Well, it has only been... 5 months, damm... since my last blog post.
And this time I bring the spice, as I go full "Yes, you are all wrong". Although it is more me trying the rationalize why people take such strange decisions/hold strange opinions.
And this is from league admins and the events they host, the timeslots they pick, people not just only driving GT3, but the same damn car, and everyone saying ACC is dead. We have a lot of ground to cover, so lets get going.
Memes about "SimRacers ask for challenging historic content, but then load up GT3 at Spa again" are old already, but no, this is actually something I vaguely understand (even if I don’t agree):
We are dealing with two groups of people, a vocal minority that is sick of what the majority likes (and likely still doing the same thing as the majority just to fit in). Come to think, this post is not much different...
But yes, if you aim to be competitive you will go towards the most popular category, becoming a self fullfilling proficy of making the category even more popular. And in a hyper competitive enviroment you can not afford experimentation, as you could loose precious rating. A car has to be better then what you are driving, and even then you might for familiarity stick with your current option. Setup shops don’t help, as changing cars would also mean spending money on new setups. This is how even GT3 grids become single class.
And then there are the slower drivers.
I have observed on multiple occasions people doing much better in GT3 then GT4. How? GT4 should be easier to drive then a GT3, yet they are way slower and even more accident prone then usual. I can not fully explain this one, excluding familiarity in the popular class. Yes, GT3s are build to be driven by Gentleman drivers irl, but that does not make them that easy to drive, GT4 should be more approachable for them but aren’t.
But something, that applies to thing even outside of SimRacing, is that it is difficult to understand what is difficult for another person. It is super easy to overestimate the competence and understanding of the average person in specific topics. But what is noticable with driving, is that cars you might find easier to drive then others could be completly inverse for another person. Especially with these worse drivers, they are slower for a reason, and that is at times driving cars completly wrong. They often never reach the limit of the car in the traditional way, but reach the limit of how much bullshit it lets you get away with.
And oh boy, some of the driving I have seen... I mean, I struggle to spot differences in driving lines ("Corporate needs you to find the differences between these two pictures..."), but still... I am sure some people could spin a FWD car... under power... So don’t try to understand why something is difficult for somebody else, you will end up just irrtating yourself.
But as such hard cars are a no go. They may try these cars, maybe they believe they could do better in those, but a couple laps offline practice usually get the message across.
Obviously it sucks for those who want to escape the hamster wheel and drive something else, but you can’t really host events for just a handful of people (if even that). I loved driving GT4 in ACC to avoid the sweatiness in GT3, and while there was regularly some Alien in the class that would outrun me ("There is always a bigger fish"), it was fun, but a class slower the GT3 is always a hard sell.
That estabilished, let us get to the spicy takes:
At least that is what it feels like when another league decides that 6pm is a perfect time to host a race... even weekdays. Although more commonly this is 19:00 or 19:30 CET (my timezone), which still makes it 18:00 UK time, and asking the question of "do you even have a family?".
I do as a student have the case that on some days I am not even home at 7pm, but that is not the usual case for (most) working adults. Those have the issue with having to get up early. But you are still not home that much earlier then 5 or 6pm, you still have to eat dinner (and after a long day preferrably sooner rather then later), cook said dinner, take care of kids, etc. But I already (even on days I come home early/weekends) feel such an arms race and time pressure in wrapping up dinner with the family, so I can get in the rig before qualifying is over.
So I don’t know how you could possibly fit it before dinner, and after dinner it is starting to get late. When I ran Vtracc S24|1 earlier this year it was run with a serverstart at 17:30 CET (this was a Saturday series), with 30min Practice, 20min Qualy, 2x25min Races (the only out of the order choice, but this is close to what running a regular 60min Race takes) you get to wrap up at 19:30, more like 20:00 with session overtimes and if you don’t want to swap clothes/wash off a bit.
Now imagine an hour later... nope, you can not tell me 21:00 is normal dinner time except if you are a Bachelor.
And that category has no issues staying up a bit later to run at a more human timeslot of 8 or 9pm, which would allow you to head to bed after a shower at 10/11pm. Such Bachelors living on their own really shouldn’t be the issue, they might still have to get up early but could adapt to any timeslot (but they may just have apathy for those who are schedule restrained)
I guess that is why series that run at such early timeslots remain popular, while something like the Sudo Racing League, that ran a timeslot of 21:00 CET, has suddenly died over the past 1.5 seasons (S13 had a good grid size in GT3, S14 started very strong and fell off, S15 barely had 10 cars on the grid).
Although, as writing, there are not really that many upcoming series on SimGrid that go earlier then 8pm. Excluding Americans, their events end up being 2-5am for me, a bit much for me these days. But outside of them, only tracc and a couple others dare to run earlier.
Although, Endurance events do still love picking terrible timeslots, like 4h races starting at 16:00, so getting in the briefing clashes with lunch (and weekend activities, like moving furniture in circles because the woman in your life want this), and then the race end clashes with dinner. 4h races are preferred single driver, and now I am forced to recruit another person, likely having to drive the generic car on a generic track, which does nicely lead into the next topic:
The Spa, Monza and Nordschleife phenomenom in SimRacing is quite well known:
Spa is a ubiquitous track, Monza is piss easy, and Nords is pure cult (that none of them can actually finish a lap on).
When it comes to ACC we have a wide selections of other circuits, and while the constant full public lobbies are of the infamos three, you can even then find quite a few of the other circuits still represented.
Most leagues make full use of this varity when setting their calendar. There are some that are less common (like Hungaroring or Snetterton), but usually they do come into rotation eventually.
But when it comes to Endurance events, especially those longer the 3h or 4h races, you have a hard time finding anything other then Spa. Even Monza becomes rare beyond 4h or 6h. Nords was popular around the time it was released (and will likely be again around the time of the real race next year). Silverstone is really common, so is suprisingly Paul Riccard. And if a league is daring they run Bathurst, and maybe Suzuka.
The reason why I bring this up is that in a relative short time span two leagues scheduled a 24h/12h race at Brands Hatch.
ONiD tried in early November with a 24h race, got (in their opinion) too few sign ups, and therefore turned the event into a 2.4h race, seeing then at least 36 drivers turn up on race day.
TOGA scheduled their charity event for the January 2025, so we are still over a month out, but they have already decided to switch track to Silverstone to boost sign ups, currently at 29.
How many sign ups either event had before adjusting is hard to tell, I vaguely remember there being 20+ entries for the ONiD event, but I could be off (and I am pretty sure TOGA hasn’t gained much from switching over, yet).
It sucks, because you don’t need that many cars to have a great race at Brands, it reeks of league organizers not accepting anything other then a full house (and for ACC they will need to adjust). But besides that, why would they settle for less? Why do people not want to race other circuits in enduros? Is it that if the track is not used for Endurance irl nobody cares? Because that is the throughline through the circuits mentioned above. Because Bathurst is not a popular circuit for sprint racers, but Endurance it rivials if not beats Silverstone.
It just sucks, because Spa gets really boring when you do it for the dozendth time, especially when drive some 3h or 4h stints (heck, even a dozend 2h stints will do it).
During my time trying to get Team Iris to do some ACC I would team up with Loic Meunier to do some Endurance events, and the joke very quickly became that he would practially only race Spa, sure there was a couple months inbetween, but he only drove Spa in ACC.
I had in December 2023 a 24h race at Spa and then another in January 2024, where Chris Davis and I both times had to practically duo the event because our Teammates fell apart on raceday.
You get tired of Spa really quick this way.
While I have mainly talked about the ACC side (well because this is what I play), but what is going on elsewhere? Is the grass greener elsewhere?
Of course not, while they might feature a couple different cars and tracks, everyone still drives the same GT3 at Spa, the only way to escape the Ferrari 296, McLaren 720S and BMW M4 is for them to not be in your sim (yet), and then they will just driven the next best GT3.
These issues do truely not change between sim. Yes, you can have a Jimmy Broadbent to force people to drive Zolder for 24h, but that is more of the exception rather then the rule. iRental has even track issues where certain tracks cause people to skip that week (due to saftey rating, but also for some iRating and maybe price). Cars have even worse fate, for example you will never find anyone to do SRX.
Lets go a bit over the state of the different sims:
People still think though that AC Evo is going to be next best thing. Admitly it does look to improve and adresse some of the issues AC has, but it will only launch into Early Access in January, there will be 5 tracks and no Multiplayer, it won’t replace any sim any time soon.
But I garantee you will see some leagues schedule events for it long before Multiplayer is added, similar how Light Speed Racing (and other leagues) scheduled Nordschleife 24h in ACC as soon as the track was announced, and despite the "Spring" announcement Light Speed set the event up for mid Feburary. And somehow, through all this rediculousness, where a multiclass event with 20 slots per class was setup, 50 cars where entered into GT3 (so 30 on reserve). Complete madness, but everyone went along with it. The event was later deleted (because Light Speed Racing has and will be a terrible league), and rescheduled for August 31th, although we have no clue if it was actually run as the event is set to private.
But my point being, that people like lemmings followed blindly other individuals overhyping a thing without question.
It is however still one thing to claim ACC is dying and you are going elsewhere, and actually doing it, but it does somewhat feel like people are genuinely leaving ACC. I guess just driving the 296 at Spa gets boring, huh?
ACC is End Of Life, there is no new content coming down the pipeline, and likely no new patches.
But the game has been left in a great state, with LFM/pitskill BOP you have a wide varity of cars that are competitive. People have this odd nostalgia for Pre-1.9, that I can really not get.
Update 1.9 (excluding 1.9.0 and 1.9.1 which had bugged tire wear) made the tire pressures less of a fidely mess and slightly tweak the handling. Driving wise it did not change much for me, except one thing: Viability of off-meta cars.
I had been maining the Maserati GT4 for a year, and this update made the car practically undrivable, and lost any ability to score underdog upsets. Also when I later that year drove the Reiter it felt also worse then it was ever before.
But we are talking about the Maserati GT4 and the Reiter R-EX, nobody drove either car, for the actual competitive cars nothing changed much. What cars were meta was shifted, as 1.9 introduced three new cars (including the 296) and later the 720S evo got also rolled out. But cars like the Audi and Bentley were already not in the Meta and utterly uncompetitive, while today you can very much run either one. The only one who could complain about 1.9 is me, who’s beloved main, the beastly Maserati was murdered, for GT4 to truely devolve into the Alpine Spec series. But nobody cared about those cars anyway.
You are just nearly 2 years removed from how things were, you have nostalgia for a game that wasn’t really better then basegame either.
But what has happened is that during this relative stability, and with the maturity of the title, you have to deal with hyper competitive drivers. Really, what you yearn for is a less competitive sim, where you don’t get randomly curb stompt by no lifers,and I get it. This is why I drive primarily in leagues, not use services like LFM, because rolling up to a race with no practice is fun, but in LFM topsplit you get destroyed.
This issue is not the fault of ACC, this is an issue with modern day competitive video games in general (and I could write multiple essays much larger then this about the topic).
I should perhaps loose a few words about the original AC.
I don’t think AC Evo will be it’s death, not by a long shot. It is very accessible due to being dirt cheap and relatively easy to run, with too much content already existing for it. Modders will take time before they set up tools, work pipelines and gain knowledge to mod AC Evo, this will take literal years to get anywhere close to where AC is today.
But AC does have downsights that make it not particularly good at Multiplayer racing, missing features (time of day, weather, driverswaps, rolling starts, pitspeed limit), and jank layered on top of jank to patch some of those back in make it a volatile game. The Physics engine is also volatile and prone to just rearrenging the suspension into impossible shapes (you can easily just "loose" a wheel by hitting a curb a bit too hard, even on damage off servers, and the suspension gets folded inwards so the wheel ends up in the engine bay).
This really makes it a hard sell on hosting any serious racing on here, which is why AC is so popular for cruising and practice hotlapping, because putting up with jank is a lot easier when nothing is a stake.
This is in some ways why I personally find AC Evo promising, because I can see them addressing these issues, and seemingly having payed attention what people used AC for.
But we will have to be patient for this one.
Due to it’s addition to LFM people are hyping it again.
But I am still jaded from when simracing.gp added AMS2 support in 2022. To say it was a disaster is an understatement, servers had a 50/50 shot of launching, no ping below 400ms with massive teleporting, and then crashes.
I love to bring up this Hockenheim Race in DTM 1992, as it had everything:
Only 3 drivers, my started unmapped itself, so when I stalled at the start I had to remap it, I charged the leader back down but the physics engine just let me down (the lightweight touring car drove like a boat on iceblocks), and then the 2 laps later (the final lap) the server crashed.
Besides that I encountered in the few hours of AMS2 is that you get copyright claimed for the main menu theme, my car wasn’t refueling despite having fuel set, the way menuing and griding is done is really unintuitive and at times straight up broken.
At the time the respondes from AMS2 fanatics was "Don’t use the dedicated server, use peer 2 peer" (that is if they don’t pat the single player on the back), and that did vaguely work, but that is an unacceptable state for a racing sim to be in (and this only resolves the ping and crashing, not the handling).
AMS2 players prasing the next update as the second comming of Christ that finally resolves all the handling issues is not lost on me.
So how is it right now? I should perhaps try lfm, it seems the servers are at least stable, the handling will still randomly wreck loose on you, and scoring race results does not work reliably...
Yeah, not great... Besides that no driverswaps for Endurance events (which is in part probably a blessing, as the engine will likely self destruct trying to handle a hand over, and the server failurate above 3h likely skyrockets).
LeMans Ultimate has been doing pretty well, with the most recent update they finally added GT3. LMH and LMP2 are the only categories that can draw people away from GT3 (due to being faster).
But the sim suffers from multiple issues: Wrecking randomly loose is a massive issue, the fact they are selling DLC while the game is still early access, charges for an online subscription to access some of their weekly races, and many rF2-isms and quirks are still there (it is downright nostalgic).
But I want to draw attention to a far bigger issue that LMU has: Motorsports Games and their financial situation.
It has been already a surprise that they released this game, I expected it to become vaporware, but while we got the game now there is no garantee it will finish development.
And the biggest issue is Multiplayer, which relies on their servers, be it for their daily/weekly races, but also for dedicated servers you have to use racecontrol.gg. You can NOT download the dedicated server executable and run it yourself, like every other sim bar iRacing, and there you have to rent servers through them as well.
But this isn’t an issue for iRacing, as that sim will likely be around still in a few years time, while again, Motorsports Games is desperatly trying to stay afloat, could go under within the next year, making the sim (at least in multiplayer) unplayable.
rFactor2 multiplayer on the other hand will continue functioning, but the sim is hemoraging leagues and even content.
Latest is that the Ferrari 488 GTE and GT3 (the newest version of the car) and the Circuit de la Sarthe, which will no be avialable for purchase starting January 2025. They had previously cut the Monaco ePrix circuit from purchase, and deleted Silverstone, although this one was free content, so was easily dumped and worked around this deletion.
The cut of LeMans and the 488 GT3 however is a massive blow to anyone still running Endurance events in rF2, as anyone who is not a veteran can not aquire the content anymore, but it is crucial content too (who can’t turn down LeMans?). But there are not many leagues remaining running rF2, EERC has shut down this year after 5 seasons, VEC will probably continue to exist, it lived for many years on rF1, that league may only die through Jimmy quiting, although I think the league will continue till the 20th aniversary. But idk how they are doing precisely, seems to be alright, but it has been a while since I bothered with rF2.
It just exists.
Nothing special to say really about it.
Personally I am not a big fan, for reason including the pricing, the wreck on minimal slip angle, high resolution textures and models with 2009 lighting engine killing performance, the culture, and EAC breaking Linux (okay, that is a very personal issue).
But there is a contingent of people who are just fine with these issues, and that is fine, but me and some others are not so fine with this, and we usually have another option compared to this.
R³E is an old dog at this point. It does work well enough for certain things, and has a decent selection of tracks and cars.
There has not been a praticularly compelling reason for me to really dive into it, lacks a couple features relating to dynamics and endurance.
But as I lack expierence with it, barring driving it like thrice in the last decade, it works, and exists, but is not changing the world.
I should probably drive their TCRs though...
The Not-Nft racing game, which spent the past years hosting esports events (because that is higher priority then actually making a game), and is now selling a battle pass, has gone into early access this December.
I would like to say more about this game, maybe testdrive it, but after the game worked perfectly under Linux in the playtest it won’t launch in the Beta anymore (like at all).
It has really not made many friends, sitting at Mostly Negative right now.
You can play it for free, (so if you are not under Linux you can try it) and you get a free M2, plus you get to drive whatever else they have for roation this week. Kind of part of the issue, as they with the Battle Pass and "owning" a car for 15$ (same as iRental) per car, while gating Nords behind a 45$ "founders" pack.
When Motorsport games is slowly bleeding out, this is just a quick and dirty cash grab that will likely beat LMU to the grave (I mean it is in the double digits being beaten by Automobilista 1).
BeamNG at least deserves a mention, but it remains a driving Sim and not a Racing sim, it isn’t suited for competition driving.
Also there exist obviously a bunch of Rally Games, but those aren’t comparable either. They are pallet cleansers in this argument.
With this only the OG remain, being Automobilista 1, GTR2, rF1, GrandPrix Legends, Nr2003 and whatever else you find between the cussions.
They are for all intends and purpose dead in multiplayer. The entire playerbase could organize a weekly event and they would all fit into one server. But this is fine, this is the natural way of things, games fade slowly into irrelevance.
A bunch of these sims had similar levels of duct tape as AC holding it together, and on modern systems it is even worse, so using them for multiplayer is streching them to an unnecessary extend when there are better options.
I bought a Moza R9 to replace my T300 (as after a nearly 6 year run it started developing belt slip) in November, but I have only used it in 5 events as of today. I did shake it down, but as usual I have not done much driving outside of that. While this is not completly unexpected, as there were only so many events upcoming, with series either wrapping up or having already ended, But I skipped out on the final round of Sudo, I couldn’t run SRXP 4h of Silverstone due to dinner, and I ended up skipping the tracc 4h, because I took too long to decide which bad option to take.
I have been feeling quite low energy and easily irratable recently, there hasn’t been a single large thing, but there have been small stabs taken at me in my personal life.
And having to uproot my simracing again, because sudo will likely not be around next year, and I don’t think I will run Vtracc with the 18:30 schedule. Also I have been wanting to regular enduros for... years frankly, since leaving rF2 in 2022... but I just can’t put anything together, everthing turns constantly into dust. Me trying to do a Nordschleife 24h has been a saga, and from my teammates being unable to make racedate, to TOGA cancelling the event because they expected their servers not to hold... I can just hope for 2025 to maybe be able to do one.
Outside of driving I always feel like I take too long and do not get enough done, I ended up procrastinating this post over and entire week, but I guess I have at least achieved something by finishing.
All those grievance though, they did not start yesterday, I have held these positions for years.
I don’t feel like I put them forward particularly well, but elaborating further would make it worse, and this has to come to an eventual end. There are definily some things that I don’t get, people ought to be not so guilable, and maybe try something else.
Although, it is somewhat funny how one of the motivations for writing this was me having to do this too...
See you in 2025, I suppose.