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?

 

[Bakkster]

The account never even had a protest against it.

I watched Nim pluck a driver out of a race one time..the same guy was in the very next race so I wouldn't be so sure about how long they 'ban' anybody.

Well, that's the problem, nobody protests because the only stories people tell are when the driver comes back. Who's going to stalk every driver to get banned to see if they ever come back (and specifically if they re-offend)?

 

[yusupov]

yeah i didnt protest. wasnt really that pissed, more in awe, esp considering it was the second race. noted the names & sent a lippy PM to one of them. but since theyre likely fake i suppose that wont mean much.

 

[Michael Hornbuckle]

Have you raced any now that it isn't week 13 madness?

 

[yusupov]

not yet, probably will tonight. last night watched a really high level gt3 race. didnt even bother ghosting, those guys are just too fast for me right now.

 

[Blkout]

I think they've had server issues today. I've had trouble quite a few times trying to get in.

 

[Matt Farrow]

No.

 

[Bakkster]

yeah i didnt protest. wasnt really that pissed, more in awe, esp considering it was the second race. noted the names & sent a lippy PM to one of them. but since theyre likely fake i suppose that wont mean much.

That's unfortunate, not the kinds of people we want on iRacing.

 

[DewCrew88]

. Who's going to stalk every driver to get banned to see if they ever come back (and specifically if they re-offend)?

They are never going to ban an account for ever as it's bad for business. Besides they arent going to stop you from opening a new account, and if you didnt really speak to anyone and played it smart they would be none the wiser. I can have a new ip in about 2 hours if I leave my router off. They dont have the time or resources to ban mac addresses or ban a specific ip range because it would kill business if they hurt other people. If they did have those resources I would hope they would use it to hire someone other than Eric Hudec to do oval physics, and maybe someone to figure out the FFB.

 

[Bakkster]

They are never going to ban an account for ever as it's bad for business. Besides they arent going to stop you from opening a new account, and if you didnt really speak to anyone and played it smart they would be none the wiser.

I never understood the logic of people who think they can't afford to ban a problematic player. They can't afford NOT to ban them. Why wouldn't they want to ban a player before he causes a dozen others not to renew?

Not that a permaban is needed for anyone other than intentional trolls, which are few and far between. Usually the first ban is enough to wake people up and they stop messing around, problem solved.

I'm sure people sneak around the 'ban all accounts' bit. I know several 'high profile' ones have been sorted out (aka, banned when trying to use another account). I don't know what actual methods they use (CC numbers?), but even if there are escapes the system is still better than nothing.

 

[Michael Hornbuckle]

What is up with the servers? I renewed my membership a few days ago and the site is down more than it is up...

 

[Blkout]

What is up with the servers? I renewed my membership a few days ago and the site is down more than it is up...

Yea, I think its the new content. I read an article from late last year when they introduced the RUF that it was so popular that the servers were going down constantly the first week because everyone was trying to race with them. I think the BMW Z4 is getting that same attention. Or, its possible that they're finding small performance bugs that need to be fixed.

 

[Michael Hornbuckle]

Well, it is super speedway week on the oval side so there is 10 times the normal participation over there but even when it is up it still loads slow for me.

 

[Blkout]

Same here.

 

[Kevin Watts]

I never understood the logic of people who think they can't afford to ban a problematic player. They can't afford NOT to ban them. Why wouldn't they want to ban a player before he causes a dozen others not to renew?

Absolutely, regular scheduled races with drivers who race cleanly are what attracts many people to iRacing. If they don't take action then people will just play Assetto Corsa or rFactor 2 online and take their chances in public servers.

 

[Blkout]

Just read this on an iRacing news site.

Offline Testing: iRacing is working on an offline testing mode so while in maintenance you can test/drive with any content you own. Goal was to have it for this build but did not quite make it. iRacing also built a new page to try and provide more info while in maintenance. 4-25-14

 

[Bakkster]

What is up with the servers? I renewed my membership a few days ago and the site is down more than it is up...

Similar happened last season, and it was related to the stats servers. It was a load balancing system that wasn't behaving. Basically, different servers trying to talk amongst themselves, getting behind and locking up the system.

As @Blkout mentioned, they are finally working on an offline testing interface during maintenance. That will make things a bit nicer at new builds.

 

[yusupov]

Just read this on an iRacing news site.

Offline Testing: iRacing is working on an offline testing mode so while in maintenance you can test/drive with any content you own. Goal was to have it for this build but did not quite make it. iRacing also built a new page to try and provide more info while in maintenance. 4-25-14

wow, that would be fantastic. really hope this happens.

 

[Bakkster]

For those interested in the downtime last season:
http://members.iracing.com/jforum/posts/list/3235077.page

Over the last 3 months we have had some rare occurrences where our servers would spike out of the blue and take up all of the CPU on a given machine. It would happen anywhere from once every two weeks to twice a week. We have been scouring the code, logs, online, trying to find the root cause. It was such a rarity that we could never track it down.

With this new season release we changed the method of how the site determines who is online and what they are doing. This change was made so that in the future, this information could be shared with servers that exist in different cells at different service providers. This change worked as designed in our development environment, our alpha environment, our beta environment and our staging environment. It also worked on the production site, to a degree.

As we continued to look at logs yesterday, trying to find the issue, we noticed on one of the servers a reference to the online status. We thought it was worth a shot so we reverted the code back to how it was pre-rollout. When we opened the site, things looked good, it seemed to be running fine. After an hour, the site spiked and crashed across the entire cluster of servers. We checked logs again and saw on one server, and only one, a reference about the online status again. We completely turned off the online status tracking. Since that time the load has been absolutely fantastic across all of the servers, we have not had any spikes and believe this to be the root of the problem.
...
We are leaving the online status tracking off while we investigate a new implementation. The new implementations will allow us to easily turn it off and on so that we can test and get the site running again quickly if there are any issues. We are considering writing a few different implementations that we can switch between “on-the-fly” so that we can find the best solution with the least downtime.

Good news from our perspective is this unfortunate incident has actually helped us to find an elusive root cause, and we are sorry for the downtime. We will continue to do our best to provide a quality service and experience for our members. Again our apologies

 

[Bakkster]

Tony posted for the current downtime.
http://members.iracing.com/jforum/posts/list/75/3251293.page#8011759

We are very sorry for downtime last couple nights. Unfortunately, if we had a simple answer would give it to you. We have been working around the clock for three days to solve it. We think we know the issue and working on it. The load looks great but then we have a sudden crash, not a hardware issue or anything. Anyway, again our apologies, obviously mission critical to keep the site up and running well.

 

[Blkout]

That doesn't sound good. They don't know the problem yet. At least they're working on it though.