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

yeah, it gives these vibes lets wait and see.
it was just an example
kunos (like many other gaming devs) when major changes (like patch v1.8) or DLC releases always do promo vids, teasers and organize events with popular youtubers, real life drivers, developers, "famous" ACC aliens etc racing the cars or tracks and streaming them. streams get many views and do good promotion for the content and the sim in general IMO. and of course to the youtubers who find another reason to keep streaming it and promote it. its not rocket sience...
i dont know if they pay for it (probably not, to be able to stream unreleased content for a popular sim seems enough rewarding for most youtubers)

i repeat, last vid in official AMS2 channel was 8 months ago... why?
and i never saw a promo event who renato, steel, nemesis, sim 604, davecam, ilja, rubens baricello, you, me, VW brazil guys, some loyal backers etc racing together unreleased content to have fun, attract views and promote the DLC and the sim. correct me if im wrong...

 

Nothing wrong with it. Just when you have Porsche and BMW behind you funding your sim with their pocket change from their marketing budget worth maybe a billion a year or when you have SRO and Fanatec supporting your sim, all of which are having budgets a few orders or magnitude bigger than Reiza things are relatively simple from marketing point of view. You can afford to pay whatever is needed to wine and dine streamers and esport players to a weekend escapade to Germany from all over the world or to one of your real racing events and they will feel obliged to grant you the benefit of the doubt just out of decency for what you have done for them at the very least or maybe even more than the doubt.
It's easier to get a positive review, create a big buzz and reach out positively many users who consume the content of those streamers/esport racers.
I don't think we will ever see this from Reiza and therefore I highly doubt we will see the same amount of twitch/YT time and support and consequently number of players.

 

I do agree that Reiza could do with close to no cost a bit more through their channels, but unlike what you may think the biggest streamers aren't for free. And to invite aliens and other streamers to a presentation/preview event you first need to have a sim with a MP that supports a clean event and that is not the case of AMS2 yet. Which is why I keep saying that MP was to be a far higher priority since it is the main channel of free advertising.

 

THIS

 

I agree with this, there have been significant changes since then (Racin' USA pt2, F-Ultimate Gen2, Stock Car 2022, Galeao GP, Argentina tracks, tyre updates), Reiza not posting anything in their Youtube channel about that stuff was a wasted opportunity imo.
@Renato Simioni maybe for 1.4 Reiza could post some videos showcasing new content and features?

 

Oh I hope this is the case moving forward. As the physics constantly changing has been a huge PITA in the past.

 

They need to deliver the career mode they promised. It needs to be very much better than the career in ACC. Many players will take Automobilista 2 more seriously.
If you have a ranked multiplayer like raceroom, it will help a lot too. Not a multiplayer with a practice session of 90 minutes before the qualification and the race, when you see that, you just want to quit the game and to play something else.

 

I don't like racing AI so I prefer the MP side of things. What puts me off is that the vast majority of online lobbies are just short races. When I see settings like 5 laps with 25 mins. qualifying then I wonder if those are satire lobbies. It just makes me want close the game again because I don't get it. You normally want your qualifying session to be shorter than the race. As soon as you start getting into some kind of rhythm the race is over, there's no way to recover from mistakes and everyone rushes to get to the front because there is no time. I do not enjoy that.

Another sad thing is that people don't use the rating although many complain about dirty racing. It's not perfect but definitely better than not having a rating at all. Performance rank farming is also not the best thing to happen in online racing. If you ask me Reiza should get rid of it completely and only keep the safety rating. I wouldn't miss it one tiny fraction of a second.

Scheduled races would be very nice. 3 different races, single seater, GT and Brazilian machinery e.g. then mix things up. 30, 45 and 60 mins. with mandatory pit stops etc.etc. It'd be really cool, the sky would be the limit, the number of combos countless.

What MP folks need to realise is that we tend to be in our 'bubble' and think everyone plays online, but that's not what's happening. The vast majority of players are offline players. I hope that changes a bit but that's the reality. And if you zoom out more and look at gaming as a whole it looks like most gamers play mobile games, globally speaking.

So yeah, we're a niche in a niche, that's why SP seems to be the priority. MP is not perfect ofc with some bugs here and there but imo the easiest fix is on the players' side.

 

I also dislike long qualifying and short races but not because of the short races. I don't want to waste time, I want to jump in and drive short races over and over again. Ideally with the host able to have a list of tracks that can keep the action going in addition to reversing the grids, banning people, etc.

I know that style of lobby is not terribly popular with sim racers on forums but 30 mins is too long for me. Even 20 minutes is a stretch but is what I normally do in AC. 15m is my preferred length of time and my ideal lobby would be 10m qualifying, 2x 15 min races with the 2nd reversed and then move to a new track and repeat. Less than an hour commitment and 2 good races.

 

I like 1 hour races as well but for me those have to be planned out well in advance but for a weekly event that's ok.

What did GT Sport do for their daily races? Looks like short races every 10 minutes and longer races every 30 mins? Obviously they had incredible numbers but something similar would be cool.

Has to be official though. AC has huge numbers for a PC sim and even then the 3rd party systems are too fragmented to have the impact all of us want them to...

Which brings us to Raceroom. How are those lobbies population-wise? They aren't that much bigger than AMS2 overall but maybe the SP/MP split is different.

 

All the different style of online races you like and want to see, are all in raceroom!
If you are in Europe, weekdays between 4pm and 10pm and weekends the grids get decent from about lunchtime, grids will be between 20 and 30 in each 15 minute race. The daily and weekly special events between 30 and 40 car grids and those races will be 45 to 60 minutes long. You have different splits and also have to have a certain safety rating to be able to qualify and enter the special races. Rookie servers are decent as long as you qualify towards the front of the grid.
Raceroom is free to try and from your specific taste in online races, it’s almost as if raceroom was made for you! Get involved, it’s an amazing sim and also has decent AI!

 

Dying.

 

I am on the west coast in the US and generally miss out on the peak EU time slots. However when I have a day off I join AC servers via SRS around noon. I didn't think to fire up Raceroom at that same time to try their servers but since it is official there are probably more players in them than in SRS for AC (even if AC has 10x more players).

If so, that bodes well for AMS2's MP future. I'll check out Raceroom on my next afternoon off to compare it with SRS, I now realize I never gave it a fair chance (evenings in PST are empty, like in most sims lol).

 

I think 15-20 mins are perfect, even 30 mins go by very quick, you can actually focus and try to get into a rhythm, a lot more things happen which make you forget time. The only disadvantage is that if you got 2 hrs time for racing in the evening e.g. you get less variety ofc, that's it. Overall it makes the racing much much better. You can join late without qualifying or practice and get a feeling for the combo during the race and try to get the lap times down lap after lap. You can recover from mistakes and nobody needs to win the race almost literally in the first corner etc.etc.

Unfortunately that kind of lobbies are very rare. I want to race so I join these short races and often I just want to keep racing after the checkered flag because perhaps the combo is great or people have great respect on track etc. but more often I don't join and close the game again instead because there's no point doing a 5 laps race imo.

 

Yeah I need to branch out more, for whatever reason I've limited myself to SRS and while decent, it has a few downsides:
1. Only 1 choice per hour
2. Small userbase means only a few hours have enough people (#1 is also caused by the small userbase)
3. You have to register before 5 minutes to the hour or you miss out and have to wait another hour
4. I haven't tested this out yet so I don't know if you HAVE to join immediately or if you can wait/rejoin but you can't join before 2 or 3 minutes to the hour

There are so many of these now with SRS, Just race, Sim racing.GP, the one in CM, etc. They probably all have the same issues with small userbases.

 

it had terrible pcars style driving for a very very long time which stopped everyone (incuding me) from playing or even looking at this title, i tried again yesterday and some of the cars are alot better now but some are still bad

also the multiplayer is non existent and there's no team racing, team racing is now a massive market in simracing, much bigger on the multiplayer side than people think, it's no surprise the 2 biggest multiplayer sim racing games have team racing and driver swaps

 

1. Not mod friendly. This would be tolerable if they could come up with a skin system that didn't restrict the number of skins onboard, and that didn't require editing .xml files to keep from overwriting all your other skins. Full modding support would be nice, but just fixing the skin situation would be a giant step.

2. The replay cameras are abysmal. Fixing the replay cameras should be high priority, with inclusion of at least two variants of a TV-broadcast type camera.

3. Multiplayer. I don't use it. But many people do. They should really get after it.

4. But the single biggest thing that they've done that has cast a pall of sadness and despair over everything is their failure to include my Hot Car Competicoes Bardahl skin in the Stock Cars. Once they put that back, the sun will emerge from behind the clouds, sales will boom, and all will once again be right with the world.

 

Not sure what you mean, but initially none of the cars drove like PCars2. They drove more like iRacing with cars with broken physics. The latest update has finally made the updated cars drive like PCars2 cars, which is a giant step in the right direction, IMHO.

 

whoa i forgot to come back for a while.

my big post about the MP is fairly simple, trolls or newbies there will allways be in any sim.
you can go to any ghost town and find one there.
admin commands and session management are the easy solution. kicks, bans, votes, etc...

a really dedicated troll will tarnish MP in AMS2 harder than in AC and ACC where you can rejoin and are not forced to wait. if some troll crashes you hard in AMS2 you get 15m of your time wasted, or 20, or how many minutes the race is. OFC you can choose to not spectate, go do something else... and then you kinda start not returning so much to the sim.

to keep people on the sim they want to be driving. who wants to spectate others for 20 or 30 minutes? unless im spectating some alien like jardier or james baldwin, i'll get bored easly. and even spectating can get bored when you can go watch the stream and chat in comments and hear them talk.

and sim racing streams have some of the lowest views of all gaming. the idea of spectating or waiting 30minutes if i get crashed at the start of the race is ridiculous. i will get out and search for another race. there is no another cus no players? try to make one? doesnt fill up? just find a race ready to go in AC, ACC, RRRE, LFS. Instantly, at any day, any time. U crash there? rejoin instantly.
People don't have all day to sit doing nothing looking at the screen.

MP is highest priority because racing is competitive agaisnt people.
hot lap is cool but its less than 50% the thrill.
look at iracing FFS... grass driving? huge payment? highest views in all racing sims? why?
most MP competition!!!
and now ACC has LFM trying to recreate the same ranking system iracing has. coupled with ACC "base" rating like SA ( safety ) and others (CC car control) etc...


I like AMS2 but the MP experience is dead. so dead it frustrates me. I wanted to rejoin a race if i crash or get crashed. i wanted to jump in and out of many servers to check out the track cars, how the race is going, how is their split, if everyone is too fast or too slow for me. I can't jump around to check out stuff like that in AMS2, it's slow and when I join the session they can change car and track. so my wait was wasted. then why bother even trying?

 

Just realised I posted in the wrong tab. Whoops.