Thoughts on current online scene

[EvgenKo423]

I've played Re-Volt online for a few months already and there is also a friend of mine which I've been trying to encourage playing with me as well. It's cool that now you maintain a schedule of races and try to get people together, it was really missing a few years ago, but there are a couple of issues I wanna mention:

• High entry level for new players
  This is what's keeping my friend from playing online and leaves a bad taste on me as well. Most of the time I'm coming 12-14, but on open and smooth tracks I'm ending up 8th with the same effort. This leads us to the following:
• There should be more open tracks
  There are many great open and fast-paced tracks in a wild like White Rose Chapel we've played today (it's one of my favorite). But the current track pack contains many narrow tracks with sharp turns and lots of obstacles (including tiny ones along the walls). Many of them have a lot of ridiculously stupid reposition points, placing you in some corner in completely random direction.
  These are hardly suitable for fast cars because of high speed and not enough game FOV to see ahead. Such tracks should be played mostly on low-to-mid cars, leaving fast cars for open and fast-paced tracks, so we could fight more with each other and less with the track itself. It will also lead to more competition and much tighter races;
• Amount of players
  I should say that 16 players in a single room is definitely an overkill. Total mayhem at the start, oil is everywhere; there is not enough pick-ups for the second half as well.
  Probably there would be better to have 2 rooms by 8-10 players, giving people more space to race;
• Repetitiveness
  It feels like we play the same tracks. I think I've seen all of the track during these months, but some tracks are played almost every day and some of them I've seen only 1 or 2 times. And this leads to the next issue:
• Track selection
  Track pack consists mostly of the same tracks with only a few changes every 2-3 months. Probably there would be better to have a smaller selection of tracks, but replace them completely every 2-3 months.
  Select half of the tracks to be wide and open, suitable for fast cars and new players. Maybe add some more variety as well, like some of the great extreme lego track out there.

Phew, I'm done.

[Alex]

I am certainly sympathetic to your problems as I've been in similar positions in other games too but sadly I don't think too much can be done about most of them.

"High entry level for new players"
This one is sadly something unavoidable with any high skill ceiling game with a low player count with this issue being compounded by the games age as well. Some people stick through it and get better, others like me played a lot of singleplayer and improved that way but I fully realize that not everyone has fun with those.

"Amount of players"
This game certainly wasn't balanced around 16 players which was only added in community patches. The problem is that not only do games fill up in seconds even with 16 slots open we don't have enough hosts to consistently host dual lobbies which is sometimes being done already and those second lobbies can fill up completely too. Lower playercount races tend to be impromptu sessions so if you want to join those you should get the Racers role on discord and keep an eye out in the #lobbies channel.

"There should be more open tracks" "Repetitiveness" "Track Selection"
The problem here is that there simply aren't enough tracks that people consider good enough to want to race on. Your suggestion for splitting up the track selection would compound the problem of repetitiveness by a ton. I do see your points as the track pack is compiled by people with only the perspective of an experienced player but tracks also shouldn't be too easy or they run the risk of being boring. Those repos that put you where you don't want to do blow and no one likes them idk why no one removed them yet.

This is a game that was a sales disappointment from almost 20 years ago and it's a miracle that it still even has a community. Obviously that does not mean we should just say we're satisfied no matter what but we're working with limited resources here with both manpower and custom content. Hope you and your friend can stick around and still have fun and maybe we can find some easier tracks that people like enough to put in the pack.

[ZipperZbieracz]

High entry level for new players

Well, get better by playing with better people or in singleplayer training. Or advocate for closed lobbies where "pro" players would be not allowed to play, but that's subjective and leaves too much place for something like "you go out, because that's what I want".

Other than that this community is too small to make something like an "elo" system, where the player with most points could match up with others with similar skill level, while weaker players would play with similar players to their own. This is theoretically possible to make (along with digitizing and automizing uploading and veryfing time trial times, but that would require changes to how the times and replays are stored and marked as legit so frauds would not appear) where the base for determining a player's "ELO" would be their times in time trials on stock tracks with stock cars on all 5 car classes, as time trial is quite objective in showing the player's skill and speed. This works very well in TrackMania and is called SkillPoints (SP), in multiplayer LP.

There should be more open tracks

This is somewhat connected to the first issue, as better players go around obstacles with greater ease than weaker ones and they also see tighter lines not as tight as more inexperienced players do. Tracks like Skating Toys, Petro-Volt or Holiday Camp are long and quite wide and fun to play, while GP1 and similar are just too boring. Make more tracks with wider paths and interesting racing line or learn the existing tracks to avoid the obstacles better, can't think of other better option.

Amount of players

The game's stock maximum number of players was 12, expanded to 16. Carnage at start is inevitable in order to allow more players to jump into one session. One can always host with 12 people set as max.

Repetitiveness

IO problems. Also

Track selection

IO problems. And there is not enough time nor tracks to make full decent packs out of nothing. Expand the existing packs, whatever their state is (I don't know it's state as I don't care anymore as even the 1v1 tourney is dead which uses the IO track pack) – possible. There are some IO track randomizing principles to ensure that tracks in one session are diverse, maybe it harms track diversity among different sessions? I don't know, don't care either.

[kiwi]

I think the high entry level is one of the good things about Re-Volt. In my opinion, this is the reason why we all still play this game. The high difficulty keep the game interesting, and you can improve by learning the tracks and the cars. I play the game since it's release, and I still can see that I improve every time I do offline or online races. When I rejoined the community after an absence of about 15 years I was last on every online race. There were so much hard tracks which I didn't know, and I was frustrated sometimes. But after some time I begun to recognize the tracks with all it's corners, and I was able to finish at positions in the middle.

If I am in the mood for relaxing races, I choose an easy to drive car - like Harvester. Nearly every track can be done without issues when the car is easy to control. If I am in the mood for some challenge, I choose Pest Control. There is nothing compared to the feeling reaching a good position on a track with low grip driving a RWD car. This is what makes Re-Volt so fun for me.

If all the tracks were easy and too wide, I am sure most people were not here anymore. If you played my Spa-Volts, you can see what kinds of tracks I like, and which kind of tracks I want to see in the future.

Regarding the amount of players: I am one of those who think 12 players are perfect. 16 player races are pretty much chaos most of the time, and the game experience is totally different. But to be honest, this is a point which I am also pretty relaxed about. I also have no problem with 16 player lobbies.

I think the track-selection at I/O races is pretty good. Whenever Bonus tracks will be raced (for example at Whitedooms sessions), it's clearly visible that most of this tracks don't have the same quality than the tracks from the main pack. However, I would like to see some of the harder tracks from the bonus pack in the main pack, because this would bring some more variety to the sessions. (Chilled to the Bone, Cake,...)

The thing which bugs me most when playing online at the moment: The hate and whining. This is also the reason why I am not around so often anymore. I am not sure why this happened, but one year ago the situation was by far not that extreme as it is now. It reached a point, where I am not able to have fun at Re-Volt sessions anymore. I am pretty sad about this, and I really hope that this will change sometime again in the future.