the disconnections, I completely disagree with the argumentation of the last part of your post.

 

If and once they ever sort out multiplayer, hopefully then they can expand into esports and finally be looked at as a serious and proper sim.
I totally agree with you about your multiplayer statement and how people especially on here think it’s the least important element of a sim and limited to public lobbies chasing ratings, mainly because all they want to do is hot lap all day with different weather and take a screenshot of it and put it on Facebook and Twitter.
Multiplayer is the absolute base for success and long life!
From fancying a quick race with friends or in public rated lobbies that you can trust for a good race, or a scheduled rated race, special events, you tubers racing with their communities where you make more friends and set up branch off lobbies from there.
Then once that base is established be a top brand for E sports where the aliens and pro’s race and who sim racers look up to and want to emulate and will want to race in the same sims and save up for the same equipment as them etc.
All of these things combined with stable servers give the sim long life, large player bases and revenue streams from the sales it generates. Just ask the ever ageing sims iracing, raceroom, rf2, ac and potentially when it’s older ACC too.
All of the above listed online features, not a single one of them is provided by AMS2 and it’s not a coincidence as to why it’s not competing with the above listed sims that do offer all / most of those features.
Currently all AMS2 does is attract hotlappers and the project cars 2 online lobbies of death wreckers and it’s why no one is talking about this sim or taking it seriously.
The reasons I get so frustrated with this game is that in the time that I play it and hot lap with it to fiddle with set ups, I really really enjoy it! But once I’ve got my setup dialled in, there’s literally nothing left for me to do and that’s the really frustrating part. I can either choose between the very dead and very broken on line features or the very very predictable and procedural AI. This sim could and should be an absolute must own all round beast of a sim!
But just like the rest of the community, I lose interest in it, because there is nothing to do or achieve post hot lapping and tuning a set up and being amazed by the graphics.

 

i love xcom2 and civ5. i play them only in SP. why should i care how popular they are?
im not a funboy or a share holder. im just a single player
why should i care if AMS2 is popular or not if i only want to race the AI? AI is always there, full numbers, always ready to race me any way i want, wherever i want.
renato says reiza is OK financially and i know the game will continue to update and develope even if it not gain any more popularity.
personally i am in this thread and talking about popularity because i want to find more people in multiplayer.
you?

BTW and because some people think that youtube will raise popularity, in reiza's official YT channel last video uploaded 8 (eight) MONTHS AGO...! and i should expect from the "youtube influencers" to promote AMS2?

PS: three days ago a studio called "gummy bear" (they describe themselfs as "a Romanian-based studio comprised of a few folks, keeping each other honest while we make dumb video games") released their first ever game on steam the "bear and breakfast". in three days 10 proffesional critics (including the very popular game spot, the guardian, polygon, rock paper shotgun) wrote full reviews about it.
now guess which racing sim has not even one proffessional critic review more than 2 years after release... (source: metacritic.com)

 

I almost feel like that's a good thing, especially if the next update is going to blow everyone's minds. When it finally starts to get more attention it will hopefully fare much better against the competition than it does now.

I can completely understand how they are currently operating. Imagine finding a solution to the sticky diff issue and some underlying tire bugs after your title had been out for over a year? You could ignore it, rush out your promised DLC and move on (let's see what Grid Legends does, that game has an abysmal player base but they promised 4 major DLCs...). Let's be happy they chose to fix it, probably at the expense of delaying the marketing push.

Would you want to market something you just found out was flawed? Especially when you have content that has been fixed receiving glowing reviews? No, you probably want to double-down on rolling out those fixes to everything, which takes time.

Then you can start the marketing push, as you will be doing so from a much more confident position. Of course people will complain, that's normal. They are really close to the point where the complaints get drowned out by compliments so maybe there are some MP fixes incoming?

If people are having crashes in MP due to netcode, that had to be exposed during oval beta testing, along with the current AI issues people keep complaining about. I'd imagine those issues could be missed in normal road course racing but due to the nature of oval racing those issues might now be deemed unacceptable and (if we're lucky) will have fixes in-place before originally planned.

 

Let the title be finished first. Having all online buzz created with promotion when the product is unfinished is just a wasted effort.

We all remember what happened to Cyberpunk 2077 and it's now difficult for CDPR to undo the damage. Let's let Reiza play the long term game and reap the fruits when AMS2 is ready.

 

@stealthradek althought i think reiza should promote better this ambitious and full of great potencial project, let's agree.
so to sum up, "let the game finished" should be the answer to this thread;s tittle:
when the game is finished it will gain the popularity it deserves and both the influencers and reiza efforts to "promote" will not be wasted...!

PS: i bought AMS2 after an YT "influencer" from australia called ermin started to release frequent videos about how good it was. after some time he released a video saying that he will stop to "promote" it so frequenly because its unfinished, it changes all the time, developer instead of trying to finish and polish existing content release new -unfinished and unpolished- content and features and things he says in his vids about some features (like physics, FFB, content, AI etc) are change so quickly that make his videos unreliable ( a "waste of effort" someone could say...)

after seeing that reiza (although it charges a full price for existing and future content) waiting to finish AMS2 and then promote it (as you said and probably you are right) i can see now why, probably, some youtubers (and existing or prospective buyers) doing the same...

 

Basically if you watch a Youtube video about AMS2 from a few months ago, whatever is being said there about features and car handling is out of date already. I can very well see how this is frustrating, investing time in a video that becomes useless so quickly.

On the bright side, when v1.4 is released the constant big changes to physics and car handling should stop, save for bugfixing and minor adjustments, and the cars and setups should remain relatively stable for the coming months while other features are being worked on. Maybe this gives the game the stability it needs for Youtubers to reconsider making videos about it.

 

yeah, lets hope so. maybe the expected stability will allow reiza to start promoting its own product too. long shot, but we never know...

PS: i found out about an upcoming sim called rehnsport after the developers organized an event that showcasing work in progress that many (if not all) "influencers" was invited to try and stream/review/promote...
thousands of potencial buyers and/or just curious viewers watched them and noticed a new product is coming. im not hyped but im waiting for it to release.
this marketing tactic to promote existing, upcoming and/or unfinished products is known since 18th century and it works quite well...

PS2: one of the most succesful developers in the genre (also a relative small team), which currently working (hard) developing content for an existing very succesful sim AND at the same time developing a new in-house engine for an upcoming sequel to an iconic racing sim, finds the time to communicate with his community via very frequently YT streams with live uncensored chat in which he answers to viewers questions, promoting his sim, racing with his community, making track guides and giving tips about everything. i cant say if he is doing it only to promote his game and make it even more popular than it is, but i think he is ALSO doing it because he really likes it. he likes to play his game with his community and in the same time, he do the most direct promotion he can had.
maybe some other developers should start to do the same thing, until other youtubers (re)consider to bother with their game?
what do you say about this idea? i think its cool and it could help a lot in popularity...

 

$$$$$$$$$$$ and more $$$$$$$$$$ talk

 

and whats wrong about this?
BTW in PS2 there is a promote suggestion that cost nothing (except of time and passion). not only this but it can provide a (very small) income from ads and donations. both PSs requires the dev actually want to promote their game.
is this the case with reiza or we should expect from influencers and/or players to promote AMS2? thats my real question here.

im afraid i know the answer. lets hope im wrong.

 

My issue with Rennsport is the fact that it seems their main focus is buzzwords (NFT anyone?) and investor's money with simracing in the background. They don't scream passion at all which is essential in simracing. It's all around building hype and getting rich rather than actual racing.

I'm getting strong Star Citizen vibes with Rennsport.