Precision Racing League tried to do their online pre-season league race last night on PC, and it was a disaster from start to finish. All drivers are from North America, and do ping tests to ensure their connection is adequate, so bad connections did not contribute to any of this. League Racing cannot take place with the current game bugs. Our drivers have summarized the issues we experienced:
We set up an unranked private lobby, and everyone was able to join successfully. However, multiple drivers were unable to select a car. The select button simply wasn't available, even though there were clearly multiple seats still open. We could navigate through different menus then return to the team selection screen, and occasionally, the select option would appear, but not to the point we could get it to work for everyone. We tried recreating the lobby, using a different host, creating an online championship instead of unranked. Nothing worked. Each time we tried to find a new solution, it was a different set of drivers who could no longer select their car. It wasn't consistent, so wasn't easily re-created. Eventually we invited one driver at a time, let him pick his car, then we moved onto the next driver, and it worked until the very last driver. Obviously having the host do this 19 times is very very tedious and time consuming. We do believe the last driver may have caused issues because he has special characters in his name. He has changed his Steam name, and we will re-test this soon.
At one point during our issue described in #1, we switched to classic cars to see if that would make a difference (it didn't), but after we returned to modern cars, 4 of the teams didn't show up. We were stuck at 6 teams (same number as the number of classic cars from our previous screen). We had to restart the lobby to resolve this.
Once we finally got all drivers in their car, and we started a short qualifying, three drivers were disconnected a couple of minutes into the session.
We re-invited the three drivers who were disconnected in qualifying so they could participate in the race. However, once we moved to the race, two drivers were able to re-take control of their cars, whereas the third driver was not; the Take Control option was grayed out and unavailable.
A couple of other times throughout the race, there were other groups of multiple drivers who were disconnected at once.
Each driver who disconnected was not removed from the circuit. Instead AI took control of their car. This was also true for the driver who was disconnected in qualifying, and who was unable to take control of his car at the beginning of the race; it was controlled by AI for the entire race. We obviously don't want AI cars in league racing, because all they did was drive slowly, erratically, and cause issues with other drivers.
A driver was unable to get their engine sound to return to normal after exiting the pits. It sounded like he was driving at a constant speed down the pit lane while actually driving around the track at racing speed, and he had to Alt-Tab out and back in to fix this.
We had one driver have a minor collision with another, even though there appeared to be no contact on the second driver's screen. The first driver's car flew into the air, did multiple somersaults, then ended up underneath the track where he was stuck for ~15 seconds, with engine revving, and tires spinning and smoking, before finally being reset to the circuit.
In spectate mode, lots of cars (though not all), were constantly on the rev limiter around the entire circuit, and in every gear.
We had a major collision in the middle of the main straight, but the safety car was not deployed, and the damaged car just sat there for ~15 seconds before disappearing.
A driver randomly lost force feedback on his Thrustmaster T300 and had to Alt-Tab out and back in to fix this.
By the end of the race, out of the 19 drivers who started, we had only 3 human drivers on circuit, along with 9 AI drivers.
Codemasters, please tell us what you're going to do to fix this in F1 2018?
What are you going to do to prevent it from happening in F1 2019 and beyond? Can we please have an open beta so that you can have the community find these bugs and test online stability before release, not after. If there are FOM limitations, I'm sure you could at least just give us generic cars with no liveries. It's frustrating beyond belief that this not only happens every single year, but that it now seems to have become worse instead of better.
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