Reason #1: (most obvious) job, family and small children. Time is the issue. And time slots
As a family man you have to take your momens of free time, but if those hours contradicts hours of quality online racing, it's not a possibility for me.
Speaking ACC, apparently too few competition servers, making it in hours not suiting me.
For instance the last tree days I had free time from my job and wanted to register at the ACC Competition Server 8am in the morning CET. But I completely forgot that
ACC Competition Server registration window is in the afternoon - which suits me very bad, just as most weekend hours do not suit me E.g. right now "Registration starts in 7h21m10s" (!) I cannot wait for that, since by that time I simply do not have the time! Family to take care of.
Before children I participated in plenty online series like Little Formula Racing Series and the successor Formula-Simracing and quality online series in rFactor and the Simbinfamily WTCC, Race07, GTR2, Race-On, R3E, etc and SimRaceWay.
It's impossible to join competition event from eg. 7pm-10pm CET with a family to take care of.
Ofcourse, the iRacing servers with other rush hours was a possibility and until 3-4 years ago I grew iRacing and liked it a lot as an European connecting to American servers in time slots suiting me. But I dropped iRacing with their new tyre model - what a decline. OK my oppinion, but to me it feels like the early access trial of pre-official rFactor(1) with tyre models like you drove on ice, not close to reality.
Reason #2: Open servers with too much "crash-fest"
10-12 years ago I liked online racing at SimRaceWay, when SRW was new and mostly solely dedicated simracers knew about it. That ensured some great close racing without a crash-fest. Then it became more popular for a wider scope, but resulting in newcomers not respecting simple driving rules. And then the proper simmers dissapeared quickly from here, sadfully.
Same could be said about ACC Quickjoin. And there you can get punished on your PA, CC, CN starting in a bad position midfield - ACC engine should be optimized here for the OBWP-part, for drivers not responsible for the accidents. Difficult to prevent an accident starting midfield in a field of crash-fest drivers, but you get punished in your rating in the carnage though no fault at all
And getting PA-value below entry treshold leaves you driving offline events anyhow to get back to the CP servers - which event schedules do not suit me.
EDIT: OK mostly due to I've entered ACC Quickjoin servers in the middle of qualification, not able to set a reasonable lap time and hence midfield grid placement. It's actually easier to start from back of the grid and just waiting for the carnage to end. But still disturbing....
However, there's quite some decent online simmers in rF2 online. But the number of online simmers in
rF2 is quite sporadic and often requires payable content to access. And then the few open servers do not have more than typically 1-3 online simmers.
Same could be said about R3E and AMS2; Far too expensive to buy all car- and track mods to ensure you are able to participate on an online server.
Reason #3: Splendid offline racing with high quality free car- and track mods
When you have a big ocean of free hight quality mods at your NAS, collected through the last 20 years and especially the last 12-13 years for rF1, AC and GTR2 - what's not to like?
Especially in GTR2 it is quite easy to setup a free CLOSE series of your own choice. Don't even have to mingle with *hdv, *rcd, *gdb, etc. files (ok admitted, I do that too), but just using the met-tool and champion ship managers for GTR2 and rF1.
That's the competition part of offline racing.
Other thing is investigating classic cars and tracks, a free ride at Targa Florio, Nürburgring Gesamtstrecke, Kesselberg 70K, Machwerk in a high quality classic race car might not be so much about the competition, but the nice feeling it self, knowing that you'll
never have this opportunity in real life in a high valuable classical car existing in only a few rare species today. And just trying to smell the sensation of old classic times
Combining those two formats is absolutely formidable. And running them 2-3 hours events close wheel to wheel give you the same satisfied feeling at the checkered flag as in longer close online events. Both in AC, rF1 and GTR2 you CAN get a close good battle with the AI's - believe it or not!
So do I do online racing? Yes, but very little.
Due to the reasons mentioned in #1, I do a little ACC Quickjoin and rF2 dropin sessions. But maybe only 5% of my sim time. OK this week maybe 30%. But digging into high quality mod offline racing as described in #3 still suits me the best as a sim racer.
I noticed a profile here in another thread define the offline simracer as a "sim gamer".
Personally I'll devide that into
"sim gamer" - when I do more investigation than racing
"sim racer" - when I'm racing offline in close competition series setup by quality mods in close AI battl - yes as I stated before, that
is possible even with the older sim engines