Have you ever tried searching by vehicle category, and scrolling through each one?
Going back to pcars1 days, I quickly realized there was a limit of 20 lobbies that would display at one time. I could refresh as often as I wanted, but usually, the same lobbies would come up with each refresh. Same thing with the pCARS2 open lobby, it behaved much the same way (one of the dozens of “imperfect things” in pc1 that seemed to have been copied straight to pc2). Occasionally, 1, 2, maybe up to 4 lobbies would change - majority of the time these changes occurred, it was just swapping one single player with rediculous settings lobby for a different single player with rediculous settings lobby).
In both my pcars1 and pCARS2 experience, it was obvious from the very jump that GT3 was the category for majority of the racing. I’ve always been one who likes the other stuff as well though, especially the Vintage GT stuff.
Wanting to race these other catagories caused me to start searching the open lobby, by category, very frequently. In both games, after months of checking each catagory individually, it became pretty clear that there just wasn’t a whole lot going on in the open lobby. Regardless if the main search page would only show 20 lobbies, if I went through each catagory and added up all the rooms I saw, it would be between 20 and 30 lobbies during peak hours, dwindling to a handful of GT3 lobbies, accompanied by the usual single player randomness in off hours.
So what would I consider peak hours? I live in BC Canada, so I’m on PST. With the amount of hours I sunk into both pc1 and pc2 online, it became clear that the population fluctuated based on the European day. Prime time gaming hours for European countries is when there is both the most quantity of lobbies, and variety of lobbies. If I logged on between 6-10am on weekends, that’s when the open lobby was at its best. It’s evening in Europe, midday on the east coast, crack of dawn out here. Sometimes I’d play literally all day, and could notice a steady decline in the quantity and variety of lobbies as the day got later.
There was usually a smaller, but consistent second wave of decent lobbies in the late afternoon, early evening, which is prime time gaming hours on the east coast. But again, as the night gets later, the server population would fall off. By 10pm pst, it would be pretty quiet. It’s around this time that there would almost always be a one or two standard Aussie V8s at Bathurst lobbies - these were hit or miss.
That became the standard pattern though, in both games. And like I said, catagory by catagory, during peak European hours, the most I could find was 30ish lobbies; and of those 30, it would be a good day if 15 of them had more than 5 people each. It’s all anecdotal and I didn’t keep stats, but I sunk a lot of hours into both games. Well over 1000 online races in pc1, and I’m probably around 700ish now in pc2....can’t tell for sure, as I deleted my file a while back, started over from scratch on my second go at the game 4-5 months ago. Lol when I was on here complaining about the rating system after release, players with 30 online races were telling me “it works fine” when I was at over 300 races started, some 500+ quali session start). Didn’t start my online rating from scratch though haha. The reason I quit the first time was because of getting screwed by the rating system - I was being prevented from getting in those Vintage GT races on Sunday morning because my rating was in the toilet from having done GT3 calamity the night before (and losing 50 points for DCing, which happened about every other lobby lol). When I came back, I had to start at 1200 and claw my way back to 1550, before going on another slide.
If we’re talking about things that effect the online lobby, I think the online rating is worth mentioning. It splits the online community up for obvious reasons, and some of them good - I prefer to race in lobbies where I know which players har some experience with the game.
On top of splitting the community though, I think it tends to funnel the community into the GT3 only direction. For whatever reason, there aren’t very many lobbies with the driver rating set to OFF, and the few that do have it off are usually gong-show, corner cutting crash fests. So it’s really difficult to find a clean, but casual lobby.
In the lobbies with the rating turned on, people take that stuff serious. That’s cool if I’m in a take it serious mood, and perhaps more important in a car that I’m both comfortable and fast (relative term here) with. However, if I want to jump into a lobby in a catagory or car I’m not familiar with, I basically know I’m going to take a hit on my license. If I take too many hits on my license, then I can’t get into clean GT3 rooms, or other weekend morning Vintage rooms.
I remember a Road G lobby at RBR short I joined. It was a nearly full lobby, and basically everyone in the room was using the 2002 Turbo, the Mustang, or the 86, I think there was one truck. So, me being me, wanting to “add some variety to the grid”, I pick the Escort. Hadn’t driven the car since pcars1, but though what the heck, I love this little car (I wonder why no one else is using it?). I get into the lobby with only a couple minutes to spare, enough time to make a few quick adjustments. I don’t bother qualifying, I’m ok with starting at the back, as it was something like a 10 or 12 lap race...two digits for sure. Race starts, and the field is gone, bye bye. I knew the Escort was the “under powered, light weight” car of the group, but my god I think they exaggerated the underpoweredness (the altitude didn’t help either). So, in a full lobby where many of the other drivers had a lower rating than me, I finished next to last (even though there was terrible driving up ahead....terrible!!!), and lost between 20 and 30 points on my license. Pretty salty about it, but whatever. I leave that lobby after the race, go look for another one....and see a Vintage GTA lobby that I can’t get in, by some 10 points. At that point, for that day, I remember I just gave up. Turned the game off and went to do something else. I wasn’t so much fuming mad or anything like that, it was more just a feeling of, “I give up”.
The lesson I took out of that experience was, “only race online in a car you have setup, and have checked the bop against the rest of the catagory”. Easy enough to say, pretty time consuming in practice. It’s also pretty discouraging to work on a tune for a car which you only get to race once in a blue moon. This is when I started to feel the rating system funnelling me to GT3, as it’s the only thing that’s common, so it feels like the only catagory worth spending time and effort on.
Said it before, but this game has so much potential that’s being wasted because, while it has all the right pieces, they don’t quite fit together properly.
I think it’s pretty obvious that GT3, sprint race, track shuffle lobbies (mandatory stop optional) are the most popular. If sms would have some dedicated servers, and run these lobbies like you see in an FPS game, I think people would be all over it. The game automatically puts you in full lobbies, shuffles players around to balance lobbies if necessary, closes empty rooms, etc. Then have the standard 10-15 min quali, followed by a 10-15 minute race. You could have a variety of rooms, some with more authentic settings, some more arcade. Keep “vote to kick” so the room can kick bad drivers. Have rooms for the popular catagories like GT3 open all the time, and then maybe have a small selection of catagories that rotate by the day or week (eg have one Road lobby, rotate through the various road catagories once per week or something).
On top of that, have longer duration races that start at a scheduled time. For instance hour long races, where the lobby starts every second hour, on the hour. Half hour practice, half hour quali, hour long race. If you had 12 lobbies like this, with the start times offset by 10 minutes, there would be a new “endurance race” for players to enter every 10 minutes.
Off course, still have custom lobbies, both public and private.
It’s just that to me, it’s pretty obvious most people in the open lobby are looking for some sort of quick race, shuffle format. I am convinced that SMS is 100% in the dark as to how much effort and dedication it takes to run a good online lobby, and how much the “good racers” in the comminity rely on a very small number of people to host these lobbies. Back when I was frequent in this game, aside from picking up on the patterns in server population, I came to recognize the names of the people who were consistently hosting the good, full lobbies, night after night. It was always the same people...and when they would log off for the night, either everyone else would also log off, or would just sort of dispers into groups of 3/4, or all end up back doing Monza over and over and over and over again. You jump out of the lobby, see if the next “regular good host” had logged in. If yes, quickly join their lobby, if no, go do another 5 lapper at Monza. Same thing, night after night after night.
So ya, that’s how I ended up putting the game down. I just came back to check out the Le Mans dlc, happy I did....but I don’t really see myself getting back into frequenting the open lobby.
