F1 2011 Whats happened to Race Department for F1 2011

stevehaz_uk · Dec 2, 2011

RD for F1 2010 was the only place to be, setups mods general discussion etc etc.. where has everybody gone?

Still no Mods forum, hardly any new post patch 2 setups being posted - no Ryan Hamilton, Viktor Anderson, and the others, whats happened?

Bram Hengeveld · Dec 2, 2011

Apart from the mods forum I dont know what you mean. There are tons of post every day

Victor Ivanov · Dec 2, 2011

And races almost every day...

Richie Hill · Dec 2, 2011

I have to agree with stevehaz on this one.

After the launch of the new website it seems to have gone very quiet. I think it's the lack of mod forum that has seen people disappear.

More setups are being posted now which is excellent. And I am sure that once the mod forum is back much more activity will follow.

But case in point, new helmets from grand prix weekends were showing up on Sunday evening! Now nothing!

Take Rowing and his development of the ACE mod, I understand he is working on it still for patch 2 but those guys have gone quiet.

I for one have gone back to patch 1 until more mods are developed to make patch 2 as enjoyable as patch 1 was.

Rich

Bram Hengeveld · Dec 2, 2011

RaceDepartment is not in control of what modders release or not hill. Thats up to them.

If they want to release mods they can ofcouse upload it mediafire, rapidshare, megaupload and open a thread and post the link.

Richie Hill · Dec 2, 2011

Thats what I thought. Do you think the sudden drop off in uploads of mods is because people are simply waiting for the forum to get up and running?

There is no doubt that since the old website went offline uploads have dropped off a cliff. I couldn't keep up at one point!

Bram Hengeveld · Dec 2, 2011

A sequel to a game is most of the time less popular. Haven't checked the sales figures of F1 2010 and F1 2011 but I wont be surprised if F11 sold a lot less copies, hence less viewers.

Any changes to websites have a negative effect in the short term. RD 1.0 on the old vbulletin forum was well indexed by google and it was easy to find things via search engines.

Now we have migrated Google is still full with old links that need to be reindexed. This process takes a few weeks/months until its back on the old level. In the meantime less newcomers than normal will find the site.

On the short term this sucks of course, but we made this migration for the long run. We have been online for almost five years and we hope to still be around in the next five years. Therefore this migration was absolutely necessary.

We now have a super stable base platform and all the extra cool stuff will be added later when its done.

David O'Reilly · Dec 2, 2011

Maybe the game is better and people aren't modding as much?
I also think that the mantle passes down the line sometimes and the student should become the master.
Are the people posing the questions about "where has all the quality content gone?" actually doing anything about it. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.

Richie Hill · Dec 2, 2011

But thats just it. I have contacted at least three members who have released amazing mods which have had to be redone because of patch 2 being released. This could and probably is keeping them busy until the forum is up and they can then upload. But I have had no replies from any of them!

Also this doesn't affect helmets and skins etc, loads were being developed and now nothing. The second patch would have nothing to do with this type of development.

I would love to help them develop but how can you become the master if you can't get hold of them to learn as a student?

zlep · Dec 2, 2011

I don't understand why the Mod-Forum is still not here. Of course, Downloads wouldn't work, but that's not actually a problem.
If we could still talk about the Mods we would develop it.

AFAIK the forum was promised for this week. Seems that this won't happen.

Bram Hengeveld · Dec 2, 2011

Is the week over already zlep? In the country I live the week starts at monday and ends on sunday. It would be very nice if people finally realize that we are just a bunch of volunteers that run RD in their own spare time.

This means that development is often a bit slower than on commercial websites as Xose and me also have a real life job of more than 40 hours a week.

We had to do the whole migration that was planned to do within a month in less than a week because the old server failed on us. Result: no sleep, no social life, no nothing for the last two weeks but a very stable and fast forum, which is for us the most important thing. RD is more than just the mods for F1 2011. We host a serious amount of other games and have daily races and leagues for them. Those people need a stable forum to start with!

A little bit of patience would be nice as the constant complaining of a handful of people gets really annoying and doesn't motivate at all.

James Maskell · Dec 2, 2011

I would like to say thank you for all the hard work that has been done so far and any that remains. Running a Website/Forum in your FREETIME isn't easy as it is time consuming and considering you guys work pretty long weeks already i imagine that it is definitely not always what you want to do when you get home. But you do and we owe you a lot for a forum quite a lot of people use daily without giving it much thought of how much effort is put into just making this thing run.

zlep · Dec 2, 2011

The problem is not that it takes time and that real life is more important. That's all right.
The problem is wrong promises and the lack of information we get.

Btw. I never complained anything. That was just a fact.

Bram Hengeveld · Dec 2, 2011

What is the wrong promise? We said we would do our best to have something up this week. As explained a few posts up the week hasn't passed yet, has it?

zlep · Dec 2, 2011

Everything is all right

I'm personally more honest interested in my previous question, why not just the forum - without downloads - is up again. It seems it is just invisible because with a little trick it is reachable.

Bram Hengeveld · Dec 2, 2011

Try to click a link on one of the mod threads to download a file and see what happens zlep. The problem is more complex than you think.

If that forum is visible instead of the usual complainers everybody will start crying it doesnt work.