How to improve online ranked participation?

I love this simulator for many reasons, but I find it sad that the online races are basically empty... especially in the US. I'm wondering what can be done and what ideas are out there to bring users into RRE online racing?

• Is it the lack of advertising?
• Lack of new graphics engine?
• Lack of promoting or discussing a development roadmap?
• etc?

 

My friend, it's always hard to tell and any critique on this forum usually gets quite harsh/agrresive reaction, but...
IHMO the two main factors are that the sim is just technologically outdated and feels abandoned by its devs.
It's hard to keep up with competition that does quite well in communicating with community, improving and laying out future plans for their sims.

 

I think the main reason is that those who are interested in multiplayer races outside of leagues already have iRacing and LFM. Why they work better than random 24/7 races, I don't know.

 

It used to be better in therms of participation. Now I only see rookie races have full grids. I don’t know why is it that iRacing and to some extent ACC has ranked multiplayer monopoly. It comes from someone who’s been playing all major sims and recently(about year ago) joined and invested a lot in iRacing. It’s certainly not about laser scanned tracks.

 

I think the ship may have already sailed tbh. The hobby of sim racing is relatively small, and it's not going to grow massively. So the number of potential racers is limited. Lots of them already are happy on whatever game they use, iracing for it's excellent organisation, ACC and AMS2 for graphics/weather etc. How do you attract people to swap over to a 10 year old game? Even with good physics and ffb and imo an excellent selection of cars and tracks it's probably not enough at this point?

I hope there's something in the pipeline to give raceroom a new life but who knows.....

 

It's player numbers. Once you hit a certain level you create interest because races always happen and lobbies are full. Both iracing and ACC have the players, players attracts players.

 

There was a small discussion about that on Discord just a few days ago. There were ideas like:
1) More extensive use of splits (not only min rep/rat, but also max rep/rat to push faster people away from rookie and into AM/PRO combos).
2) LFM/iRacing-style server system.
3) Rewards for reaching some objectives/milestones, monetary (in vRP) or otherwise (like badges, mentions, etc.).

 

I think that what has happened is the ranked servers killed off a lot of dedicated servers and now no one is on any of the servers.

Perhaps they need to bring back official non-ranked servers for free content so that new players can actually experience MP in the game and then work up to paid content.

 

I would try to split the problem into smaller chunks, and then address them individually. For example, we could say that there are:

• Users who play Raceroom, and play online as well.
  This would basically be Raceroom's current online player base.
• Users who play Raceroom, but don't play online.
  That's me. After trying few races online I was bummed out when I realized that this is about everything one is going to get - MX5 in rookie servers. Maybe having more variety by adding more servers with different car classes (or just an increased variety in rotation) would help to split those 40+ people constanly racing in two rookie servers. Personally, I would be eager to try some classic DTMs or Group C, even in a field of 8 cars or so, if it's a ranked server.
  Another thing I noticed is that getting ranking points does not provide as much of sense of accomplishment as leveling up. I think iRacing has it in a form of license classes. Now obviously it is more suitable for larger player pools, where competition is higher. But maybe having similar system that is adjusted to a smaller scale would help increase the interest in online participation.
  
• Non-Raceroom players who don't race online.
  I think here it gets harder from a technical point of view. While Raceroom has great fundamentals, like ffb and physics, it lack some features that a lot of users woud expect by default - day/night cycles, changing weather, dynamic track surface (not sure if it's already in Raceroom), etc. And from what I understood by surfing these forums, it is not going to happen, or at least not anytime soon. Despite this, maybe there still are some low hanging fruits - for example, maybe it wouldn't require that much of an effort to add different weather/lighting effects (not talking rain), like having different levels of overcast sky. This alone would add some degree of randomness that might make 1+ hour race that much more alive. Even currently existing changing daytime, with its changing shadows messes up my braking points sometimes. Aaaand it's great.
• Non-Raceroom players who race online.
  To me it seems that iRacing audience is the most inert and it would require something much more novel or radical than simply offering a better version of iRacing with a bit lower subscription fee (I think this is exactly what Rennsport is going to do), or no subscription at all (which is sort of covered by ACC already). And I fully agree with what ravey said about players attracting other players. IMO, the best what could be expected, is attracting somewhat notable amount of players by other means, which would attract some iRacers/ACCers that for some reason might be on the fence already.

 

Without a clear roadmap from management, I'm on the fence about continuing with RR. It is my favorite sim by far, FFB/Physics, sounds, choice of cars, tracks, etc... but without managing proving to us that this product is alive and RennSport, AC 2.0, Forza 8, around the corner, I might have to look somewhere else.... very sad about it. The decision to further split the community by introducing the very annoying discord, just made things worse, IMHO.

 

But why do you need a roadmap to enjoy what we currently have?

 

Because I don't want to waste any time further improving my skills with this game or spend more money if I feel the management considers this gem of a sim dead. If they are not excited about it, or don't care to invest to keep up, then why should I? I'm in the US and all the online servers are always empty, or only rookie level ones have people... The management doesn't seem to create a reason why people should care, then why should we?

 

Sounds like you aren't satisfied with what the game offers right now and need something outside of that to keep your interest, is that right?

 

Discord has been there for several years. Just because something doesn't suit you doesn't mean others don't find it useful.

 

Can't wait for that moment, goodbye.

 

I have over 2000 hours racked up in RR, and I spent a lot of time in multiplayer until a few months ago when I gave up.
I won't go near a multiplayer race until ranking caps are introduced.
The championships were a good idea on paper, but in practice excluded anyone outside the top echelons of the rankings; again, no ranking cap. Maybe that's changed now.
I don't know what effect the graphics engine has on user numbers; last time I looked, RR had the same number of concurrent users as AMS 2, which uses Unreal 5 (I think). That number was around 400 users, compared to AC's 4000.

 

Not exactly, I truly love the game, don't like the way it's managed, promoted, marketed, etc...

 

I find the multiplayer experience good compared to the other sims but quite limited in progression. I had fun going PRO but it lasted a few races. Growing a player base requires news and attracting noobs. Beginners almost all come out of Gran turismo or Forza. These players love progression, trophies, and quick runs without preparation. I firmly believe that the sim that can attract beginners and pros on the same platform will be the big winner. And even more the 1st Sim who will use the crossplatform

 

I have to agree that ranking caps has to be introduced. I'm a very low ranking player, and joining a rookie server, I expect to find exactly that, rookies. But instead, I find myself being anihilated by 2000+ ranking players, making the feeling of accomplishment deminish excessively. Also, the locking of car adjustments on the rookie servers cripples the game experience even more.
I love the selection of cars and tracks, but I think the focus should shift towards game experience going forward.
Multiplayer, maybe as described above, a certification system for the ranked servers.
Single player, some kind of career system. Some fixed championships for the separate classes, etc. Properly implement already added content. (Electric cars AI's...)
And for both MP and SP, day/night and weather for realism. And stop ruining the driving experience of car classes long after they were introduced. (Ref. the Classic and DTM92 cars, those were fun to drive until someone found out it would be nice to ruin the handling. They are no longer what I paid for, and enjoyed.)

 

sounds like what you want are splits rated by SOF like iracing does means that if someone is esports level theyre unlikely to be i your race and youll only ever racve people your pace-ish that would be a complete and massive overhaul to how ranking works, but it just straight wont work because og how many people turn up to ranked now