Future of Project Cars as an eSport [open discussion and questions for SMS]

[Patrick Kulinski]

That would be much appreciated. I don't want to spend lifetimes figuring out an appropriate setup for every car and track. I want to race, otherwise I would have bought a racing engineering game... another way fixing this problem could be: make the used setup accessible to everybody .. clicking a time at the leaderboard and you can download the used setup for this record, or even better directly apply it to the car if wanted so...

Reading the post, I remember the talks about having both a driving school and a car setup school in the game. Finding a setup isn't that difficult, and "setting a car up" does not mean nailing it but making the car feel nice and predictable. This is what I aim for and this is where I find a second or another. What's required for that is a general understanding what the parts in a car do, after that everything else (which change causes what effect?) falls in one's lap. [/OT]

I also think cranking it up in two ways would be beneficial:
- A ladder (leagues for pros + entry leagues for beginners/sunday drivers)
- official scheduled races.

You that could create a hub for interested people, every driver could race against people with comparable skill and on top, the perceived value of those events would be pretty high.

[Markus Ott]

I hope with pCARS2 the focus on real sim racing becomes bigger. I don't mean what ESL does, more what iRacing does. Long(er) races, bigger fields, driver changes, clean racing, live broadcasts, some sort of license system.
I don't want to say we should copy iRacing, but they definetly hit a nerve of sim racers with what they do. As much as I hate their safety rating system it sadly is a main point why the racing is rather fair and at least without on purpose crash kids.

I vision some sort of a service, cheaper than iRacing as you would only pay so whoever runs the service can pay the servers, not for licensing and creating cars and tracks.
Take ideas from other popular f2p e-sport games to get money from mini DLCs. Things like different colored wheel nuts, rims, starting numbers or other cosmetic stuff (as long as it doesn't turn the game into Hello Kitty Island).
An extra e-sport/sim racing page for pCARS2 where every league or community outside the paid service can introduce themselves and what kind of racers they are looking for, a central hub where every racer can find mindliked without searching teh interwebz.

[AerandiR]

I would like to post a viewpoint fairly different to those above...

As someone with no experience in traditional sim-racing communities and teams, I have little interest or time to cooperate with others to achieve some communal goal. For me the ideal form of e-sport allows individual participation on global leader boards or tournaments very much akin to what the existing SMS-R Championship and GT Academy are doing. Two important criteria for such a system are:

- Giving me the opportunity as an individual to compete against teams with more resources (to develop car setups, etc.)
- Having a consistent track cut detection system. It's great that everyone wants this. That makes it easy to prioritize.

Cheers, and keep up the excellent work with Project Cars!

[Kevin Leaune]

Hello,

it would be nice to make a ranking by also support ( Xb1 - PC - PS4 ) for SMS -R .

What do you think ?

[Joseph Barron]

Hello,

it would be nice to make a ranking by also support ( Xb1 - PC - PS4 ) for SMS -R .

What do you think ?

Hi Kevin. That isn't possible in the current season, but it might be something we can do in the 2016 season, which will begin not long after the current one is complete.

[artao]

I would think that for pCARS to "make it" as an e-sport, there would need to be actual races rather than just hot-lapping with leaderboards. Hot-lapping is all well and good, but also rather boring and not particularly representative of racing.

[Wacky-Racer]

I would think that for pCARS to "make it" as an e-sport, there would need to be actual races rather than just hot-lapping with leaderboards. Hot-lapping is all well and good, but also rather boring and not particularly representative of racing.

Agree, hot lapping "is boring" , and finding competition in public lobbies and some 3rd party leagues is near non existant, maybe the odd 1 or 2 good, clean and fast drivers dotted around in there but nothing to really make you race to your potential, or increase in your ability.

The idea of single class championships sounds a good idea from reading other posts here. Prototype 3 with default tune , e.g Caterham sp/300 or the radical would make for a good series. Definitely formula A-C, something different to gt3 or touring, same old becomes tedious after a while.

[Jaileh]

Evening every one, I am really interested in esport on PCars especially with ESL and Logitech etcetera but I'm kind of surprise there is no tool/functionality dedicated to esport and broadcasting yet. I'm pretty sure you already had those ideas but I'll suggested anyway, is it possible to get:

- a tournament organising tool, I think it's strange to ask everyone as steam friend before a race (like ESL). Something with check-in/registration, autofilled ladder, point counter and maybe video recording if a race need a referee

- a broadcasting tool or spectator mode allowing "shoutcasters" to comment a race without login in and the abandon to lobby and spectator mode.

- an official dedicated server tool

I think the first two suggestions are needed as dedicated server add-ons because in my opinion esport tournament should be host on organizer's servers. I have no problem with P2P but I don't think it's the best option in tournaments.

[Joseph Barron]

Evening every one, I am really interested in esport on PCars especially with ESL and Logitech etcetera but I'm kind of surprise there is no tool/functionality dedicated to esport and broadcasting yet. I'm pretty sure you already had those ideas but I'll suggested anyway, is it possible to get:

- a tournament organising tool, I think it's strange to ask everyone as steam friend before a race (like ESL). Something with check-in/registration, autofilled ladder, point counter and maybe video recording if a race need a referee

- a broadcasting tool or spectator mode allowing "shoutcasters" to comment a race without login in and the abandon to lobby and spectator mode.

- an official dedicated server tool

I think the first two suggestions are needed as dedicated server add-ons because in my opinion esport tournament should be host on organizer's servers. I have no problem with P2P but I don't think it's the best option in tournaments.

Hi Jaileh. This has all been discussed internally at SMS already

We can't promise these features will come at a specific time or anything like that, but this is an area that we would like to improve in the long-term.

[FR-Alan]

Hi, post #5 from Frequisto is quite a good summary.
Need to push hard on those aspects to make MP experience unique where the transition with ESL become evident.
I have read in other post on e-sport that default setup will be forced especially for community events. It s a good step but missing from the whole players in online if i understand well.
For other questions above :

a broadcasting tool or spectator mode allowing "shoutcasters" to comment a race without login in and the abandon to lobby and spectator mode.

It is possible actually. You enter as a driver but retire to the pit for qualifications and during race. You will have the spectator mode then. I'm ok, it s not a dedicated slot for spectator but it could be a next step.
Regards,