Free weekends are always nice. And with this game genre you barely scratched the surface if you drive for 2 days straight. Most likely people will buy more stuff after the weekend. Imho good move. Hopefully there will be a banner on Steam also attracting some attention.
Brilliant move. I myself have not much left to test, but I'm sure that there will be some new players in community after this weekend. I have only one concern - are the servers prepared for it? last time we had 50% discounts in store it was difficult to even get to the menu screen, not to mention loading the track and racing.
It does seem like a bit or a risk, I agree. It's a great way to get people to try it out and stress-test the servers but if it all goes wrong then the impact on the game's reputation will be quite severe. Perhaps making everything free for the weekend means that there's be *less* load on the servers because there'll be no need to check the players have access to the content - rather than all the 'if (hasAccess(playerId, someContentId))' checks (or however it's done), the server can just respond immediately with "yeah, whatever"
I came here as a result of the free weekend mailout to my email. It took me 40 minutes of searching, attempting to login thru steam, creating a user account here etc, just to find out more about it, and I still have no idea what to do. At first glance, you think I'm an idiot, but I'm a 50 odd year old IT pro who's been racing Simbin for a decade or so, I installed this game on steam when it first came out, ignored it until now where I think it may have a serious chance of survival now that a ded server is released and perhaps some thoughtful promotion, but, like the early game menus, I'm still finding it incredibly difficult to access from a cold contact point of view. Make it easy for us. For a start, when it says to LOGIN thru Steam to get into this forum, perhaps THAT should work? Oh yeah, and all the info leads us to this forum page where there are a lot of fans patting each other on the back, but NO INFO for those of us that you want to recruit. Edit.... this isn't a hate post either, I gave up 3 times, but I want you to succeed, so I determined, even though the clock just struck midnight, that I would post and make you aware of the access problems, (as I see it)
A friend of mine is trying to download the latest patch to use this weekend.. But it's coming down corrupt. Possibly because it's taken several attempts to get past the 40min mark. But just incase it's not that I thought I'd better post about in case it's more serious. @Sector3
I haven't been able to race a single MP race all day / night.. . Works good in Practice and Qualifying, but in the race after about half a lap, everybody disappears!??.. I can see dust and smoke of their tires, and sometimes they flicker a second or two, then disappears again. I truly hope a lot of new players won't get this under the free weekend, scaring them off!
Public server or private ? We have been experiencing this is our ESR race for some people not everyone.
I don't really look at the server names, I just look on how many players there are in the server, what car / track combo and so that it's Get Real mode. But they might all have been private, have never experianced this before in a public server.
I've only had trouble on private servers...lag and leaping cars...the S3 ones always seem pretty good.
That should be it really. When you initially download R3E on Steam, it downloads "everything" for you. All of the cars and tracks, etc. Basically, these are locked away until you buy them in-game or via the games website at: http://game.raceroom.com/store/. Once you buy some content it will be available in game to play whenever you choose Of course, with this free weekend, this is a trial and all content is unlocked for you! Test out what you can after downloading the game. All updates should automatically be installed already as well. It's just a 1 time download right now, and then off to race!
@Sector3 my friend is still having trouble with a corrupt down of the latest patch...he's done the verifying and deleted data, to try and get a clean install..no joy. any clues??
Damn it, Sector 3, I'll be out of town and I'll only catch a little time with it. And of course I'll get tempted to buy the Group 5 cars. But I won't give in *throws money at you*. You will never see another buck from me *throws more money*. Seriously now, this is a nice move and a good opportunity for users to try out all of the content. Appreciated!