The plan is that ALL of this will be publicly available with no monthly subscription (take that iRacing..!).
We are still fairly early in development at the moment and as I keep blowing everything up in unexpected and annoying ways, have made the decision to control the amount of people that have direct access just for a while longer, and break out the bits that are needed to run the league in forum posts here (linked directly to the actual site).
This is because the amount of bugs that will be found and then reported if we open up access, the frustration this may cause people, plus ideas and requests that will come in will likely put people off and/or blow up my tiny brain - and a lot of the stuff may have already been reported or collected as part of the discussions we are having as we build this in the background.
So in short - we are operating a kind of 'closed alpha' for the site right now as development time is extremely limited (literally lunch times and the odd hour on the weekend for me and the closed alpha guys spare moments to test things and discuss their ideas between their many other admin type duties and jobs around here).
BUT soon - hopefully in the first couple months of the new year - we will get to the next phase which we could call a kind of 'closed beta' where I will issue all of the regulars here with their own log in credentials and then you can all have full (viewer) access to the site (admin rights will be reserved for the actual league and server admins here). You will also be able to see the future development roadmap.
At this point I'll start a thread on the forum here where everyone can report bugs/problems, make feature requests or submit ideas. I will collect all of these up into the roadmap and then everyone will be able see what the future of the project looks like and even how they have influenced the development along the way.
It is however, absolutely not my intention to take traffic away from this site - and depending on how this all goes, that is something we'll need to think about in the future. This should be a tool that brings traffic and users TO Rooz, to help grow the ACC/general community here and add value for all members with bigger grids and a nice level of competition across all classes.
Later it may be that we open it up to allow non-authenticated log ins (full public access), but honestly I am not sure about that as I want to keep it chill, as a tool mainly 'By Rooz, for Rooz' and don't want to have to spend hundreds of hours on security type stuff, or create lots more admin work. We'll see about that later!
Side note: I just bought a two year subscription to iRacing so I can see how they do what they are doing and if I can learn anything from that, and honestly...not impressed so far! They are 'winning' (much debate around what that means) because they have a system that works and they have a lot of users in it providing a constant supply of competition and a way to track your performance. The sim itself (although I have only just licked the edge) doesn't feel anything like as good as the general feel of driving in ACC IMO - and the site is functional, but ugly (2000's design although there is a beta UI I haven't tried yet) and also missing a lot of tricks in terms of giving data that I think users would like to see about races and about their performance. It is no small feat of course to deliver what they have, but it is also encouraging to think that a company like Kunos could - if properly motivated/financed - really shake up the sim world. There is certainly a huge opportunity in that for them (market share )
Last edited: Dec 20, 2019
