why is there no one online?

Timezone is a killer. I'm in Aus so the American friendly time of the trainer series is the morning for me which I can do.
Ginette runs six times over each weekend (same event). The first one is the most popular.
The AC SRS events run every hour each day so hopefully ams2 becomes more popular in time and moves towards this.

 

In have found when i go to multiplayer, i can see, at the most, 10 lobbies at the same time my friends can see dozens including the league i am supposed to be racing in...

 

I find that when I hit "Refresh" sometimes more lobbies pop up. I'm not sure why the multiplayer UI cannot seem to see all the lobbies all the time. Aren't they all hosted by a server owned by Reiza? I might be wrong but it just seems like a weird problem.

I have also noticed that if a lobby is transitioning between practice and qualifying or between qualifying and racing, the lobby won't be visible for a few minutes.

Again not sure why. Multiplayer needs some work: UI improvements and some type of ranking system.

 

Lobbies are either run locally (P2P) or through a dedicated server you set up locally or remotely. Lobby search goes through steam. Reiza can improve searching though i wouldn’t know how that works.

 

There was quite a few lobbies up last night, so it’s getting better, but there is a bug when sometimes it will change order and show the empty or inactive lobbies first page.

 

Maybe that could be the reason you often see two or more different lobbies running the exact same track/car combi with rather few participants - instead of running all together and therefore having potientially more fun.

 

The page never shows the more crowded lobbies first, unless you manually sort them according to number if drivers...
I think it's confusing/misleading for some people

 

Think there was an update a while ago to makes sure fullest shown at top, with longer loading time. Since then there has been another, and as mentioned above + from what Ive seen it may be bugged. Also has mouse hover buggy thing Ive noticed since.

 

Because there is not a multiplayer system yet. We are in 2021 I think people play in multiplayer simracing games because the online is the best. When only there are random open lobbys....and there is nothing official with ranking system, with practice session, qualy and race then people pay money for Iracing because Iracing has this, multiplayer. I hope the multiplayer system anounced by Reiza be something good and interseting, some that allow us have objectives as simracers, if not... for me make no sense have a good physics and good FFB If there is not a good multiplayer system.

 

For one, you can see from steam charts, AMS2 has around 200 avg. players a day. That isnt a lot to push people to go online and see a lot of activity, unless you have a group to race with consistently.

I wont go into details about "issues" with the game, but online lobby system leaves a lot to be desired in terms of features or QOL. Coupled with no competition matchmaking, lack of leagues, one of the worst replays/broadcasting in sim racing and other stuff. Personally I went to other games until things are more fleshed out, physics fixed, etc., keeping an eye on this but not getting my hopes up for sooner than months/years, as sad as it sounds.

 

About replays...I not understand why they did not work a bit more on It when they did a big investemnt on graphs. Actually graphs are really cool. I hope months instead of years, actually I really like the game (somethigns should be fixed) but not sure I am understanding the P.O. Why invest in IA before multplyaer or physics? Why not open a pair of Official servers looping race combos each week? Something like 15 min practice, 15 min qualy 15 min race and then restart again? ( I don't know who is the P.O of the project)

 

Part of that may be due to the incredibly enjoyable to race AI. So far I've been happily having very enjoyable sessions with lobby of my choice with full grid. I might do online later, but AI is quite good fun to race with.

 

I think the best way to populate the online world is by making race events or championships and multiplayer rating system sums a lot too.

For example: Once a week Formula Vee championship at X:XX time in Europe, America, Etc.. with XX count of Races.
Or.. Spa Multiclass event at X:XX time.

People just sign in for the race and when the time comes, there are XX People on the Lobby

PS: Filling the grid with AI it's great

 

Short answer: There aren't that many people playing AMS2 at the moment.

Long answer: Most of the people that do play AMS2 do not want to join random multiplayer lobbies against random people with random cars that have physics that keep randomly being changed from week to week. We need more structure and we need things to mature and not be in constant turmoil. Also, until recently the netcode was very poor compared to other titles.

 

Our league used AMS2 for multiplayer but the number of issues we encountered turned us OFF completely. Every week, someone would run into some bug or another and completely ruin the fun.
1. The hud randomly disappearing (and the left arrow switch hud button not working)
2. FFB disappearing/lowering during the race
3. FFB locking and pulling the wheel to one side during the race
4. People dropping off during the races
5. People dropping off during the practice and quali and being unable to join back in
6. Being unable to change the Race lobby settings between races in peer to peer lobbies (Eg: Practice, Quali and Race length)
7. Results at the end are incorrect (I've reported this on the bug list but still no fix)

We're switching back to PCars2 until AMS2 matures as a solid multiplayer game.

 

I enjoy myself with AMS2 and often limit myself to hotlapping. Due to the limited number of races in classes other than GT, I don't do much MP racing. I would like to have more MP races with the following cars: Formula Vee, Trainer, Fusca, hotcars, Opala, Lancer. My experience is that these are lively cars where, despite the limited power, you can drift nicely and especially race close. In short, if there are more people who also want to race these cars in MP mode, I will also be here more often.

 

I think the final nail in the coffin for us was the constant new updates that kept messing with the tires and physics of the Sprint Racer (our last series). Every week the handling, gearing and sound on the car would keep changing. When you are racing a fixed setup with your friends the car would be totally different week after week. Insanity.

I just hope Reiza can focus on fixing all the bugs before releasing new content. The game has potential but the current state of multiplayer is not up to snuff. I'm holding off buying DLC until the bugs and multiplayer lobbies updates are put into place.

 

My feeling is at some point we need a freeze of cars that are deemed "good enough". Unless something is drastically wrong, cars that have been in the game since EA/1.0 should not be changing every other update.

 

AMS2 is still under very heavy development, I think people just need to keep this in mind and be prepared for such issues when running leagues etc. We had a league race yesterday and most people managed to download the update JUST in time for the race, there were some anxious moments there, but what can you do? We knew in advance that the game is being updated very often and yesterday's update being so large was just an unfortunate event which does not happen often.

The game for the most part behaved well (unlike some of the drivers ), nobody had trouble with loss of FFB or any other similar problem AFAIK, that cars felt so good driving them and all good, except for at the end one of the infamous bugs of Madness multiplayer kicked in, some of the drivers finished the race normally, but all the rest got an extra lap at the end, totally messing up the end results.

The devs here have fixed a lot of other problems in the engine, so I am confident this will eventually get fixed as well, together with many other ones, and step by step AMS2 will be gaining new drivers, which will help online as well. But it needs time and patience from our part, always keeping in mind that this game has extremely big potential, but is still heavy WIP.