Automobilista 2 V1.5.5.0, Le Mans & Endurance Pack Pt1 RELEASED - Now Updated to V1.5.5.6

Unfortunately, the AMS2 rating is not good for anything. Only if it serves as an incentive to drive a higher class would it be of any use. Racecraft, LMU, iRacing and others show how such a rating makes sense.

 

The rating should simply not be deactivatable and higher classes and even GT3 would need a minimum rating then it would be useful but as it is it is useless because nobody uses it or only sets it to minimum.

 

Maybe it is a mentality issue indeed.

AMS2 community is majorly focused on commitedless racing it seems.

That would explain the profusion of 5 lappers and why services like JustRace which tries to emulate a proper competitive scene just cant pick up popularity.

Also goes in line with so many people here saying they are mostly SP players. The community seems to focus more on casual racing.

 

Give people a reliable service and they will use it. MP has been undernourished from the beginning and there are still too many frustrating bugs/Qol pending issues to make it worth investing in as a player and much less ranked where you are basically in a lottery of ram/disconnect/stutters.

 

Despite its many improvements elsewhere, AMS2 multiplayer is perceived--and not entirely without reason--as a fifth- or sixth-choice option compared to iRacing, Low Fuel Motorsports (ACC & AC), rF2 RaceControl, RaceRoomExperience, and even Le Mans Ultimate Early Access. Anything Reiza can do to substantively improve the multiplayer experience in AMS2 can only help their title climb out of the multiplayer relegation zone.

 

Only way i was able to get proper long races going is joining a league. Open random lobbies will always prefer to do short 10 minute races over anything that requires actual time investment because there pretty much is NO incentive to drive around for 1 hour against random people. At least i lost any interest doing something like that, but when we did a 2,4 hour long endurance race at Le Mans it was one of the best races ever ! Gotta find leagues otherwise you'll never have a good online experience unfortunately. And a "rating penalty" means absolutely nothing anyway.

 

As I see it you are partly right.
But the main problem is the extremely low number of serious MP drivers both here and in most other sims.
Because committed and serious MP drivers who want to use time and effort does join iRacing.
When I do check out the MP list here about 90-99 % of lobbies have a racelength of about 5 laps.
Come on. Who want to use some energy to participate in that.
Except yeah as you say some casual lobby hoppers.
Good name bytheway

 

Now that the AI is more competent, there is even less incentive to do MP.

Some low hanging fruit that could make MP better without requiring a total game rewrite.

• Reduce the pre race countdown to 60 seconds and skip it entirely when default setup is on.
  
• Make all lobbies that cannot be joined (due to the session being closed or full) invisible so people don´t waste time entering and leaving for nothing and creating connection spikes
  
• Create a hot lap sub lobby for those who want to create lobbies with no actual race or when practice session is longer than 30 minutes.
• Temporarily get rid off the ranked lobby option until a definitive solution is found to the freezes in these lobbies and a better ranking system is devised.

 

Not dismissing any of the legitimate concerns about AMS 2's multi-player shortcomings, but isn't the above true for every or any sim out there? I simply do not expect to have a quality online experience outside the confines of a league or some reasonably well organized online matching service (both of which exist for AMS 2). Only iRacing avoids this dilemma, because you pay a hefty subscription fee specifically to avoid the chaos and disappointment of open lobbies.

A bunch of people sitting around grumbling about the inanity of open lobby racing and thinking there must be a better way is exactly how and why iRacing was born.

 

I did some league race hosting of my own and we only ever had around 30 minute practice so everyone joins the server in time, then a 5 minute qualify which was just a one-lap shootout, after that a 45 minute race.

Honestly i will never understand the reasoning behind wasting 20 - 30 minutes of time with qualifying. THAT part should be as short as possible. The moment i see qualifying 20 minutes followed by a 5 lap race i am out because it is just time wasted. Only valuable time is spent actually racing.

 

It is true. If you hop into a random AC public lobby you'll likely get the same sh*tty experience as in many AMS2 public lobbies.

The following isn't particularly directed at your post, Marc, just a general comment on this subject.

The difference is that the other sims do offer a proper platform for a proper organized online matching service. AMS2 simply doesn't...

LFM was the biggest example of that. Then we have RCO where the dev had to limit the size of the grid to avoid problems. Not only that, but also had to make a workaround the P2P nature to try to set the host as someone from the continent where the majority of the grid is from.

Then we have JustRace, which is a pretty neat service, yet empty (at least for AMS2 events) and certainly suffer the very same issues RCO does.

I do believe the underlying issue is how P2P works and there is very little Reiza can do about it.

What can be done, and I don't understand why it hasn't been done yet, is Reiza sticking JustRace into AMS2's interface as an unofficial scheduled race system. At least more people would be aware of it, and I think AMS2 online experience would improve heaps, despite P2P.

Finally, unfortunately on this forum this disclaimer seems to be necessary everytime we talk about MP: no one expects AMS2 MP to be like iRacing.

 

The first point has nothing to do with rammers. I meant the endless pre race countdown we have to sit through before green flag because one player is AFK or staring at the screen mesmerised instead of clicking ready and making everyone else wait. There is the option to skip it altogether but then people are screwed if they have to add fuel or whatever. 60 seconds is more than enough.

About rammers joining late, I get that´s why there is a 2 minute curfew on session but these lobbies should be hidden from view as then people won´t try to join them as suggested before.

One final one I forgot was to give the room master the option to end a practice session when the timee goes to 0 and not allow everyone to finish their lap. This is especially interesting now we have so many onger tracks where one can easily extend the session 12 minutes or more, especially if AI are included as they won´t click to go back to the pits.

 

About the pre-race countdown, the current time limit is fine, I wouldn't want to shorten it. For 5 lap, pickup races, it's too long, but the extra time is nice to double check strategies, setup, etc. for a 30-90 minute league race. In the leagues I've run with, that extra time has saved several of us from embarrassing strategy errors or weird issues with the selected setup not applying in the race.

As for rammers, the problem is a legacy safety rating system that is effectively determined by overall playtime without incident and not recent behavior. I've never seen an A or S rated driver drop in safety rating. 70% of the lobbies I see lately are locked league races. I would guess most of these would want to open up to more players to gain new players, have bigger grids, closer competition, etc., but are required to lock lobbies to avoid the 5% of players who are toxic. P2P host tools could help mitigate these issues: i.e. a player blacklist or insta-ban feature that could be activated from the ICM.

Still, I don't see changes in the rating/ranking system having any effect on the state of AMS2 MP without the addition of official hourly/scheduled races. Player hosted lobbies/leagues should always be able to run what they want without restrictions, but a rating/ranking system needs clear goals.


Side note: rolling starts/formation laps are in desperate need of an overhaul. The AI regularly get tripped up on simple things, chicanes, turns, different classes, etc.. Any gap in the field compounds and suddenly drivers have 35-50 second penalties for issues completely out of player control. Also, if a player stalls/stops on the grid, everyone behind suddenly is out of sync and the game gets confused about where to go.

IMHO, full formation laps should be behind the safety car. iRacing does this, and the current FCY system rules could eliminate issues with the leader speeding or receiving random penalties. Cars could either start from a stop on the grid or in the pits (could even implement a pre-grid if you want to go for 100% immersion).

 

In my opinion one of the problems is that 90% of the time multiplayer in AMS2 tend to converge on GT3 lobbies in Spa / Monza / Red Bull ring with sunny conditions , and all the richness of being able to race in different classes / circuit combinations / weather progression are lost. Besides the great ARJ lobby which throw different cars in the mix, I hardly see open lobbies with 70s vehicles or trucks, group A cars, karts, hot cars, f trainers, super vee, etc. This, compounded with normally short 5 lap races lead to the casual multiplayer lobbies. For me at least, which have little time to play and cannot commit to league racing, I tend to focus on sp mode. Depending on car/ track, racing with AI can be really satisfying.

 

In my case, my AMS2 rating is frequently got reset to U1500. So AMS2 rating is nothing to me...

 

But every racing game with it's online mode honestly should be targeting to be like iRacing with matchmaking that has you join races every 1 or 2 hours. The current open lobby system is terrible if you want to join just a random online race when there is no league stuff going on especially with how once the practice / qualifying has the final 2 minutes or you are in the pre-race menu, nobody can join in anymore which hopefully is a limitation that will be removed completely soon enough as it was mentioned.

 

Reiza does not have the resources iRacing does to keep a rich and stable multiplayer environment with hundreds of servers running in some cloud, hence why it is unfair to compare the MP experience of both titles.

What we should expect is Reiza to develop MP features we had in AMS1.

Many would claim they are excused from doing that since they changed engines, but in reality I sincerely don't care. AMS2 is supposed to be an evolution compared to AMS1, but in terms of MP it is a massive disappointing regression compared to a game launched 8 years ago.

If the game wants to be dissociated from Project CARS, it certainly cannot be an excuse for being unable to do the basics that title was unable to.