Hello Reiza. I am a fan of Automobilista 2 realistic with the situation of this simulator. Have you seen the number of users of ASM2 compared to other simulators (iRacing, RF2, AC, ACC, RaceRoom)? You are doing an excellent job improving the simulator but this effort is useless if you don't get a significant user community and given the current level of maturity of the simulator the next URGENT step I think is a competitive online mode. even if it is something simple like RaceRoom and evolve it. I'm sorry to say Reiza, but the situation in ASM2 is Online or die
You aren't wrong that ams2 multiplayer needs improving. Hopefully V1.4 will bring more stable servers multiplayer sessions as a start. I also hope that in the near-future that there will be features like a stewarding system for league races, better broadcast facilities, and trackside cameras that focus on whole groups of cars, rather than zooming in on one car and missing the action around that car. These would be massive quality of life improvements to AMS2. But I do not believe that AMS2 nor Reiza will die without adding competitive/'esports' features. This is the only sim which is really focused on single player and Reiza have committed to making an in-depth career mode. Also bear in mind that rFactor 2 added a competition system and that hasn't given life to the multiplayer of rFactor 2.
Many sim racer talk about ranked MP and that it's a must-have but in reality most MP races - even ranked ones - are a 5-10 laps lasting **** show. Even Iracing offers mixed experiences, although it's the best racing I've yet seen online
I understand your passion for AMS2 and that you want to see it improve by getting a better online mode that attracts more players. But let's explore the reasoning with the help of some substitution: Just because a selection of other games with a specific feature have many players, does not mean that replicating that feature in AMS2 will in itself attract more players. Popularity depends on many factors, and can be about attracting a small amount of new players from larger segments of the population, or about attracting a larger amount of new players from the smaller niche segments. iRacing has an attractive online mode because they planned their whole product and pricing model from the start around the idea that racing online on a subscription basis is their core feature. The core feature in AMS2 is not about being the best sim for Online racing, it's about being the best sim for Brazilian racing content, both modern and historic content. With that in mind, in order for Online mode to fit into that product in a way that attracts new players, several pieces have to fit together, and Reiza needs to play their cards right. If AMS2 ends up having the 5th best Online mode, why would players want to race online in AMS2 when there are 4 better alternatives? "If you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one." Reiza needs to play to AMS2's strengths, but they can still improve other parts of the sim (including Online mode) in order to make the product better as a whole. But I do have some good news for you: While Reiza has stated that they will not provide tools for modding (my example feature above), they have stated many times that they are working on improving the Online mode. In their recent August 2022 development update, Reiza stated that they are adding Time Trial of the Week to the next update, together with many improvements to the Online experience. And in previous updates they have also hinted at the following:
A lot of people want to see better multiplayer options. You can see how popular games that have good multiplayer support are. Eg: PUBG, Fortnite, etc. It seems Reiza has hear our pleas and will be focusing more on multiplayer after the next major update (V1.4). *fingers crossed* We just need to be a little more patient. I for one, am excited about the V1.4 update and want to see what multiplayer stability they bring.
A year ago we heard nothing but "where is ranking system", "we want ranked racing", "when ranking will come everything will grow", "ranking now" blah blah blah. In effect, it did almost nothing to vitalise the MP system beyond make lots of people unable to play the game online because turning on the ranking system makes their games run in slow motion and the only fix we have is "did you try turning off UDP"? R3E and rF2 have competition systems and mostly functioning MP codes. They don't have many more players than AMS2 has. Sim racing has reached saturation where there aren't thousands of people chomping at the bit to join your ranked race at 2 a.m. Pacific Time on a Tuesday no matter how good the physics or MP are. Unless you join iRacing of course, and those people are too deep in the sunk cost fallacy and learned physics to move to another game with a fraction of the player base. I am not against fixing the glaring MP bugs (session hangs/disconnects, lobby desyncing when over 25 people are present, rating slow-downs) but let's not pretend like that will fix everything and suddenly make MP lobbies full of people. A solid league sim is probably the best AMS2 will achieve and from almost two years experience participating in AMS2 leagues, I think it works pretty well in that context.
As of now AMS2 has more online participation than Raceroom and Rfactor 2. Alot of the older sims are showing their age and rely on DLC. But yes, a lot of focus on MP is needed and hopefully soon. Am looking forward to the end of year update.
It’s the enthusiastic fans of a sim that see a great opportunity to not only give the fans what they want, but to help a sim grow and also quite rightly put some well earned money in their pockets too for all their hard work. LFM contributed to ACC success and he’s even offered to help out RF2, but I doubt they will jump on board. If AMS2 can sort their platform out, it will attract genius folks like LFM for ACC and SRS for AC and they will play a huge role in online activity. There is a far bigger community out there than public lobbies and discord leagues and all of them combined give the sim larger player bases, longer life and the ability to keep selling DLC to a bigger and hungrier player base. ESports are obviously also very important to a sim. Public lobbies within a sim may not be huge, but they play an important role for someone’s first steps and to give them an appetite for online racing. Low Fuel Motorsport | Sim Racing Team and Community Sim Racing System These two websites have done amazing things for their sims and if LFM for example hooked up with AMS2 once they sort the fundamentals out, it could lead to a far greater amount of regular and committed players / fans and a wider acceptance within the sim community. Dare to dream big and don’t be so closed minded to opportunity! Steam charts don’t lie and why wouldn’t Reiza want a share of that? Go get ‘em Reiza!
I would caution against looking at raw playercounts. Remember that many people are playing the beta, and they aren't counted in the main ams2 playercount.
I included all three sims to give visual context. We can argue the toss on any parameter that you wish, it still won’t account for the multiple times difference between AMS2 and whichever Kunos sim you want to measure it up too.
i agree whole heartedly with this, if reiza can sort their driving model out (aka make it drive as good as ams 1) then hooked up with lfm it would take off to another level, there's a way to go yet to get to ams 1 levels of driving, ams 1 physics were one of if not the best
this comparison is unfair. AMS2 will never reach even half AC(C) popularities. i watch the popularities of sims in steam the last 2 years and IMHO quarter of ACC's popularity would be a great achievement for reiza when AMS2 will be a finished product kunos with 2 different approaches (AC with more content, mods, easy to run on low specs PCs, free roams etc, ACC with less content than any sim, no mods, needs a higher end PC to run properly, focused on competitive multiplayer etc) proves that there is not a specific recipe for popularity. rF2, raceroom and (maybe after some time) PC2 should be compared with AMS2, kunos simulazioni is literally another league.
Imo ACC has a recipe for popularity : GT3 cars. Simply the most popular racing category in simracing since the early/mid 2010s. No matter which sim you choose: you'll find those cars on nearly every lobby.
Which are the two classes Reiza do really poorly, that also happen to be arguably the two most popular classes in sim racing? Yup, you guessed it, GT3 and GT4! Hopefully with the altitude bug / error being corrected in V1.4 which hugely affected the fun and fairness of GT3 and GT4 races ( which thankfully they acknowledged in the dev update notes and are now fixing ) plus the addition of the Merc GT4 and hopefully more GT3 cars soon to add more choice and variety to the grid, this could spark some much needed interest and help give people an alternative if they get tired and bored of ACC and fancy a different sim and community to race with.
ACC is not the only sim that has GT3 cars. maybe it has the best GT3 cars in the genre??? otherwise the players would populate other games with GT3 cars but more tracks and other categories. my point is that kunos has two sims with totaly different approaches and both are the most popular of the genre on steam (i guess iracing is more popular) and compairing them with AMS2 is unfair. i repeat: is another league (in terms of popularity) and i dont think this will change anytime soon whatever recipe could someone suggest... @James Lee GTE F1 are also very popular cars. reiza add them for free. didn't gain the popularity i was expecting. AC1 has payed mods for F1 2022 cars. 4 months ago made an all time best record in steam popularity. a title released in 2014...
Here’s some interesting data for you. LFM released September 2020 and helped with momentum post the USA pack. Most notably in the steam charts, post LFM’s introduction, this is when ACC never dropped below 4000 players again. I’m not saying LFM are solely responsible for this, but they played a part in the growth and the steam stats ( attached photo ) are interesting to view at the very least. Would be great to know what other factors helped propel ACC. Is this when Jardier became super popular on you tube and became full time ACC for example. Really interested to throw out ideas of contributing factors to the big push ACC had in quarter 4 2020. It would be very interesting to see if LFM and AMS2 would yield similar proportional results in 2023!
@James Lee GTE https://steamdb.info/app/805550/graphs/ i dont think there is any big spike after sep 2020. but anyway, lets hope that leagues like LFM will help AMS2 to grow popularity. as i said in another thread about popularity, reiza should promote AMS2 more in social media. they DON'T and thats sad. because even if leagues (or any other improvements) will exist, people should know about them. BTW, aristotelis vasilakos stream his LFM races. reiza's YT channel last video is 8 months old...
