An Open Letter to the AMS2 Community

_ShadowWolfe · Nov 29, 2024

So the future plan is to only do dev updates when it's close to release? I'm not sure how to feel about that. I feel like dev updates could still be offered as-is, just don't give an estimated time of release until it's actually ready.

As an example, a dev update in January could just have at the end, "We'll release more information when available." Then a follow-up in March could be, "We're comfortable with the state of development and expect to deploy the update one week from now."

Richirichi · Nov 29, 2024

Renato Simioni said: ↑

Greetings Everyone!

First of all, some great news - we are happy to confirm the V1.6 update to AMS2 and all associated DLCs are rolling out over the course of today. We also have a Dev Update following up shortly with some notes about the udpate and the IMSA Track Pack, whch previous Dev Updates on V1.6 haven´t yet covered.

The above is the most relevant bit of this letter - if you are in the silent majority of users who are happy with AMS2 as is, happy to see V1.6 incoming and to take updates and developments as they come there is precious little further below you´ll find iof interest so you might as well skip it; if however you are one of those outraged or simply disappointed by how we have communicated (or not) during the course of V1.6 development and even before that, or if you are outraged at the outrage and thus taking part on the usual merry-go-around of internet drama, it might be worth reading on

We have always been a group of developers first and foremost; it´s what we do well and mean to focus on. We don´t want a team of managers and marketing people around us, and we want every bit of revenue to go for the developers and to fund further development. It´s definitely an approach of pros and cons and I wouldn´t suggest it is the optimal way to run a business - it is just the way I mean to run mine.

With that said, there are obviously limitations to how well one can handle various aspects of the business especially when a lot of is concentrated on one person, who isnt´necessarily skilled at all of them. I am obviously well aware the scattered breaking down of news, dev updates and mis-timed previews have grown long in the tooth and worn down the patience of many users, and now that we are on release day, I think we can discuss a few things about it more clearly, and how we plan to handle things moving forward.

As you know v1.6 is a major update to what is already a big game, and it has had a challenging gestation, including one of the major must-have features only really coming together over the last 10 days But the update is much more than this feature, the IMSA content, or the physics updates - we have reworked a lot of the game from the ground up, which should be evident to anyone who sees the contents of Pt1, Pt2, the New Cars of V1.6

Irrespective of that, a segment of our users clearly isn´t happy with the approach and that is not something we are oblivious to. Here perhaps it´s worth offering a brief historic perspective on our dev updates - we began them way back in 2013 during the development of GSC Extreme, long before these were the norm within sim racing development, just as a way to keep users attuned to what we were doing with it; by mid 2015 we had had a crowdfunding campaign to continue developing GSC Extreme beyond the point it had become commercially viable for us to do so in new sales alone.

The campaign was successful, GSC Extreme ended up becoming AMS1, and thus Dev Updates thus became not only a tool to communicate with the user base about development of the game, but a way to keep backers and early buyers attuned to what was happening to the thing they had backed. With AMS1 and then AMS2 growing ever larger and more wide reaching, these updates became denser and denser, and an expectation began to foster for this to keep going into bigger and bigger updates, always preceding by these big dev updates.

Once AMS2 came around, again with a Season Pass and a backing campaign we continued delivering both game updates and development updates pretty much on a monthly basis, always trying to balance reviewing of the work that had been done for and incoming update with what would be coming up next, with some foresight into where the overall was heading. The primary goal of the dev updates thus has always been to communicate about development to people who had already given us their money for the products we had already sold them.

In this time the user base for AMS2 has also been steadily growing and at this point the majority of our current users aren´t old timers from GSC days, but people who come and go from other games sims and many of them do seem to find all this previewing a little jarring; slowly but surely these updates have become harder to write as shorter term developments become more scarce, more time was being spent in deeper development efforts that are both inherently less predictable and more time-consuming to deliver; more new content is reliant on premium licensing agreements that can take months if not years to bring to conclusion; and more demands were put writing about what the user base wanted to happen to AMS2, rather tha purely what we were doing; unfortunately some of what they want simply don´t happen within the time span of a month or two or even four (such as Multiplayer development); some of it just wasn´t what we mean to offer with AMS2.

This has become a slow-growing conundrum and one we have tried to balance as well as we could, admittedly with diminishing success - on one side we have some of our most loyal, long-standing users who not only enjoy but have come to expect the dev updates to come in regularly, packed full of info and previews and foresight of varying accuracy, and who are always hungry for more information; another segment of the community is more anxious, less tolerant of information that isn´t strictly precise, and see these articles as purely ads or teasers, which ultimately becomes frustrating if they are for products they can´t yet enjoy.

At some point trying to find a balance that appeases these diametrically opposed expectations has become untenable and the whole exercise not only futile but counter productive as it ends up centering every AMS2 discussion around whether this or that is happening, whether our estimates are going to be right, rather than what we believe is what should matter, which is what the game currently offers and the sheer volume of progress that is delivered on a regular basis, be it timed to perfection or not. Irrespective of how much you enjoy the end result of V1.6 one will be hard-pressed to dispute it packs an impressive amount of progress that is not typical of most game updates, let alone most racing sims within the time span of seven months.

We all should be able to agree that this dynamic does the community, ourselves and especially AMS2 a disservice, and for this reason we are going to change the approach moving forward by dropping the publishing of regular dev updates; they ren´t really necessary anymore, we are not selling things in advance to warrant them nor plan to; we also think that AMS2 V1.6 is at a level of maturity to stand tall on its own without constant forecasting future developments. .

Our primary goal has and continues to be to make the game better, faster so it becomes more competitive to fund further development, in keeping that ball rolling we continuously aggregate more value to those of you who already own it the soonest. Anything that ultimately distracts or detracts from that goal or from that perception being reality isn´t actually worth doing.

This isn´t to say that moving forward we´ll be entering radio silence mode - we will still engage via social media, occasionally pop in the forum to contribute with objective answers to pertinent questions and the odd whistling emoji, and obviously in the Paddock Club where the day-to-day development grind takes place - while we obviously don´t want people leaking content and videos of updates before they are ready, it is perfectly alright for members to share news about bug fixes and improvements with non-members so that more information becomes common knowledge. And when release time approaches for a new update, we´ll have development overviews in text or video form to cover the progress that has been made.

With all this housekeeping well out of the way, let´s get on with what we are all here for!
Click to expand...

Richirichi · Nov 29, 2024

Renato Simioni said: ↑

Greetings Everyone!

First of all, some great news - we are happy to confirm the V1.6 update to AMS2 and all associated DLCs are rolling out over the course of today. We also have a Dev Update following up shortly with some notes about the udpate and the IMSA Track Pack, whch previous Dev Updates on V1.6 haven´t yet covered.

The above is the most relevant bit of this letter - if you are in the silent majority of users who are happy with AMS2 as is, happy to see V1.6 incoming and to take updates and developments as they come there is precious little further below you´ll find iof interest so you might as well skip it; if however you are one of those outraged or simply disappointed by how we have communicated (or not) during the course of V1.6 development and even before that, or if you are outraged at the outrage and thus taking part on the usual merry-go-around of internet drama, it might be worth reading on

We have always been a group of developers first and foremost; it´s what we do well and mean to focus on. We don´t want a team of managers and marketing people around us, and we want every bit of revenue to go for the developers and to fund further development. It´s definitely an approach of pros and cons and I wouldn´t suggest it is the optimal way to run a business - it is just the way I mean to run mine.

With that said, there are obviously limitations to how well one can handle various aspects of the business especially when a lot of is concentrated on one person, who isnt´necessarily skilled at all of them. I am obviously well aware the scattered breaking down of news, dev updates and mis-timed previews have grown long in the tooth and worn down the patience of many users, and now that we are on release day, I think we can discuss a few things about it more clearly, and how we plan to handle things moving forward.

As you know v1.6 is a major update to what is already a big game, and it has had a challenging gestation, including one of the major must-have features only really coming together over the last 10 days But the update is much more than this feature, the IMSA content, or the physics updates - we have reworked a lot of the game from the ground up, which should be evident to anyone who sees the contents of Pt1, Pt2, the New Cars of V1.6

Irrespective of that, a segment of our users clearly isn´t happy with the approach and that is not something we are oblivious to. Here perhaps it´s worth offering a brief historic perspective on our dev updates - we began them way back in 2013 during the development of GSC Extreme, long before these were the norm within sim racing development, just as a way to keep users attuned to what we were doing with it; by mid 2015 we had had a crowdfunding campaign to continue developing GSC Extreme beyond the point it had become commercially viable for us to do so in new sales alone.

The campaign was successful, GSC Extreme ended up becoming AMS1, and thus Dev Updates thus became not only a tool to communicate with the user base about development of the game, but a way to keep backers and early buyers attuned to what was happening to the thing they had backed. With AMS1 and then AMS2 growing ever larger and more wide reaching, these updates became denser and denser, and an expectation began to foster for this to keep going into bigger and bigger updates, always preceding by these big dev updates.

Once AMS2 came around, again with a Season Pass and a backing campaign we continued delivering both game updates and development updates pretty much on a monthly basis, always trying to balance reviewing of the work that had been done for and incoming update with what would be coming up next, with some foresight into where the overall was heading. The primary goal of the dev updates thus has always been to communicate about development to people who had already given us their money for the products we had already sold them.

In this time the user base for AMS2 has also been steadily growing and at this point the majority of our current users aren´t old timers from GSC days, but people who come and go from other games sims and many of them do seem to find all this previewing a little jarring; slowly but surely these updates have become harder to write as shorter term developments become more scarce, more time was being spent in deeper development efforts that are both inherently less predictable and more time-consuming to deliver; more new content is reliant on premium licensing agreements that can take months if not years to bring to conclusion; and more demands were put writing about what the user base wanted to happen to AMS2, rather tha purely what we were doing; unfortunately some of what they want simply don´t happen within the time span of a month or two or even four (such as Multiplayer development); some of it just wasn´t what we mean to offer with AMS2.

This has become a slow-growing conundrum and one we have tried to balance as well as we could, admittedly with diminishing success - on one side we have some of our most loyal, long-standing users who not only enjoy but have come to expect the dev updates to come in regularly, packed full of info and previews and foresight of varying accuracy, and who are always hungry for more information; another segment of the community is more anxious, less tolerant of information that isn´t strictly precise, and see these articles as purely ads or teasers, which ultimately becomes frustrating if they are for products they can´t yet enjoy.

At some point trying to find a balance that appeases these diametrically opposed expectations has become untenable and the whole exercise not only futile but counter productive as it ends up centering every AMS2 discussion around whether this or that is happening, whether our estimates are going to be right, rather than what we believe is what should matter, which is what the game currently offers and the sheer volume of progress that is delivered on a regular basis, be it timed to perfection or not. Irrespective of how much you enjoy the end result of V1.6 one will be hard-pressed to dispute it packs an impressive amount of progress that is not typical of most game updates, let alone most racing sims within the time span of seven months.

We all should be able to agree that this dynamic does the community, ourselves and especially AMS2 a disservice, and for this reason we are going to change the approach moving forward by dropping the publishing of regular dev updates; they ren´t really necessary anymore, we are not selling things in advance to warrant them nor plan to; we also think that AMS2 V1.6 is at a level of maturity to stand tall on its own without constant forecasting future developments. .

Our primary goal has and continues to be to make the game better, faster so it becomes more competitive to fund further development, in keeping that ball rolling we continuously aggregate more value to those of you who already own it the soonest. Anything that ultimately distracts or detracts from that goal or from that perception being reality isn´t actually worth doing.

This isn´t to say that moving forward we´ll be entering radio silence mode - we will still engage via social media, occasionally pop in the forum to contribute with objective answers to pertinent questions and the odd whistling emoji, and obviously in the Paddock Club where the day-to-day development grind takes place - while we obviously don´t want people leaking content and videos of updates before they are ready, it is perfectly alright for members to share news about bug fixes and improvements with non-members so that more information becomes common knowledge. And when release time approaches for a new update, we´ll have development overviews in text or video form to cover the progress that has been made.

With all this housekeeping well out of the way, let´s get on with what we are all here for!
Click to expand...

Renato Simioni said: ↑

Greetings Everyone!

First of all, some great news - we are happy to confirm the V1.6 update to AMS2 and all associated DLCs are rolling out over the course of today. We also have a Dev Update following up shortly with some notes about the udpate and the IMSA Track Pack, whch previous Dev Updates on V1.6 haven´t yet covered.

The above is the most relevant bit of this letter - if you are in the silent majority of users who are happy with AMS2 as is, happy to see V1.6 incoming and to take updates and developments as they come there is precious little further below you´ll find iof interest so you might as well skip it; if however you are one of those outraged or simply disappointed by how we have communicated (or not) during the course of V1.6 development and even before that, or if you are outraged at the outrage and thus taking part on the usual merry-go-around of internet drama, it might be worth reading on

We have always been a group of developers first and foremost; it´s what we do well and mean to focus on. We don´t want a team of managers and marketing people around us, and we want every bit of revenue to go for the developers and to fund further development. It´s definitely an approach of pros and cons and I wouldn´t suggest it is the optimal way to run a business - it is just the way I mean to run mine.

With that said, there are obviously limitations to how well one can handle various aspects of the business especially when a lot of is concentrated on one person, who isnt´necessarily skilled at all of them. I am obviously well aware the scattered breaking down of news, dev updates and mis-timed previews have grown long in the tooth and worn down the patience of many users, and now that we are on release day, I think we can discuss a few things about it more clearly, and how we plan to handle things moving forward.

As you know v1.6 is a major update to what is already a big game, and it has had a challenging gestation, including one of the major must-have features only really coming together over the last 10 days But the update is much more than this feature, the IMSA content, or the physics updates - we have reworked a lot of the game from the ground up, which should be evident to anyone who sees the contents of Pt1, Pt2, the New Cars of V1.6

Irrespective of that, a segment of our users clearly isn´t happy with the approach and that is not something we are oblivious to. Here perhaps it´s worth offering a brief historic perspective on our dev updates - we began them way back in 2013 during the development of GSC Extreme, long before these were the norm within sim racing development, just as a way to keep users attuned to what we were doing with it; by mid 2015 we had had a crowdfunding campaign to continue developing GSC Extreme beyond the point it had become commercially viable for us to do so in new sales alone.

The campaign was successful, GSC Extreme ended up becoming AMS1, and thus Dev Updates thus became not only a tool to communicate with the user base about development of the game, but a way to keep backers and early buyers attuned to what was happening to the thing they had backed. With AMS1 and then AMS2 growing ever larger and more wide reaching, these updates became denser and denser, and an expectation began to foster for this to keep going into bigger and bigger updates, always preceding by these big dev updates.

Once AMS2 came around, again with a Season Pass and a backing campaign we continued delivering both game updates and development updates pretty much on a monthly basis, always trying to balance reviewing of the work that had been done for and incoming update with what would be coming up next, with some foresight into where the overall was heading. The primary goal of the dev updates thus has always been to communicate about development to people who had already given us their money for the products we had already sold them.

In this time the user base for AMS2 has also been steadily growing and at this point the majority of our current users aren´t old timers from GSC days, but people who come and go from other games sims and many of them do seem to find all this previewing a little jarring; slowly but surely these updates have become harder to write as shorter term developments become more scarce, more time was being spent in deeper development efforts that are both inherently less predictable and more time-consuming to deliver; more new content is reliant on premium licensing agreements that can take months if not years to bring to conclusion; and more demands were put writing about what the user base wanted to happen to AMS2, rather tha purely what we were doing; unfortunately some of what they want simply don´t happen within the time span of a month or two or even four (such as Multiplayer development); some of it just wasn´t what we mean to offer with AMS2.

This has become a slow-growing conundrum and one we have tried to balance as well as we could, admittedly with diminishing success - on one side we have some of our most loyal, long-standing users who not only enjoy but have come to expect the dev updates to come in regularly, packed full of info and previews and foresight of varying accuracy, and who are always hungry for more information; another segment of the community is more anxious, less tolerant of information that isn´t strictly precise, and see these articles as purely ads or teasers, which ultimately becomes frustrating if they are for products they can´t yet enjoy.

At some point trying to find a balance that appeases these diametrically opposed expectations has become untenable and the whole exercise not only futile but counter productive as it ends up centering every AMS2 discussion around whether this or that is happening, whether our estimates are going to be right, rather than what we believe is what should matter, which is what the game currently offers and the sheer volume of progress that is delivered on a regular basis, be it timed to perfection or not. Irrespective of how much you enjoy the end result of V1.6 one will be hard-pressed to dispute it packs an impressive amount of progress that is not typical of most game updates, let alone most racing sims within the time span of seven months.

We all should be able to agree that this dynamic does the community, ourselves and especially AMS2 a disservice, and for this reason we are going to change the approach moving forward by dropping the publishing of regular dev updates; they ren´t really necessary anymore, we are not selling things in advance to warrant them nor plan to; we also think that AMS2 V1.6 is at a level of maturity to stand tall on its own without constant forecasting future developments. .

Our primary goal has and continues to be to make the game better, faster so it becomes more competitive to fund further development, in keeping that ball rolling we continuously aggregate more value to those of you who already own it the soonest. Anything that ultimately distracts or detracts from that goal or from that perception being reality isn´t actually worth doing.

This isn´t to say that moving forward we´ll be entering radio silence mode - we will still engage via social media, occasionally pop in the forum to contribute with objective answers to pertinent questions and the odd whistling emoji, and obviously in the Paddock Club where the day-to-day development grind takes place - while we obviously don´t want people leaking content and videos of updates before they are ready, it is perfectly alright for members to share news about bug fixes and improvements with non-members so that more information becomes common knowledge. And when release time approaches for a new update, we´ll have development overviews in text or video form to cover the progress that has been made.

With all this housekeeping well out of the way, let´s get on with what we are all here for!
Click to expand...

Hi Renato, thank you for this magnificent update and I’m sure that we all appreciate, the incredibly hardwork, you and your team have put in. But, there is no question that frustration, and perhaps disappointment at the communication strategy is apparent, on both sides of the debate, i.e., customer, and between staff/developer. We should, all of us, have a reset here, and think about how this can be restructured in the future, without falling into implicit finger pointing, accusations, grievances, and allowing our emotions (for you guys under immense pressure) to override what should be a constructive and reasonable discourse. If there is anything, I have learnt about update 1.6, it is that.

Nibi-Vr · Nov 29, 2024

Juste amazing ! Thanks so mutch,verry good job

Max Melamed · Nov 29, 2024

Looking forward to enjoy 1.6 over the Weekend for the First time.

Communication and getting it right is super hard and I think you die the best you could. You can never please everyone.

I love how dedicated you Guys are and however your future communication will be, Just do it how you Guys feel it is right.

Michael Lewis · Nov 29, 2024

Still downloading the update but i know it is going to be great and as a result i have purchased nearly all the DLC not in my library as a thank you to the amazing team. They have had undeserved grief in my opinion but this sim has given me so much joy i can't tell you. I am mainly in to the rally cross but bought everything else to support the awesome work Reiza do. You guys rock big time.

Michael Lewis · Nov 29, 2024

If you love the hard work the team has delivered i encourage everyone to purchase the DLC's as a thank you after all they did it for the love of the game at no cost. I am still downloading but i am in a backward country with crap internet (United Kingdom)

MrDominoe · Nov 29, 2024

First, thank you Reiza and Renato specifically from the bottom of my heart. The work you guys do is absolutely insane. My bones are ready for Indycars at Mosport and Road Atlanta. It's finally happening!!

With the utmost respect possible, I'm going to dissent a bit with some of the other voices here and say that I think nuking the dev updates is probably not the best solution when most people who have voiced concerns were saying that the lack of communication was such a huge part of the problem. I've been racing the sim since 2021 and lurking the forums for a few years and over the last few months leading up to this update the thing that kept coming up was the confusion about timelines and delivery dates and how those are communicated. Truthfully I didn't see much else - I don't think the majority of the community or even the more vocally displeased have issues with delays or the length or scope of major updates - we know the team is working hard which is why we're here supporting them. I know the dev updates are supposed to be more casual, so it makes sense why dates mentioned are not concrete but a lot of people reading "in the next few days" or "September" or "by the end of Summer" don't have the context to know that and even if they did, it's still a confusing thing to say if there isn't actually a real window. In my view, these perceived delays are then exacerbated by radio silence from Reiza and a deluge of "stop complaining" to a lot of the concern and criticism by and from this community (not that there isn't an overabundance of mostly useless whinging also).

Maybe I'm misreading things but there also seems to be a bit of a growing divide between club/not club and going dark for everyone BUT club makes sense - they paid for the right to have their input taken more directly and be closer to the metal in the dev cycle - but it will probably not improve that relationship between communities.

Personally I would like to see a compromise. Fewer dev updates so the team can focus on its work while staying away from the toxicity that anticipation can build but in exchange I would hope for more accurate devupdate/release windows that the community can look to and rely on and if there is no window, just the directness of "no window at this time - here is what's currently being worked on, see you in the next update" or if there's a missed window that someone just pops in to say something about missing it. I can't help but notice how much things cooled off a few weekends ago when everyone was ready to blow and Renato simply dropped in to say "not this weekend."

In exchange a contingent of the community needs to accept that Reiza is great BECAUSE they refuse to compromise and that patience is a virtue that will DEFINITELY PAY OFF with this sim and this team - I honestly couldn't be more impressed with you all and the work you do. There's a lot of work to be done (myself included) on expectations and maturity when it comes to this stuff - there were several cases of others I saw bordering on parasocial and that is not healthy for anyone.

Anyway - time to pelt Road Atlanta T1 barrier with a rocket ship

jztemple · Nov 29, 2024

OK, long time lurker in the forum, but I just have to put in my two cents. Considering the excellent support the game has been getting, the wonderful updates and the new content, if it works better for the devs to have few dev updates, then by all means do whatever you feel comfortable with. Ignore the haters and remember that there are many of us out here who are very, very happy with the game.

Thanks!

Flat-Six · Nov 29, 2024

Renato- You & the Reiza team are doing a good thing in sim racing! Your game rules! I loved the updates and am a relatively new AMS2 fan. As someone who does long difficult projects for a living, personally I completely understand the delays snd the desire to make things as good as you can despite delays. It was interesting and informative to read your letter about how the updates came to be, which I was personally not aware of. I was actually really into reading the updates and enjoyed watching the progress, but you guys should do whatever you feel is best for your team. In the meantime, thank you for all the hard work on this update to a game that we all love and I am looking forward to trying it tonight after work!!!!!! Like, a lot!!! Thanks again!!!

SpaceYam · Nov 29, 2024

Thanks Renato and everyone at Reiza! I actually just jumped in the beta last night for the first time in a while racing the McLaren MP4/6 at Bathurst (because why not!). And I had forgotten just how much has improved. The upload has finished downloading but it is teasing me by taking a long and unpredictable amount of time to actually finish installing. But I am keen to get some racing done today!

It's a shame about the dev updates, I think smaller "This is what we're working on, stay tuned!" would be fine and hopefully appease those who like to cause drama. But I completely understand the angle you have, and completely understand that development takes time and there are no shortcuts to a polished product.

But for now, hopefully we'll all just shut up and do some endless laps in what has got to now be the finest racing sim on the market

Xenix74 · Nov 29, 2024

No developer update... is not a problem for me.

I drive this sim not because of beautiful words,
but because of beautiful work!

SJors · Nov 30, 2024

Congratulations @Renato Simioni. You and the team made my go to race sim even better yet again.
Don't let negative influences get in the way of what you guys are doing. All triple AAA studio's and publicers should take you as an example, as almost none are as dedicated to their games as you all are. Just for that reason alone I will buy all new DLC, to also keep you guys fiancially motivated.....and because it is very good DLC!!

Eric Rowland · Nov 30, 2024

Reiza ...

Pollinflas · Nov 30, 2024

Thanks for this Christmas present Reiza. The value of the product is huge and the update is fantastic, challenging but fun, like the best simulators. I hope you have a good Christmas holidays. Definitely you convinced me to keep being a buyer and backer of your future releases.

Fiyah · Nov 30, 2024

We should make a Reiza meeting at next year's Formula 1 @ Interlagos! With a giant Reiza banner on one of the grandstands, similar to that massive 'acelera Ayrton!'

ps. send invites to the F1TV crew with Sam Collins included to try out Ams2.

BenC · Nov 30, 2024

MrDominoe said: ↑

First, thank you Reiza and Renato specifically from the bottom of my heart. The work you guys do is absolutely insane. My bones are ready for Indycars at Mosport and Road Atlanta. It's finally happening!!

With the utmost respect possible, I'm going to dissent a bit with some of the other voices here and say that I think nuking the dev updates is probably not the best solution when most people who have voiced concerns were saying that the lack of communication was such a huge part of the problem. I've been racing the sim since 2021 and lurking the forums for a few years and over the last few months leading up to this update the thing that kept coming up was the confusion about timelines and delivery dates and how those are communicated. Truthfully I didn't see much else - I don't think the majority of the community or even the more vocally displeased have issues with delays or the length or scope of major updates - we know the team is working hard which is why we're here supporting them. I know the dev updates are supposed to be more casual, so it makes sense why dates mentioned are not concrete but a lot of people reading "in the next few days" or "September" or "by the end of Summer" don't have the context to know that and even if they did, it's still a confusing thing to say if there isn't actually a real window. In my view, these perceived delays are then exacerbated by radio silence from Reiza and a deluge of "stop complaining" to a lot of the concern and criticism by and from this community (not that there isn't an overabundance of mostly useless whinging also).

Maybe I'm misreading things but there also seems to be a bit of a growing divide between club/not club and going dark for everyone BUT club makes sense - they paid for the right to have their input taken more directly and be closer to the metal in the dev cycle - but it will probably not improve that relationship between communities.

Personally I would like to see a compromise. Fewer dev updates so the team can focus on its work while staying away from the toxicity that anticipation can build but in exchange I would hope for more accurate devupdate/release windows that the community can look to and rely on and if there is no window, just the directness of "no window at this time - here is what's currently being worked on, see you in the next update" or if there's a missed window that someone just pops in to say something about missing it. I can't help but notice how much things cooled off a few weekends ago when everyone was ready to blow and Renato simply dropped in to say "not this weekend."

In exchange a contingent of the community needs to accept that Reiza is great BECAUSE they refuse to compromise and that patience is a virtue that will DEFINITELY PAY OFF with this sim and this team - I honestly couldn't be more impressed with you all and the work you do. There's a lot of work to be done (myself included) on expectations and maturity when it comes to this stuff - there were several cases of others I saw bordering on parasocial and that is not healthy for anyone.

Anyway - time to pelt Road Atlanta T1 barrier with a rocket ship
Click to expand...

This are my excact thoughts, which i couldn't put into English without messing up.
Thank you!

Reiza, thanks for the hard work you put into this. Amazing!

Huseyin Fahri Uzun · Nov 30, 2024

Thank you very much for your hard work. It's the best, I love ams2 and always was.

bibi2110 · Nov 30, 2024

Sinceramente ho aspettato con impazienza, ma con rispetto perché stavate lavorando per noi.
Ringrazio tantissimo per il lavoro che avete fatto. Per me era già un gran gioco con cui mi divertivo tutti i giorni con la mia comunity "Gli automobilisti" e quindi per me tutte le critiche che vi sono state fatte sono incomprensibili. Oggi i giochi escono in early access mezzi rotti e incompleti e le persone invece di lamentarsi dovrebbero apprezzare il fatto che voi non lo fate. GRAZIE PER TUTTO IL LAVORO FATTO

Renato Simioni · Nov 30, 2024

SJors said: ↑

Congratulations @Renato Simioni. You and the team made my go to race sim even better yet again.
Don't let negative influences get in the way of what you guys are doing. All triple AAA studio's and publicers should take you as an example, as almost none are as dedicated to their games as you all are. Just for that reason alone I will buy all new DLC, to also keep you guys fiancially motivated.....and because it is very good DLC!!
Click to expand...

No reasons to worry - I think its pretty clear by now we´re fairly stubborn and resilient bunch that actually gets a kick out of being unconventional and subverting expectations, especially negative ones

So while I very much appreciate all positive vibes, no-one needs to be concerned much less offer their sympathies because I assure none is warranted; I live a privileged life doing what is likely the only job in existence that at once I love, am good at, and can make a comfortable living out of; I get to work with a great team of people with very different skills to mine to create something fairly unique, and reward them appropriately for it; it can be hard work, sometimes too much work but even when that´s the case it stems from my own choices. Having to deal with some obnoxious comment in the forum at some silly hour right after a 14h stint can be annoying or even disheartening for the moment, but it doesn´t take me long regain the perspective that is a very small price to pay in the grand scheme of things

Richirichi said: ↑

Hi Renato, thank you for this magnificent update and I’m sure that we all appreciate, the incredibly hardwork, you and your team have put in. But, there is no question that frustration, and perhaps disappointment at the communication strategy is apparent, on both sides of the debate, i.e., customer, and between staff/developer. We should, all of us, have a reset here, and think about how this can be restructured in the future, without falling into implicit finger pointing, accusations, grievances, and allowing our emotions (for you guys under immense pressure) to override what should be a constructive and reasonable discourse. If there is anything, I have learnt about update 1.6, it is that.
Click to expand...

There aren´t two sides here though, there is Reiza and hundreds of thousands of individuals - we can´t negotiate a consensus there This is just the reality of communicating with massive numbers of people especially online, it is not a AMS2 / Reiza / problem or even a sim racing problem and it´s esssentially why corporate communication is usually both sparse and sterile..

One of the issues with attempting mass communication is precisely that while you can try lead one horse to water and quite possibly make it drink it, trying to lead hundreds of thousands of horses will inevitably lead some to not to drink it, others running astray, another bunch biting you while others kicks you The horses might then meet and communicate between themselves and somehow conclude you were actually trying to lead them to the slaughterhouse...

You get the analogy here hopefully this is not strictly about the timelines and schedules, if anything those are mostly self-inflicted wounds and what tends to happen when one overstretches himself; it is communicating about development itself that make me conclude dev updates have become futile / counter productive - they have been for a while IMO and have only continued as long as they did because we had fostered a expectation for them to keep coming, but it comes a point it can no longer be justified for the energy it consumes.

To mention one common example, there is only so many times one can write detailed articles or segments about physics development, what is being changed, how it represents evolution, where and how the evolution will be perceived, how it builds on what it was done before only to have it received with what effectively codes as "well if it was perfect before how could it be more perfect now;' - when the word "perfect" was only ever uttered to say "nothing is ever perfect"...

If you are communicating about complex things it´s nigh on impossible to get everyone to understand it and very easy for that to become a miscommunication you somehow need to answer for - all ultimately for very little gain.

So while one may be disappointed with changes or when a run comes to an end, we all know that things evolve over time, often for both better and worse, and one needs to adjust accordingly. We can´t possibly complain about what is ultimately the consequence of quadrupling our user base. But I also need to be pragmatic to tell when we are overstretching ourselves for what is no longer a net positive - it´s better to focus on what actually matters

Log in or Sign up

An Open Letter to the AMS2 Community

_ShadowWolfe Member

Richirichi Member

Richirichi Member

Nibi-Vr New Member

Max Melamed New Member

Michael Lewis Member

Michael Lewis Member

MrDominoe Tony Stewart's Pro Spinner 2

jztemple New Member

Flat-Six New Member

SpaceYam Member AMS2 Club Member

Xenix74 Active Member

SJors Member

Eric Rowland Well-Known Member AMS2 Club Member

Pollinflas New Member AMS2 Club Member

Fiyah Member

BenC New Member

Huseyin Fahri Uzun ggnoredo

bibi2110 New Member

Renato Simioni Administrator Staff Member

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

An Open Letter to the AMS2 Community

_ShadowWolfe Member

Richirichi Member

Richirichi Member

Nibi-Vr New Member

Max Melamed New Member

Michael Lewis Member

Michael Lewis Member

MrDominoe Tony Stewart's Pro Spinner 2

jztemple New Member

Flat-Six New Member

SpaceYam Member AMS2 Club Member

Xenix74 Active Member

SJors Member

Eric Rowland Well-Known Member AMS2 Club Member

Pollinflas New Member AMS2 Club Member

Fiyah Member

BenC New Member

Huseyin Fahri Uzun ggnoredo

bibi2110 New Member

Renato Simioni Administrator Staff Member

Share This Page

Useful Searches