Max Verstappen rants after Virtual Le Mans debacle

Very sad for sim racing as a whole. When the current F1 World Champion participates and then describes the event as a joke, you are taking a major step backwards. I don't see top level drivers participating in events like this again any time soon.

It will be interesting to know exactly what happened. Maybe they are already said, and I just did not see that detail. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with MSG and any current sim publisher would have been in the same boat.

Very sad indeed.

Johnr777 said:

Competition is indeed good for sim racing, but currently not a healthy one when MSG buys all the major licenses and fail to deliver

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Yeah. Competition would mean that other sims/platforms/leagues would be allowed to race let's say the Le Mans 24h and the Indy 500. Not the case currently.

I blame this on..........wait for it............................the sim racing community. Sim racers constantly drool about, " new car, new track, new series". Well developers know if the community wants to continue to spend money on half-assed software( I am looking at you Codemasters) then why not.

Stop bitching about what new cars or tracks you want. You don't drive all the cars and tracks you have now. Make the known issues in every sim more known. The companies expect you to post on some forum on their website the issues you are having. Then everyone in the community are the ones who try to find a workaround. It might be one person who actually works for the company that looks at what is posted in the forums. Do you really thing that one person is going to fix all of the issues?

You already act like beta testers for every game. Be a real beta tester. Tell the world about the crap features that don't work. Don't buy new tracks and cars until the 10 year old issues are fixed. Stop forcing new sim racers to search the galaxy trying to fix mundane issues in a game.

Most of the Youtubers talk about the games where they excel. Never about how even the game they play most frequently is full of bugs and what those bugs are. You get what you ask for.


Make the software makers accountable. Don't support crap.

Rant done.

Johnr777 said:

Competition is indeed good for sim racing, but currently not a healthy one when MSG buys all the major licenses and fail to deliver

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Exclusive licenses are awful in any kind of game-situation. I mean, excluse rights to e.g "Virtual Le Mans" or "Virtual Indy 500" etc. as in the official name, that I have no issues with. As long as the content isn't locked behind an exclusive deal.

Nitro McClean said:

It's sad that a sim that is very good on one side gives so many problems in online racing at the same time. The question is, however, whether the drama of Virtual 24h LeMans 2023 was entirely rFactor 2's fault. What did the organizers do to prevent what happened at the previous two editions this time around? Why didn't they protect the servers from DDOS attacks? If SGP can do this, surely Motorsport Games should be able to do it too? Or is SGP just very good?
I hope that WEC will have a serious talk with Motorsport Games and that this will ultimately lead to something positive in the form of a much improved functionality of online racing in rFactor 2. And that WEC is strong enough to close the contract with Motorsport Games if they don't trust it enough.

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Nothing happened at the previous version of the race, nor did much happen during this or the last season of VLMS. Which does give some credibility to the IP-thingy that S397 have put out in their statement.
SGP, as in Simracing GP? I think that there needs to be some clarity in what actually caused the issues before anyone can know, or have a theory of why it hasn't (or has) happened to others.

Regarding closing the contract, it is a contract lasting until 2031, with a pre-agreed 10 year extension. That will probably not be cheap at all.

R00b_Driver said:

I'm an rF2 fan, and I'm not defending rF2/MSG (who I think shouldn't have exclusive rights - I don't think any one sim title should have exclusive rights).

But, to say all S397 have done all year is churn out new content after new content is a little unfair.

They've radically transformed the UI, fixed some AI related bugs, introduced a new Real Road 2.0, are bringing Hybrid for the BTCC cars this year, and introduced a new tyre model - are that is only the ones I can think of.

Is it perfect - no.
Are there still bugs - ohh god yes.
Should have the server related issues/disconnects been sorted out by now - yes.

Are they heading in the right direction - yes.

I only hope that this year they go and release a new online server system etc to cure these constant reoccurring issues.

But once again - what happened is inexcusable - I feel for anyone who was effected, I'm just as sceptical of MSG as the next person.

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Ok, but what I mean is this: if you have foundations that hold up little you can't hope that by continuing to build floors the entire building won't be affected.

This is a metaphor to explain everything that happened: if you don't fix the problems with the base, don't be surprised if it all collapses on you in the end.

Before putting new things, such as cars and tracks, they had to immediately correct those problems that were continuously reported also on their forum, otherwise what's all that for?

Over time they have preferred to prioritize something else rather than building a solid foundation and this is the final result.

Luciano Santos Filho said:

Yeah. Competition would mean that other sims/platforms/leagues would be allowed to race let's say the Le Mans 24h and the Indy 500. Not the case currently.

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Other sims/platforms/leagues can race 24hrs at Le Mans, and the Indy 500 etc. They just need to use another name. That's not really a major issue. It's not as "cool" doing the "Full sun-circle of Le Mans" compared to the "Le Mans 24h", but it's there, no issues.

However, the BTCC game that probably never will come, the Indy game that probably never will come, the WEC game that, well. Has a majority of the content in rF2 and will likely never be released. That's what I see as issues, as that actually keeps smaller companies from making those deals and games, and make more competition.

Ole Marius Myrvold said:

Yup. @Kenny Paton

Verstappen wanted nothing to do with rF2 after 2020 Le Mans either. Yet he joined again for 2022, where they retired and then in 2023.
If he'd stop simracing on any platform where they have experienced server issues/connection issues in a race he has participated in, he'd be racing offline I think.

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Reading between lines what I'm understanding is that you are hinting is that if he comes back next year he is an hypocrite, and if he doesn't then he also is an hypocrite because other sims also have flaws.

I see it in a different way. That event has been a sh**show since he participated for the first time, he has endured at least a glitch of the game in every participation he has ever had at that event. Even he himself has said that it is one thing when this happens one year or two, but they have done that event 4 times and they still can't finish a race without redflagging because of massive disconnections or glitches affecting drivers.

It is one thing when at one event there is an issue, and another entire different thing when every year something happens. No platform is flawless, but as much as I hate iracing and their business model I have to admit that they can manage massive events with thousands of users concurrently with barely any issue.

And when one issue happens you can be sure that they are going to fix it for the next event, and sometimes they even fix it on the fly. RF2 can't even do online events as reliably as RF1 could. RF2 was never finished, and only ISI devs knew in detail how everything worked under the hood.

I think that he is not getting fed up with RF2 because of this year's particular event. I think that he is fed up with RF2 because it has let him down for the third time in 4 years, a big mess up in the first 2 years is excusable and understandable.

What has kept happening for 4 years culminating in this weekend is inexcusable. They should had started the development of RF3 so they could start from a clean state, the current devs clearly don't fully understand what ISI devs did with their netcode. Now it is probably too late for them, as motorsport games seems set for bankruptcy.

BillyBobSenna said:

Very sad for sim racing as a whole. When the current F1 World Champion participates and then describes the event as a joke, you are taking a major step backwards. I don't see top level drivers participating in events like this again any time soon.

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He said the same in 2020. Yet returned for the next edition in 2022, which ended in a retirement, just to join for the event again in 2023. Might be a step backwards, but it's unlikely that it will have top drivers pulling out. There's a healthy pot of money to be won in this.

Once again rfactor2 proves that physics aren't good enough, when the software is made out of papier-maché. Maybe it serves as a wake up call to software devs that the software experience needs to be as important as the physics for the driving.

Who am I kidding...

You are all Right...

Antonio Castagna said:

Ok, but what I mean is this: if you have foundations that hold up little you can't hope that by continuing to build floors the entire building won't be affected.

This is a metaphor to explain everything that happened: if you don't fix the problems with the base, don't be surprised if it all collapses on you in the end.

Before putting new things, such as cars and tracks, they had to immediately correct those problems that were continuously reported also on their forum, otherwise what's all that for?

Over time they have preferred to prioritize something else rather than building a solid foundation and this is the final result.

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Ohh, I completely agree - 100%.

I was saying in the forums and in Discord that more effort should be put into fixing the extreme list of bugs that are already there before adding in a ton of more content which that may need modifications to it after said bugs are addressed.

Most often the replies are '...well we got to pay the bills somehow...' - which is fair enough I think.

But yes, you're right - I can only hope something good comes out of this.

TRASGU said:

Reading between lines what I'm understanding is that you are hinting is that if he comes back next year he is an hypocrite, and if he doesn't then he also is an hypocrite because other sims also have flaws.

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Then you are sadly adding wrong word between the lines. What I was hinting at, is that Verstappen isn't the calmest person in the world, that he says exactly what he feels and thinks in such a moment is a strength and a weakness - it all depends on the situation. I have no idea if he will return. However, it wouldn't make him a hypocrite. It hasn't made him a hypocrite either... It's just that things said in the heat of the moment might change when you get a bit of distance to it - or it might not change. Human nature.

TRASGU said:

I see it in a different way. That event has been a sh**show since he participated for the first time, he has endured at least a glitch of the game in every participation he has ever had at that event. Even he himself has said that it is one thing when this happens one year or two, but they have done that event 4 times and they still can't finish a race without redflagging because of massive disconnections or glitches affecting drivers.

It is one thing when at one event there is an issue, and another entire different thing when every year something happens. No platform is flawless, but as much as I hate iracing and their business model I have to admit that they can manage massive events with thousands of users concurrently with barely any issue.

And when one issue happens you can be sure that they are going to fix it for the next event, and sometimes they even fix it on the fly. RF2 can't even do online events as reliably as RF1 could. RF2 was never finished, and only ISI devs knew in detail how everything worked under the hood.

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4 times in an event that's been done three times? Anyway. First year was the first time they had an event of that scale. That things happened weren't really a surprise.
The second year, the race itself didn't really any issues. Verstappen crashed out, but that wasn't server-related was it?
No massive disco, red flag or anything in 2022.

Except the times where iRacing has issues, and the drivers ends up parking on the start/finish straight, doing burnouts etc. refusing to race until things are fixed. I mean, it doesn't happen often, then again, out of the 10 events in the two VLMS season, it's been one race that have had big issues. Too bad it was the flagship event.

TRASGU said:

I think that he is not getting fed up with RF2 because of this year's particular event. I think that he is fed up with RF2 because it has let him down for the third time in 4 years, a big mess up in the first 2 years is excusable and understandable.

What has kept happening for 4 years culminating in this weekend is inexcusable. They should had started the development of RF3 so they could start from a clean state, the current devs clearly don't fully understand what ISI devs did with their netcode. Now it is probably too late for them, as motorsport games seems set for bankruptcy.

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As a sidenote - Verstappen had no issues in the two VLMS races leading up to Le Mans.

Lots of doom and gloom..but RF2 has been heading in the right direction for the past year with some great content and lots of fixes. This was an embarrassment for sure, but doesn't mean the end of RF2 or anything that dramatic.
1.Endurance sim racing is a niche subset of a niche hobby. This didn't make any of the main gaming websites afaik.
2.Most Max V fans are F1 fans, and F1 is not the focus of RF2 at all.
3.Most RF2 fans are already invested in the game and won't really care about Max V's comments anyway.

I feel bad for Studio 397, they probably got roped into this by MSG and had little choice in the matter, I can easily imagine the devs saying it won't work and the sales/marketing people at MSG completely ignoring them.

Like someone above said, RF2 is not stable enough for this kind of thing, only iRacing probably has the capacity to do this unfortunately. That shouldn't take away from the fact that RF2 has made great strides and is a great racing sim, its just not a good fit for this kind of event.

mcroshaw said:

Like someone above said, RF2 is not stable enough for this kind of thing

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The simpler point is : "RF2 is not stable ", at least it is my experience with it and I do not even use it online.
Expecting anything else is really naïve at best.
As for the issues that created the mess, are they known, if not, expecting better in the future is not sane, if they are known, can they be fixed?

Jan Larsen said:

Well, if we look aside from Max's view which is pretty irrelevant in the big picture, the whole situation is pretty much nothing more than a giant display of server instability. Long story short - it happends.
Now, the curve ball here is the statement MSG put out during the race, basically saying they've been hacked. IF that is true, it shows two things: 1; someone out there has a big enough grudge against MSG to go to jail and 2; the server security was poor. As I understand, IP addresses of everyone on the server were accessible which obviously isnt good. Again, IF its true, I wholly expect MSG to make another statement saying they now know who the hacker is and disclosing it in precise details. F.x. "we now know who hacked us - Iraping" or something like that, otherwise I wont believe this to be anything other than inept server handling.

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Their statement mentiones IP Adresses - plural, so I am not sure if they are referring to the server itself, or other IP Adresses.
Who knows if we'll ever truly know.

Jan Larsen said:

@Neilski @Ole Marius Myrvold (you two came about off the top of my head) Is it possible to crash a server, even the best ones, with 40+ drivers and a few more waiting to swap seats, rain, day/night, textures from 40+ cars, custom skins etc etc, from sheer overload?

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Yes. But with precautions being taken, that's not extremely likely. So, custom skins isn't an issue in races like this. There would've been a pre-made rfcmp-file with all cars made as their own entry. So it wouldn't been any custom liveries to load in during the event.
From what I've read, they use the normal spectating rules for the events as well. So you are only allowed to join the server as a spectator x-amount of laps/minutes before the driver swap. And must leave after x-amount of time as well. This lessens the load as well.
Rain has been put out as one of the culprits. I'm unsure about that. It might be a red herring seeing as it started to rain shortly before the first issue, and then they turned it off. Which have made people attribute the rain as one of the issues. However, it happened again without rain - and if we are to believe S397, then it is the IP-adresses thingy that caused the issues both times.

It's years since we ran RDLMS on rF2, we had the same rules, own rfcmp (mod) file for every event. Limit on time to spend on server as a spectator etc. We had real life live weather enabled, we had day/night cycles etc.
Granted, the game has changed a lot since then, back when we ran it, it was all based on 32bit applications as well. But I cannot remember we having much of server issues - granted, I wasn't there for all hours of all the races. But there was not a single time while I was driving, or commentating, that we had server issues. And yes, we did also have a 24hr race at Le Mans.

We did, and I've followed that ever since, limit the grid to 44-45 cars, as we found that going over that did increase the chance of issues. However, we've not had events with that amount of cars going on for hours since, so I honestly don't know if this have changed, and allows for a bit higher number of cars. Based on the 2022 Virtual Le Mans, it does look like this is the case.

While we haven't been stressing our rF2 servers since Covid Lockdown, we've not really had much server issues regardless of what we've been racing, or conditions, or anything. Most of the small issues we've experienced have been user error. Or, in fairness. Me stuffing things up when setting up the server.

mcroshaw said:

Like someone above said, RF2 is not stable enough for this kind of thing, only iRacing probably has the capacity to do this unfortunately. That shouldn't take away from the fact that RF2 has made great strides and is a great racing sim, its just not a good fit for this kind of event.

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Cote Dazur said:

The simpler point is : "RF2 is not stable ", at least it is my experience with it and I do not even use it online.
Expecting anything else is really naïve at best.

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Am I just really lucky?

I, quite randomly and utterly unprepared, ended up taking over a day of the rF2 Racing Club here in 2020, and soon took over the techy bits of it when it comes to servers etc.
I hadn't really touched rF2 since the last RDLMS season. I had literally never set up a single server for any games by myself previously.

Not had any issues. The game runs smooth, fine, no random crashes, no lagging, recognizes all three of my controller devices. Saves and remembers the different controller profiles.

Not had any proper server issues either - except from me screwing things up. Only issue we had was that there was a time we didn't get to update to the new build, but that got sorted once someone with an admin account to the RD main server got on and fixed some permissions that got changed.

I do know that modern AMD-stuff & drivers doesn't work well with rF2 though.
But I have yet to be able to break rF2 myself, and considering what I've put the game through the last 2.5 years, I should've done it. More than once.

R00b_Driver said:

Ohh, I completely agree - 100%.

I was saying in the forums and in Discord that more effort should be put into fixing the extreme list of bugs that are already there before adding in a ton of more content which that may need modifications to it after said bugs are addressed.

Most often the replies are '...well we got to pay the bills somehow...' - which is fair enough I think.

But yes, you're right - I can only hope something good comes out of this.

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Well if their way to 'pay the bills' is to burn down the whole building... they are geniuses

Very disappointed to see the news about how this year's Virtual Le Mans went down.

Like others have said above, the main thing frustrating me about this weekend's public humiliation for sim racing and the iRacing Indycar license debacle is the exclusivity piece.

There's this sinking feeling knowing that any "official" virtual Le Mans or Indy 500 (or, for that matter, any official virtual Indycar race) must be conducted in rF2. Or that any BTCC, WEC/Le Mans, or Indycar game must be created under Motorsport Games for the time being. There's no way out. And the blame lies at the feet of both Motorsport Games and real world racing organizations like Indycar and the ACO. A pox on all their houses.

Not to say rF2 doesn't have positive aspects (tyre physics, force feedback, AI features, more contact-friendly netcode). But it also still has serious issues – some that have plagued it from the beginning, 10 years ago. Credit to Studio 397 that they are now earnestly working on a number of them. But even so, it's unfortunate (if not unacceptable) that many lingering problems were (and are) unaddressed for so long and new problems were sometimes introduced. Never mind the more recent issue of the very questionable business practices of Motorsport Games and the suspicious history of its leaders.

Perhaps rF2 (with a properly configured powerful server and a patch for DDOS protection) is the best platform for official virtual Le Mans and Indycar. But perhaps it isn't. And it's a crying shame that for sim racing's biggest events of the year, we'll be stuck with it, regardless.

While I must admit I feel some schadenfreude seeing Motorsport Games publicly humiliated, I'm saddened that their troubles cast a pall over more and more of the rest of sim racing, especially in the eyes of the general public.

I will post a Project cars 2 Lemans race server soon, the best game for Le mans.

Hot story.

If this can make these kind of elite competition events crash and burn, more of it please !

Sim racing developers should concentrate their efforts for normal people, not on a few high profile events featuring real world stars that otherwise do not give a **** about simracing and ragequit whenever they feel like it like everyone else (except that does not make it the news).

This will have almost zero impact on the rF2 player base, that couldn't care less about these events and what Decostappen think a specific day. Heck, the average simracer does not give a damn about competition and would rather drive in his ghetto AC mods and post and upvote simrig pics in /r/simracing.

But it is sure popular to **** on rF2 / MSG as much as you can in this moment. rF2 does not deserve it in my opinion.
Also, as long as these event are run online, something will never go according to plan: if it is not server issues, it will be players disconnected by an intermittent connectivty problem on their end (ISP problem, LAN problem, bad ping, ...).