Ah, so this is all from that BS from the First/NR2003 thing, that sounds about right, I get it now.
That's fine, nobody is forcing you to play it. But you cannot argue that their model is arrogant in the context of modern gaming. I didn't say you had to like it, I'm sure lots of people hate it. It's not unprecedented, and their pricing in and of itself is no indicator at all of it's possible success or failure, that's my point.
the matter is that its a cheap marketing trick
marketing and anysing business is something i find utterly repulsive... stereotypical engineer on that matter
yes it is because mumorpugers dont have any alternatives and the developer provides a real service... with iracing all you get are servers which id greatly prefer to be run by independent admins and bad pings for anybody who had the poor judgement to not be born in the us
well you must be... in your current position all youll ever do is recycle it indefinitely
yes it is... with the current scheme the sim will almost entirely fail or succeed on the (over)pricing
the behaviour bb alluded to is an early indicator that they generally expect the community to just bend over and take whatever they come up with... how they expect this to work with their target market already having their heads in and all that im not sure
FWIW, I've read that the developers are actively pursuing server farms in various global locations. Racers are already classified by geographical region, so for the most part I don't think pings will be a serious issue when the whole thing is up and running.
That's an interesting point, and while emotionally I agree with you... what power does this community have over LFS? Let's say the devs decide to do something "terrible". All you can possibly do is not d/l a new patch, and play the old version on some outcast servers in the company of other marginals Sure, you still have the "product", but if it's getting morally obsolete and the userbase is greatly reduced, is it still worth the money you paid originally?
Why is it that? A roll out is really the sensible thing to do, and MMOs of all kinds generally do the same thing, or something very similar.
Balogne. There are free MMORPGs, pay one time MMORPGs, and subscription based MMORPGs. Guess which ones are the best?
And please, point me to all the top-notch racing sims we all have access to at the moment, I've been looking for it for a few years but must've missed it somehow.... You've said yourself many times that LFS is just the least crappy of everything available, so now we're (likley) getting something worth running and you're just going to whine at the nominal fees?
And what service are the MMORPGs providing other than servers and GMs? Right, they're working on the software, which iRacing will be as well.
Of course if someone (hypothetically speaking of course) can play flawlessly with 300 to 400ms pings and it appears as LFS single player lagwise, then that doesn't matter does it? (no, it doesn't)
Mean head!
Please explain why there's that kind of animosity towards iRacing's pricing when there isn't for WoW, LOTRO etc etc. It's not making sense. If anything, it means that they know it's not going to appeal to everyone, and it also means they want to provide ongoing services. It's not a rushed title pushed out the door by a publisher unfinished at pricepoint X in order to rake in Y amount of dollars, never to be revisited or improved.
because it creates a false sense of exclusiveness... a division between the haves and the have nots to feel smug about and forget that being a have actually means paying tons of money
enlighten me... i have no idea since i dont really care about mmos but something tells me the answer is the ones that dont have to keep you playing and paying through endless grind
have i? i guess i have but its a bit harsh on lfs which i mostly like for being a whole buffet of improveability that i strongly believe will one day turn into something truely great
and yes i will whine at the fees incessantly any you wont make me stop
yes but they host servers all around the world that can host thousands of players simultaneously and huge databases that must be horrible to backup
with iracing you dont seem to get much that lfs doesnt already offer for free and in a way i prefer meaning that i dont have to rely on "the man" to host a server for me
well if say youre traveling at 200kmh thats 55m/s or 22m/packet@400ms... of course it matters at that rate you can plow straight through a car standing on track without even noticing until after youve tunneled straight through it (not physically impossible but usually considered to be extremely rare)
well for one i dont care much about the pricepoint of any mmo and probably never will because grind is one of the few things i care to bother with even less than stock cars but mostly its the simple fact that iracing is the most expensive game ive ever even heard of
theres no free demo (unlike all mmos ive heard of) and at about the same price as an mmo which generally comes with a gigantic world and tons of classes you get (from what i understand) 2 tracks one of which i dont care about by default and 2 cars one of which i also dont care about by default and one which is extremely unappealing to me (all of which amounts roughly to how much you get from a certain other sim that you may have heard of for free)... and youre expected to pay a lot more if you want some actual content
Oh there is, trust me. It's one of the reasons I won't touch any of them. It seems I'm in the minority though, which I find a bit sad since I don't want to end up having to rent every game I want to play instead of paying once and be done with it. The business model just doesn't appeal to me, nor does it fit my gaming habits at all.
I don't think that is entirely true people that are in the field of physics have been studying and sharing/selling alot of detailed information about simulated tyre physics for the past 15 - 20 years. The problem hasn't been a lack of understanding on their behalf but more it has been an issue of lack of computer power needed to run live simulations due to there complexity. They have been able to run quite accurate non live simulations for quite some time I believe.
While that is maybe true it doesn't guarantee that they will get it right. Knocking up some formulae that fit their newly aquired tire data in the test conditions, does not mean that the simulated tyre will behave like a real tyre in all conditions
e.g. From my understanding drum tyre test units have several limitations. The primary one being that it is a round surface which would give different contact patch dimensions.
Even with a flatbed machine it has a different surface to the race track so can only give approximations of how a tyre might behave live on a track.
When they say they have tested all tyres, how many different surfaces have they tested them on and under how many varying conditions. Then they would have to come up with a set of formulae to simulate all these results, they would be right back to the problem of CPU power. So any simulation that runs on a PC is going to be a less than a perfect replication of a true tyres performance.
So the question is not really about the data they collect but the compromises they will have to make to get it to work on an average PC.
Now with iRacing I so far precieve that the minimum specs will be higher than that recommended for LFS, so I do see it is entirely feasable that it could have a better tyre model than LFS does currently but it's not guaranteed and how much better is even less clear. We will see soon I guess
LFS tyre physics are still lacking in some areas but I don't think that is because of a lack of understanding or information, I think it is more from needing to make some compromises to get it to run solidly on an average PC.
Did I mention that a lot (too many sadly, hehe) of the MMO players are too young to drive but manage to subscribe to WoW and the like? Man, quit saying it's "tons of money" because it's just not tons of money generally speaking. It just happens to be the first racing sim to have the kind of development budget and business model that it has, and the end result will reflect that it's a heck of a lot more than a half baked product that's sort of worked on now & then. Besides, if you really are right and it costs too much then all that will happen is they'll lower their prices. Big deal.
If you have no idea why did you comment on it?
Yeah, it probably will, but maybe it won't. LFS will probably be known as "The sim with the most potential" for quite some time, it's been that way for years already and why think anything different will happen before we pass away? It certainly does have a buffet of improvability though, that's true.
ROFL, ok, we'll have this conversation again in a few weeks time.
That I could understand.
I don't know how they hypothetically do it.
Well, now you're just avoiding the point. You don't have to care to play MMOs to understand the fact that an exhorbitant supply of people are willing to pay those prices, and the cost is identical to WoW, which would also make WoW the most expensive game you've ever heard of as well.
That's the only thing that I agree with the doomsayers in this thread about, a demo and an offline mode (there is no AI) would be reasonable.
But those things are the whole point of MMOs. MMOs are not concerned about recreating real environments accurately, or precisely modelling real world objects or their behaviour. There is no real world research that goes into MMOs (at least not physical things), there is no fancy tire testing equipment involved etc. The point of a sim is it's physics first and foremost.
Of course if you do commit to a longer term you get more content for free, but most of what I read is that lots of it's elements don't appeal to you, which is fine and fair play but has zero to do (inherently) with the business model.
All fine, but when you consider that one pays for things like GTR1,GTR2,RACE07, blah blah blah, you're just paying for rehashed crap anyway. But again, my point isn't that it has to appeal to everyone, it's probably better that it doesn't in many cases (but not all). My point is that it's not cost prohibitive in the context of the gaming market in 2008, and nothing more.
Product vs Service debate aside, I find the amount of grown up employed men from US/Western Europe calling $13/mo "tons of money" frightening. Maybe myself, axus, and BBT should join some frugality courses Seriously guys, I'm not rich, but when I go to Manhattan to hang out with friends (no rich people there either), it's at least $60-70 per person, all things combined (nothing upscale, mind you--just not McDonalds). How is $13/mo so impossible?
And that's actually exactly why a more significant number of simracers, most particularly in this community, won't BUY those titles.
The rent-a-car premise of iRacing arrives in the age that Blockbusters and other video rental companies die, where the pay to play arcade game has been superceded by the console and where the juke box has been superceded by the MP3 player. I can't help feeling that it's arriving slightly on its back foot. People spend to own, these days.. they want to be mortgage-free in 12 or 15 years instead of 25 or 30 years.. they don't want to pay twice for the same thing.. let alone 12x in any one year.
yeah it isnt but its tons of money put into perspective by looking at other games
and either way 20$ is a whole lot of money for a demo
the day i stop enjoying coming up with inane baseless arguments will be the day i put a gun between my teeth
yes but mmos are an entirely different ballpark and derive their popularity through ripping out anything that requires skill from the person playing the game and replacing that with money (both real and virtual) and time spent repetitively killing billions of boars
essentially rpgs come with the promise that if you spend enough time doing the same thing over and over again youll automatically become one of the most powerful persons on the server thus offering some form of guaranteed reward
with racing games (and eg shooters) its not quite so simple and time doesnt translate directly to godliness so for the broad majority of the userbase theres not much motivation in playing the game for hours on end instead of occasionally which is a problem with games that you have to pay monthly fees for and the reason no developer in those market segments has had the poor judgement to try subscription based payments yet
yes but a large part of the fin in playing sims just like mmos is exploring the content... and with a basic subscription there just is none for a price that will buy you just about every sim released up until now from the bargain bin
it does have a lot to do with the model since the only way to decide whether this sim does offer anything of value to me would be to pay 20$ + 15 for the radical and probably another 15 for a track thats fun to drive with that car... at that point ive paid the price of a freshly released game for about as much content as a demo should have
you have to pay a lot just to get an idea whether the game is worth paying money for which you already have done... if that form of content delivery isnt a crappy business model i dont know what is
theres something deeply messed up in a business model if cracking a game makes you feel like a modern day robin hood instead of a guy who harms a bloke wholl share his family life with the community
when the srt interview came out you critizised someone for saying how unlikeable the marketing guy was but truth is he was right... the fact that they even have a marketing guy makes their operation dreadful in my book and that he could be taken right out of a dilbert strip doesnt help either
But some of the "justification" for the price seems to be about how much effort (money) they're spending to make iRacing realistic. If Polyphony redirected their resources away from eye candy, and instead into realism, would we not get something just as good for a lot less?
Comparing it to other MMORPGS like WoW doesn't make much sense either. Apples to apples, does LFS not provide the same service already? If the Devs wanted to implement some sort of inbuilt league system, I'm sure they could do it relatively easily (a bundled insim app extension of LFSWorld stats).
The thing is, if you even have to bring up GT5 then you're not going to understand any kind of response I could formulate. But now that you got me thinking; I would bet you a pint that iRacing cost more to develop. With the possible exception of licensing costs notwithstanding, the research and technicalities of iRacing would probably make GT5 (or, really, ANYTHING right now) look pretty silly.
And I do agree with you on the demo point, but I think the demo should be time limited and offline only.
Those boars are a menace!
What about the joy of simply having properly sanctioned and penalized racing with unparalleled physics and netcode, in a sim that doesn't have glaring holes or wireframe cockpits? If anything, I'd be much more motivated to play iRacing than WoW for exactly the reasons you describe. The exploration and adventure can be fun in WoW to a point, and large scale PvP is quite fun as well, but racing appeals to me personally more than those things and therefore I have no problem paying for iRacing. (Although I will be trying Age of Conan in a few days :razz
Heh, then I should see you in TDU a lot. It's not a sim, but the Hardcore mode is "sim-like" and actually quite fun. And it'll take you two hours just to make a ring around the island as fast as you can, I have no idea how long it would take to drive every road.
Yes I do agree about the demo thing.
Well, when you're not running a casual "might get it done might not who cares" type of ship, a business is a business. They needed to do research to even see if Kaemmer's vision was financially feasable considering the approach they had in mind, and they need a "marketing guy" unfortunately. When this kind of money is involved, it's more than a hobby and sadly business principles need to make sure that the 40 people making it make a good living too. That even extends to the crap on the shelves like GTR; if the general public didn't "go for it", it wouldn't be there. I'm just glad that in a free market economy where most are creating rubish, that someone had the balls to throw this type of development towards iRacing. It's definitely a "first"
I too think iRacing's costs must be enormous. The laser scanning alone for all the tracks must cost an eye watering amount of money.
And unless there's some massive global catastrophe, I doubt J Henry, or therefore iRacing, is going to go bust in the next few years. They've already been going what 4 or 5 years? And the sim isn't even released. So I doubt we'd be stuck with software that can't be used.
Judging by the last week's events across the world though, who knows. It's catastrophe season by the looks . . .
id probably enjoy it if it wasnt the half baked result of an ongoing finite number of chimps shakespear experiment that is bugged to the point where on my machine it soils itself every few minutes in a way that pressing the reset button is the only way to get the pc back into shape
i dont know... i havent really seen much marketing other than putting a lot of meaningless words into every newspost and interview on iracing so it doesnt seem like having a vp of marketing (so at least two of them wastes of oxygen who arent really good for anything other than cheap laughs in dilbert and userfriendly and selling lots of antidpressants to engineers) is a particularly valuable investment in this particular case
For me, its not the expense, its more a structural principle that's the problem.
I think we are in an era where important changes are taking place, and while most of them are in the digtal realm, they have knock on effects in real life freedoms and real life economies.
Software designers have to wake up to a few realities.
Sorry, but my hard disk is my property, and I do not like the idea of someone parking something on it, making it illegal for me to touch it or change it in any way, and then having the cheek to charge me on a daily basis for the privilege of having it sit there.
I don't care how much Dave and his mates have spent on 'development' because frankly, getting to try out lots of race cars, hanging around race tracks, and playing games all day is what most people call 'fun'.
PS: @BBT, you do come across as a bit rabid on this subject
I think this is where the change is coming in, put it this way, you don't "pay" for the iRacing software, you pay for the subscription to use the software, I guess you could say the software itself is free.
It's a very similar system thats used in other software systems, and I think is going to be used more in the future for gaming.
iRacing has NO offline capability, it's online only, and, so I have heard, is very different to anything else thats around.
Regardless of where you stand on the pricing issue, you have got to give them some respect for trying something a little different, trying to break the mould, and possibly even being trailblazers for the future.
Like I said before, I am sure it's not going to be for everybody, as it's all very different from what we're used too, but I am sure those that do take the plunge will be rewarded by a very good sim.
Well, its the price of being a trailblazer, that you cop a lot of shit, and its a necessary part of being in a democracy that people dump a lot of shit on what you do. Its not actually 'shit', its argument.
That IS respect. It is not in the least bit respectful to say "this is how it is, like it or lump it, and stop whining about it".
Fact: until we have some tangible information in public all we can do is speculate and probably argue over their business model (which is basically all we know about apart from a handful of screenshots and a video and even that knowledge isn't really complete).
Question from arises from said fact: is that process in any way useful?
I don't quite understand how someone can expect to take shit, but then not be allowed to set their own price point .
It's their product, they can price it how they like, thats not disrespectful, what do you expect them to do, reduce their price point because people don't like it?.
It's basic commerce, they can charge what they like, and it's up to the individual to decide if they want to pay, or not, no one is being forced to buy it, the market will decide if it's viable or not.
I would imagine that they have business models showing that the take up will be slow, or small, and must have accounted for that.
Sure, you still have the "product", but if it's getting morally obsolete and the userbase is greatly reduced, is it still worth the money you paid originally?
You've said yourself many times that LFS is just the least crappy of everything available, so now we're (likley) getting something worth running and you're just going to whine at the nominal fees? 
