How do you find groups to race with? I like GT cars and sports cars and touring cars and casual formula. LFM is pretty much dead. I raced LMU a few times I am kind of a new sim racer. I can do most weekdays EST. I can get lucky jumping into races into online via jumping in on you tube streams.
If you're interested, you can check out Gonky Racing. It's a project I've been developing for Automobilista 2 with the goal of making it easier to find communities, events, active servers, driver profiles, rankings, statistics, and much more. I'm still working to promote the platform and attract more communities and drivers. That said, I think it already offers everything you'd find on similar platforms, plus quite a few features you won't find anywhere else. Best of all, everything you see on the website is already working perfectly, up and running, and completely free. If you decide to try it, I'd love to hear your feedback or any suggestions you might have. Gonky Racing — Automobilista 2 (AMS2) rankings, live timing & racing
LFM is not dead, we had plenty of great racing last season (off season this week), I had aboutt 60-70 races myself. It’s true though that the numbers overall aren’t something to celebrate, but it’s a chicken or egg problem. Everyone who is interested just need to start signing up and race, instead of staring at the numbers. Sure it can be empty until enough people start to do it and not give up. The most difficult thing is to get a lot of people to do it at the same time… and that applies to all smaller sims. And existing leagues is another good plane race. Ps. We don’t any more options as that dilutes the player base further. That’s one of the big problems on ams2 mp scene, it’s small and iall over the place and not coming together what smaller player base would require
I completely agree with the "chicken or egg" problem. AMS2 doesn't have a huge multiplayer player base, so splitting it even further doesn't help anyone. Looking at the data collected by Gonky Racing, 147 public races were recorded in June and 39 in the first 10 days of July. All of those races are archived on the website with their results and statistics. So the activity is definitely there, but it's spread across many different communities and servers. That's actually one of the reasons I built Gonky Racing. The goal isn't to replace leagues or platforms like LFM, but to bring everything together in one place and make it easier for players to find organized racing. My goal is to bring together the best features from existing platforms while also adding new tools for communities: creating and managing dedicated servers, organizing championships and events, driver licenses with Elo and Safety Rating, rankings, statistics, dynamic wikis, live server information, calendars, driver conduct management, and much more. The platform is still growing, and I'm working on bringing more communities and drivers on board. But everything you see is already live, fully functional, and completely free. I'd genuinely love to hear your feedback if you decide to check it out.
Agreed, if everyone just coalesces around LFM and we get built in LFM integration in the V1.7 AMS2 update. I think it will go a long way in bringing together casual players that launch the game, want to hop online and get in a ranked competetive multiplayer lobby/race. There will always be leagues for people that want a more structured series and personal lobbies for people that want to goof around. Built in ranked online races have gone a long way to help LMU grow their player base. Although LMU, IMHO, currently has the worst tire model of any game out there right now. Heck even iRacing has much better tire model than LMU as it stands IMHO.
I agree that LFM integration could help bring more people into organized racing, especially for casual players looking for a quick ranked race. At the same time, I don't think a single platform can cover every need of the AMS2 community. Leagues, communities and public ranked racing can all coexist and complement each other. My goal with Gonky Racing isn't to own the community; it's to help connect it.
@Gonky Racing I mean that with the most respect, please stop using AI to generate your replies. It's fine if vibecoding is the right thing for you, but a forum should always be for the humans talking with each other ;-)
Thanks. I actually write everything in Spanish first. AI only helps me translate it into natural English because I'm not fluent enough to write long posts. The words may be polished, but the ideas are still mine.
I can’t see how the player base for multiplayer could grow without a working daily racing system (and for ams2 that is LFM) For new players, especially those new to sim racing, starting with leagues / small communities isn’t easy no matter how “beginner friendly” the claims are. On daily racing as in LFM / ranked systems of other sims, the barrier to try is generally lower and provide many more changes to race, which can be extremely beneficial for a new players (it’s also a lot more effective to be able to do “same” race multiple times in a week than just one of each) … at least in theory, if there would be enough players playing those races. Unfortunately the player base is currently too small and it’s disheartening to see that from that small player base, majority who race online in any given moment is doing it on some random open lobbies. Hopefully the integration helps with this. The chicken and egg problem makes things really difficult though. I can see only two ways around that, first is that Reiza release update with so much hype that tons of players are trying the game and the ranked races at the same time, which hopefully would go without technical issues. If majority players would then have a lot of fun, the success might continue as long as the system would continue offering enough stuff that interest people (and Reiza keeps updating / adding stuff to the game). It’s not easy even then. Second much harder way is to get enough dedicated fans for the game (and mp) who want and can race regularly/often and come together to create enough participation in the races so that somebody new could see that there is people racing at least in the peak hours, which could encourage them to give it a try. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be that many of those players around or the very least, the players are divided into many different leagues. It’s a fact of life that people will stop racing and move to other stuff eventually, so there needs to be influx of new players trying and joining that is greater in numbers of those quitting. On LFM AMS2 had success last season with weekly series especially, which are currently kinda league like in the sense that the number of races are limited with main difference being that on LFM, you have the same race running 2-3 times a week instead of just once. Those series that did better, were carried by regulars who joined often. I’m sure that success continues to next season and hopefully grow too. The daily series, which now run every hour around the clock (and change car/class/track combination weekly) requires many more times the number of players compared to the weeklies to fill the grids regularly, so there is a lot of empty races, but even then, there are definitely hope to getting better participation again as people seem to like the setup now, it would just need more regulars who want to race often to have more consistent participation. It’s critical to get those going for get new players to give it a try. EDIT: now that the season 23 schedule is up, I made a post about it to reddit too where anyone who is interested can also find the info what is offered: Reddit - Please wait for verification ps. When LMU was released in early access, it didn’t have any custom lobby options and you/new player basically had just 2 races that alternated to race with. This didn’t allow the player base to get divided, so it was able to continue to run with some decent participation even in it’s lowest point and never got so low that it would had got this chicken or egg problem. When they released GT3 for the first time (and stole some of that limelight from ams2 1.6 and LFM), it was really able to capitalize on this and grow. Custom lobbies/server option came later. It’s also a lot easier to prevent dividing the player base when you have content focused only certain type of racing and car classes
I actually agree with pretty much everything you said. I also like the idea of running the same track several times during the week. That's how I learned most circuits myself, and I think it's one of the best ways to improve. That said, I also think a lot of casual players get bored if that's the only thing available. AMS2's online player base isn't huge, so I don't think the goal should be to compete with other AMS2 services. The real challenge is attracting players from other sims. Personally, I think AMS2 already has some huge strengths: the physics, the force feedback, the variety of cars and tracks... for me it's one of the best sim racing experiences available. The online side just needs to be more engaging for both competitive and casual players. That's the direction I'm trying to take with Gonky Racing. Rather than trying to offer the same thing as LFM, I'm trying to add features that make people want to come back. Things like passports where you collect countries, circuits and layouts you've raced on, weekly challenges, frequent rivals, personal records for every car and track, a mobile app, and whatever new ideas come to mind. The same applies to the wiki. I didn't just want another wiki, I wanted one that's connected to the rest of the platform. And with the Node Manager, the goal is to make it much easier for communities to create servers, championships and events without having to deal with the complexity of the dedicated server. Maybe some ideas will work and some won't, but I enjoy trying to think a little outside the box.
