Nah, I think that speculation doesn't work too well, actually. For grown-ups with a steady income 20 bucks for a trial isn't that big of an investment for anyone to create a bias other than getting slightly pissed off if they didn't get what they expected.
Whether or not different aspects of iRacing are better or different from other sims has been dealt with extensively in this thread many times over. There are several major aspects in the service that no-one has tried to do before, and most of the essential components of a sim are done better than in any other game, in my opinion. It's up to everyone to decide for themselves if that is revolutionary or not.
It is a torrent of Nascar Racing 2003 with some mods installed. That's why it's called NASCAR2003_with_mods. In reference to that torrent, there is absolutely nothing else to "get", and the whole thing has no relevance whatsoever in this discussion. Have a look at the description if you still think otherwise.
Last edited by Liff, .
Well, I don't think these cases are that similar, as the iRacing torrent is based on a public release, not beta version, and was only released after the service had been public for a while. In its outdated state it wouldn't serve any purpose in testing or promotion either, in my view.
You must have misunderstood me. What I meant to say was simply that the illegal offline-only torrent that is distributed on several sites is based on an old, outdated version 1.2.0.0 of the software. The current version is 1.4.0.0. One of the main points of the subscription model is that the service can be both updated and expanded constantly.
Last edited by Liff, .
I believe this behavior was only reported by one racer, and not confirmed by anyone else. Can't be bothered to test whether it's true or not myself... It's easy to see that tires lose grip when they lift off the ground, so I don't see why they would have any grip when the car is upside down, either.
And what is that supposed to mean? They offer the same old obsolete offline-only 1.2.0.0 version of iRacing as well as a torrent of NR2003 with some mods installed. I fail to see any connection with the post you were quoting.
The netcode seems to make that one look worse than it might be from the perspective of the driver in question. In the video it looks like the car suddenly starts to slide to the right after already coming to a standstill, when in reality it was likely just a normal spin after a careless re-entry to the track.
The Formula Mazda and the Radical feel quite a bit different now with the last big update. I wouldn't say that either of them feel like they're on rails, although the Radical with higher wing settings is still understeery.
You get both versions of the Solstice and both versions of the Legends car with the basic subscription.
That was a nice balanced review, and many of the points are things that one must judge subjectively.
About the graphics, however: I've found that iRacing is pretty easy with the system requirements, and my old 6600 GT easily gives me solid v-synced 60 FPS at 1680 x 1050 with the settings toned down, and the game still looks very good. What kills the frame rate is usually the "more shadows" or "advanced shadows" settings, and I guess using too much memory on the memory slider could cause low FPS, too.
I have to say that for me the car physics of iRacing feel better than those of LFS, though not by a huge margin. What sets iRacing apart as far as realism goes, however, are the tracks, which feel very real.
The FFB in the Solstice is not a very good example of the feedback model of iRacing. The car has power steering, which makes it feel very muted compared to the other vehicles. You could try the Legends car on an oval or a road course, and I guarantee you'll see the difference. Otherwise there must be something wrong in your FFB settings.
I agree with you on some of your points in the last paragraph. iRacing is not an LFS killer, and neither is it designed to be, in my opinion. Apart from the pricing I still don't see why iRacing would only be suited for a more experienced racer.
I thought I'd paste this here, too:
Dale Earnhardt Jr. talks for 90 minutes with John Prather and Frosty StClair about iRacing and sim racing in general on the latest episode of the PSR Radio show The OpinionNation. Really cool in-depth discussion by three smart sim racing enthusiasts. The archived show can be streamed or downloaded from http://radio.psrtv.com/.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. talks for 90 minutes with John Prather and Frosty StClair about iRacing and sim racing in general on the latest episode of the PSR Radio show The OpinionNation. Really cool in-depth discussion by three smart sim racing enthusiasts. The archived show can be streamed or downloaded from http://radio.psrtv.com/.
Without any quotes from the discussions, I can't understand how on earth such an issue would be a major factor in choosing a subscription model instead of a more traditional boxed-sim model when there are lots of much more compelling reasons to go with the subscription route.
I believe they definitely had that issue in mind, too, when choosing the subscription system, as to a small extent it's a natural consequence of it, but implying that it was the main reason or even a significant one for doing it sounds totally unconvincing.
Also, what makes such a statement ridiculous is that the cheapest monthly subscription price for World of Warcraft is the same as the cheapest for iRacing. $13 a month isn't nearly enough to provide any kind of exclusivity and does very little in keeping riff-raff out.
Last edited by Liff, .
I've read posts arguing that the high pricing helps keep wreckers out, but it has all been pure speculation by non-staff members, and I don't see any reason for it to actually be a factor in the prices.
For me the $13 a month is a reasonable fee for the servers, stats, the organized series, constant updates to the game engine and website, working safety rating system, having a steward to protest to for on-track incidents etc. I'd prefer it be lower, but it's not that expensive if you go for a year, considering the amount of work the staff does on all aspects of the service all the time.
The content price, on the other hand, is too high for me to buy everything I'm interested in. I would love to do more of the ovals, for example, but financially I can't do it. However, the price for development at the level of detail iRacing has chosen leads to a really high cost per vehicle and track. They can't lower the prices so that they would effectively make losses with every piece of content that is bought. But since there are no variable costs involved in selling the content to more people, I could see the content prices going down as the user base grows.
Another option would of course be to cover the expenses of developing content by raising the monthly fee and lowering the content prices, but I don't think that would lead to more subscribers, either. At least this way we can choose what type of content we are paying for.
Still another option would be to just make (even bigger) losses with the content at the beginning in the hopes of attracting more people in. Even with the prices they have now I don't think they're getting even with much of the content just yet.
But I don't really worry about it too much. They have the numbers, we don't. Maybe they are better off with conservative predictions of the number of users they could have in the short term.
Well, it's hard to say anything about being commercially unsustainable yet, with the very little info we have on what's going behind the scenes. A couple of months ago John Henry said on the forums, "I expect that for the first ten years or so there will be a constant debate as to whether or not we'll ultimately be successful."
The current high prices for the content must mean, in my opinion, that they haven't even assumed to get that many subscriptions at this point. If scanning a track on average costs $100,000 (which is some number I've seen, could be a lot more and/or vary a lot), about 5000 buyers for a track would be enough to cover the costs at the current prices.
I don't believe that the pricing system has anything to do with keeping people out. They have just estimated a low number of prospective users in the short term, and determined the content prices based on that.
If you went and tried the iRacing Mazda on that track, there's no way you would make those comparisons. Even though it's a modern open-wheel car with a wimpy engine, it doesn't feel glued to the track even with a high-downforce setup. And in my opinion it doesn't look like that in the video, either.
It's easy to see from the small steering wheel icon that Ben Cornett makes lots of small corrections with the wheel. Download the higher quality avi and you'll see more of the behaviour of the car. Ben is one of the top sim racers in the world, and with any lesser drivers at the wheel you'd see them struggle a lot more trying to achieve such speed.
It's obvious that the video quality is terrible. The game itself looks great which can be confirmed by looking at just about any other video out there.
Also, I don't understand how you can judge from that video that the game "drives" badly unless you judge physics by the graphics.I'm sure that the Radical is based on a wealth of accurate data. According to a post on the official forums, iRacing mostly dealt with Radical USA, and it seems to me that the comment about Radical UK only refers to the aerodynamics data. And when it comes to wind tunnel information, it's just not possible to have complete data for many of the cars.
Apparently the track specific setups that iRacing has included with the update are MUCH better than the setup the Silverado has without manually loading one. At first there were a lot of complaints on the official forum about excess bounciness, but after people realized that there were setups for every(?) oval track included, I haven't seen anymore complaints.
Sim racing is free from lots of the constraints of real racing, but I'm sure the rush I'd get from real-life racing would make me enjoy it very much, even though in the sim world I might enjoy a different format. That rush is something that for me personally is mostly missing from a basic pick-up race with nothing to gain and nothing to lose. When a significant portion of the field drive like they don't care, the race just doesn't feel that engaging.
I understand the attraction of a league type format, but it's something that I probably wouldn't want to commit myself to. For me the iRacing SR and iRating system strikes a very good balance between leagues and open pick-up races, and I don't feel it's a case of missing the best of any worlds. The feel of the regular season races is definitely not the same as a generic pick-up race.
But it's a matter of opinion in the end. Hopefully there will be enough racers who share some of my opinions so that the iRacing regular seasons will be a success (as I think they have mostly been so far). Anyway, on their website iRacing state that "One of our highest priorities is to develop ways to fulfill requests for individual races and leagues", so hopefully there will be something for everyone in due course.
Excellent post, although I disagree with the above statement.
To me iRacing is a very nice compromise between leagues and pick-up racing. I wouldn't want to either commit myself to a league and race the same 20 people all the time, or attend pick-up races where the skill level of people would vary greatly. For me the non-SR 13th week road racing has greatly reasserted my second point.
It probably varies a lot between the series. At least in the Radical series the standard of driving hasn't been anywhere close to the iRacing road class races that I'm used to. Also the feeling of competition has mostly been gone from the races. For me it just shows the importance and effect of the safety rating and iRating systems. It's a short, refreshing break from the season, perhaps, but I'm thankful the racing normally isn't as it is during week 13.
It seems like a whole different story in the oval races with the Mazda, though.
There should be no shortage of drivers for the Solstice and Skippy races, definitely not during European peak hours. Both series usually get 3-4 grids of drivers for the races. Next season there will probably be less people in the Solstice and the Mazdas should start getting constant good grids.
You didn't mention the one aspect that really makes iRacing special - the quality of the laser-scanned tracks. You'll have to pay for extra content because accurately modeling tracks and cars is very expensive and the user base will probably never grow big enough to cover the costs with the subscription fees only.
I think the graphics look good and very realistic. The effort put into textures really shows.
It seems like you didn't really try to get to know the system if you didn't find active races. There are races starting every hour for the rookie series, and you only have to know when they start and jump in. It seems the rookie series races all have several grids worth of racers.
Last edited by Liff, .
No wonder the table doesn't look good since it's full of errors. Rookie Legends races start every hour and the qualifyings start at :45 past the hour, not :15 past, so they don't overlap. Skippy and Solstice qualifyings only last 20 minutes so they don't overlap with the races, either, and you can jump straight to the race after qualifying. Advanced Solstice races start at :30 past the hour not on the hour and the qualifyings start :5 past the hour, not :35 past. It's MUCH better planned than you'd think by looking at that table.
There's also this announcement on the public website about an upcoming Daytona Prototype car: http://www.iracing.com/newsEvents/article.php?id=65&lc=1
Yes, this is true for "remote" driver replays that you watch in-game. However, "local" replays (replays of one's own car) are accurate, and videos posted by the drivers themselves therefore have the correct gears, braking points etc.
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG