Is iRacing worth it?

[William Moody]

I have rfactor 2 and AC i am thinking of getting iracing just for the open wheelers is it worth it just for that?
If so how much would it be for 1 year membership and the open wheelers?

 

[yusupov]

what do you mean exactly by be aware of, galin?

no harm in paying the entry fee, it's a crap variety of cars & tracks, but enough for you to get in a race & get a feel for the physics & systems in place. if you're curious, maybe plop down on a car you can compare directly to AC, or go full bore & get a 6-pack for the 20% discount (which, assuming you'll use the other content, is essentially equivalent to a free car).

after a few 6-pack purchases i'm only a little over 1 purchase away from all the content i 'want' (& basically need) as a road racer already. it is a lot of money all told, but ive not spent any more than i wouldve spent on random steam purchases for a bunch of games that, for the most part, i quite likely would not enjoy as much as hoped, if even play. otoh with iracing i know pretty much precisely what i'm getting, & its all stuff that will be updated every quarter (? i think) on top of that.*

*unless of course it all goes under ;D

 

[Galin Dimov]

what do you mean exactly by be aware of, galin?

no harm in paying the entry fee, it's a crap variety of cars & tracks, but enough for you to get in a race & get a feel for the physics & systems in place. if you're curious, maybe plop down on a car you can compare directly to AC, or go full bore & get a 6-pack for the 20% discount (which, assuming you'll use the other content, is essentially equivalent to a free car).

after a few 6-pack purchases i'm only a little over 1 purchase away from all the content i 'want' (& basically need) as a road racer already. it is a lot of money all told, but ive not spent any more than i wouldve spent on random steam purchases for a bunch of games that, for the most part, i quite likely would not enjoy as much as hoped, if even play. otoh with iracing i know pretty much precisely what i'm getting, & its all stuff that will be updated every quarter (? i think) on top of that.*

*unless of course it all goes under ;D

thanks for the info...I guess I will give it a go and see for myself.

btw, how are the entry level cars with paddle shifters? I haven't gotten the TH8RS yet...

 

[Blkout]

thanks for the info...I guess I will give it a go and see for myself.

btw, how are the entry level cars with paddle shifters? I haven't gotten the TH8RS yet...

No issues using paddle shifters if you don't have an H-pattern shifter. To be honest, I think there's only 5 cars that have H-pattern shifters in iRacing anyway, ironically most of those are the free cars that they give you with a basic membership.

 

[Bakkster]

The Cadillac has paddles in reality, but you can drive any of them with paddles.

As for things to look for, I wouldn't suggest buying any content until you've decided you like the racing you get with the base content. Didn't take me long to decide I wanted to stick around. If you do, definitely go with a 6-pack to save as much money as possible. The Ruf plus 5 common tracks will give you plenty options, do it right and you'll always have a track for one of the 6 series you have cars for between the three Rufs, SRF, Caddy, and GTC.

 

[indiemo20]

reading through this thread, I am very close to taking advantage of the RD for iRacing. I love the feel of AC and enjoy the driving but there is no sense of accomplishment right now (online) and yes, the organized by RD events are good but if I want a good online race (right now for example) i am pretty much out of luck and keep on racing offline.
Any suggestion for what I should be aware of?

Getting obsessed

Go for it, if you look for online competition you will be in heaven,,,nothing like it.

 

[Holtech]

I have rfactor 2 and AC i am thinking of getting iracing just for the open wheelers is it worth it just for that?
If so how much would it be for 1 year membership and the open wheelers?

The reason u hav to work your way up mate, so it's keeps the better drivers racing together

 

[Holtech]

The funny thing is if u went real racing, the price of an iracing membership wouldn't even pay for the feul to drive 10 laps in a real race car, so I don't understand people saying its pricey, iracing is that close to the real deal it's not funny, r factor is still on the arcade side of gaming, people need to remember with iracing membership fees go to developing the game further, with real race car engineers and drivers from all forms of motor sports, very small price to pay IMO

 

[yusupov]

sorry, but iracing isn't any more realistic than rfactor (at least rf2); in a lot of ways less so, in some ways moreso.

the price has nothing to do with how 'real' it is & in fact cars can very obviously be imbalanced because it is, in addition to a sim, an mmo. AC, rf2, game stock car all have physics just as good as iracing & from what i gather, until recently, probably better.

the servers are obviously huge upkeep & thats where the costs are. the MP experience is unrivalled; the simulation very much is. its still great & has the best tracks around but people who think other sims are 'arcade' in comparison are deceiving themselves.

 

[Holtech]

If r factor is as good as u say mate I will hav to look at it further, I no I wasn't impressed with v8 super cars on Bathurst, the tyres weren't even round on the graphics!!

 

[yusupov]

well, there are no v8 supercars or a bathurst track for rf2 as far as i'm aware. i was referring mostly to rf2's feature set which iracing doesn't come close to. tire management, weather etc aren't simulated to near the same extreme. physics wise, i think rf2 feel closer to iR than AC. imo theyre both more difficult. but AC, to me, typically feels the most realistic. not sure how much if any of that is FFB tricking me.

i dont have much experience with rfactor yet as it was an impulse buy for me & one im currently regretting tbh, though hopefully thatll change down the road.

 

[Galin Dimov]

Thanks for the comments guys, I will try it and see where to go from there.

My only problem is, how to fit the simracing in my life and what makes more sense. During the week, I very rarely will find time for it and I am left with weekends which might make iRacing a bit too expensive for the amount of racing I can do but on the other hand, with the limited time I have, and from what I've read, I can just fire it up and go for a competitive race whenever I find a time to spare.This, alongside the sense of accomplishment and racing "career" are the things that I am missing right now in the other sims.

 

[Kjell Eilertsen]

If r factor is as good as u say mate I will hav to look at it further, I no I wasn't impressed with v8 super cars on Bathurst, the tyres weren't even round on the graphics!!

Well, considering how the developer of rFactor, ISI, are also making the base physics engine on which many real life racing teams base their simulators on I think it's pretty safe to say that those guys has as much base for doing realistic physics as any other developer out there.
http://www.rfactor-pro.com/
iRacing is good, I like it a lot too, but it's not a unrivaled holy grail of simracing physics like some try to make it sound like it is.

 

[Kevin Watts]

People keep bringing up rFactor Pro but its far away from what we get as a consumer product, that's clear even by reading one of the news items from a company using it where they say

rFactor Pro’s software tool, TerrainServer, feeds high-bandwidth, high fidelity, cleaned LiDAR point cloud data for each tire contact patch into a vehicle mode

rFactor Pro is another product altogether and besides it's all about the data being plugged in, it's like comparing the monthly financial report spreadsheet from a multi national company to a guy running a corner shop. It doesn't matter what sim you're playing you're not getting the fidelity of those pro sims so the mention of rFactor Pro is irrelevant.

I have recently spent some more time in rFactor 2 and it's fun but the reason I'm only just enjoying it now is one of the problems I have with rFactor 2. Even though my old system was a few years old it wasn't a slouch but rFactor 2 really struggled to run even by turning down lots of detail. With that detail turned down it looked no better than rFactor 1, in fact with the horrible UI it may as well have been rFactor 1. Even with all the bells and whistles switched on my new rig it runs smoothly yet looks lacklustre, more like rFactor 1.5 than a true successor. Development has been positively glacier and they have relied too much on the community again to make this sim great.

Multiplayer is practically dead even after ISI had to jump in and try and revive it by setting up their own official servers. I'd like to see some sort of norification of new content and auto-update of all content as we've come to expect in other sim rather than have to trawl ISI's clunky web-site checking dates and version numbers. Things like that lack of auto update, and shunning newer technologies such as DX11 and laser scanned tracks when all their competitors took that initiative is why it all feels so dated. That said the FF does feel great and I do love to race around Silverstone in the Civic's and now I can run it satisfactorily it is fun and the AI is not bad but I can have that fun and decent multiplayer in Assetto Corsa even in its early access state.

Its down to the individual if iRacing is worth it, its not the holy grail of physics and if you're a more casual racer maybe its not worth it but if you want really good close competition in organised series with possibly the cleanest racing to be found online then just for that iRacing is worth it in my opinion and not even the trolling in this forum from Chris and Austin can change that.

 

[Niel Hekkens]

Keeps going on, and on and on and on and on and on and on

 

[Blkout]

Keeps going on, and on and on and on and on and on and on

But is iRacing worth it?

 

[Kevin Watts]

But is iRacing worth it?

I remember when iRacing went public that people predicted it would last one year, maybe two and yet here we are 6 years later with it showing no signs of stopping yet so it would appear many people do find its worth it else it would have folded a long time ago when all those modern day Nostradamus' predicted.

Its funny, I was watching a sim racing video earlier with a guy giving his thoughts on a sim and then mentioned iRacing and that iRacing was just out there to make money. It made me laugh that people think perhaps ISI, Codemasters, Kunos Simulazioni etc. are charities who work solely for the benefit of racing sim fans and don't make any profit.

 

[Chronus]

SI, Codemasters, Kunos Simulazioni etc. are charities who work solely for the benefit of racing sim fans and don't make any profit.

We should be careful about some things being said, mate.

ISI did more for the simracing genre and community than some studios (including DK's) ever did. ISI did not release a string of titles (as some have) ever promising the "best physics this and best immersion that", and charging each year or every 2 years an exorbitant amount of money ; they released maybe two major titles (rF and F1C) and have now "released" their third (or, in the time lapse of 14 years, about 10 titles).

Also, they produced and licensed a platform which allowed other companies to enrich the genre with their own titles throughout the years (from SIMBIN, to The Sim Factory, SRW and Reiza).

As for Kunos, Stefano released NetKar Pro and Netkar Namie (free ). NKP was not an expensive sim and got free updates right to the end (1.3.xxx).

Compare all that to the (unfortunate) conflicts between DK and the community (the before Papyrus closed and the after iRacing was born - the sad case with GTP and others).

All of them (iRacing, ISI, Kunos S., SIMBIN, Reiza) are companies who must sell their products to survive.

But comparisons stop there.

 

[Kjell Eilertsen]

I never claimed that rFactor for consumers where has the same fidelity as rFactor Pro, but unless I am mistaken (which I very well might be) both titles are made by the same team, hence the guys making rFactor for consumers should be very well equipped with knowledge about how to make simracing physics, at least on par with the iRacing guys.
That said I find the user experience on rFactor to be poor, and on rF2 even worse, they seem to know sim physics far better than they do the concept of User Friendly and User Interfaces.

 

[Chronus]

Eh.

rF is a very good tool for driver training.

rF Pro is a modular, driver in the loop simulator that can be used for both driver training and engineering purposes. Professional racing teams can integrally and literally plug in their software and physics models.

If I recall correctly, not all ISI core-programmers participated in the development of rF Pro.

Regarding UI: at least they allow us to mod the UI as we please. Some modifications dramatically improve your "user experience", and that's a big PLUS for a lot of us.

the guys making rFactor for consumers should be very well equipped with knowledge about how to make simracing physics, at least on par with the iRacing guys.

Well, they're really good at what they do.

Thing is, DK also is knowledgeable and super-experienced. Plus, he has BIG contacts within the car and motorsports industry, reason why many (including me) are still waiting for iRacing to become much better than it is now (simulation wise).

 

[Kjell Eilertsen]

DK being?