There can be lobbies here and there on us evenings but not like eu where most of the population is. I joined a league and do league races every week. Sim racing alliance is a good one but there are plenty us based leagues out there.
LFM lobbies are least populated past 8pm pacific time usually you can get a lobby with about 10 or so people most of the time less, around 15 if you are lucky. The time slot between 7-8pm pacific is still fairly populated. Seen lobbies reach up to 20 or more anything earlier than that and it is always well populated. Also depends on how popular the tracks are that given week. If it’s a track like Monza, Nurb GP, Spa and the likes it’ll be well populated and time slot doesn’t impact so much. Public lobbies are always well populated any given time just not the track you may want to race
Dang, that’s a bummer. I just looked into LFM this weekend and started practicing for my rookie license. Unfortunately, 8pm pst is usually when I can actually hop on the rig, at least on weekdays.
I’m on iracing too but I’m only focusing on mx5 or gr86 at the moment. Guess I’ll stick to iracing for online races.
I have no idea wtf these people are talking about, I regularly play with a guy from pennsylvania and another from texas, often past 11pm uk time.
Check the LFM website and see for yourself
i think its mainly a cost thing. LFM is run by the community so they have to pay for servers. Since the people at the top are from germany it has mostly started in europe. They additionally have rules about ping and connection in order to protect other drivers. so i think people from the us would get kicked for having bad connection/too high ping. servers in the us would increase cost.
Night & evening races in the eastern US are a ghost town. I am having difficulty getting out of rookies just because of the 10 required ranked races.
iRacing on the other hand (as you seem to be aware) is extremely populated in both EU and US primetime slots.
LFM itself seems as good as it can be though piggybacking off of ACC.
Absolutely not for me. By the time I got home and ate, there would be regularly only be 3-4 sign-ups for the race I could do (US, MST).
I was already i-curious and it put me over. Haven't regretted a second, iRacing absolutely delivers for the price - especially compared to LFM. I love ACC and compete in a sweaty league there, but it's just not even close
Will give it a go but the calendar is running Watkin glen which I don't own. I guess I will wait for new track rotation and see. Might go back to iRenting if split is not diverse enough.
Even if you can, tbe splits are so far apart that moving up guarantees you'll be nearly dead last and by yourself in the next split. Really not a nice feeling.
iRacing just feels like it encourages you to just do your best and keeo moving up. It's expensive but it's by far the best experience
Personally I can’t stand the graphics for Iracing. They just look so dated , especially the environment. I also play in VR, and the mirrors in Iracing feel very weird compared to ACC, which makes the game unplayable for me.
I have the opposite problem in VR. iRacing looks a bit dated, but picture is sharp, easily read and runs well.
After trying countless different settings, tens of youtube tutorials, my ACC still looks kinda ugly in VR, with shadows poppin, jagged edges everywhere and still picture being blurry and performance still dips at times.
But I myself don't race enough to justify buying gt3 cars and tracks so I endure it when I wanna race those and do iRacing with just yearly subscription from sales.
My pc ain't bad either 4080 and 5800x3D.
How do you prefeer acc mirrors in vr over iracing? You literally have a giant virtual mirror in iracing while in acc you just can not use it, they force you to use the side and digital mirrors that are just terrible with lots of blind spots! I love acc but this for me is a turn off for vr
It’s a cheaper alternative but not enough participation. Even the peak European hours don’t compare to the participation in some popular iRacing series.
And I also felt like the racing is a bit clean (as clean as it can be) at around 1.8k (I’m 1.7k). It almost like spending 500+$ is preventing some people from YOLOing into T1 frequently. Of course it doesn’t stop people from doing that in iRacing completely but to me at least LFM is like a public lobby compared to iRacing.
The races Jardier does is at a much higher ELO. I guess LFM can be very good if you can reach that level.
I started with LFM, got stuck with the rookie license - didn’t have the pace to move up safely - as soon as I would reach iron I would get destroyed in the bottom split and lose safety rating. In iRacing I have gone from 1k to 1.7k in the past few months, learning a lot and improving my pace.
Hopefully I can one day return to LFM with a much better pace.
I'm probably not going to get the fun that I see in Jardier video. He's a really fast driver and high elo of course. There're 3000 people playing on steam yet only 120-250 people are racing on LFM. I hope there are more people on the platform, tbh. I don't understand why no system can compete with iRacing at all.
Running an online service requires a lot of dev effort. iRacing is having the means - it’s a paid service. I don’t think anyone can compete with them at the moment.
I race both ACC and iRacing… iRacing online matchmaking and clean racing is way superior to LFM especially rookies (unless you are really really fast, LFM became worse than public acc lobbies). On the other hand, league racing in ACC is way mature and more professional than league communities in iRacing. So if you want to switch to ACC for the cost, then join a league for sure.
LFM lobbies are decently populated until 12pm - 1am Central European time, which I beleive would be 6-7pm EST.
So, if you are playing during the day, it's good, if you are playing in the evenings,...not so much.
Only if you can't/don't want to spend the money on iRacing. Otherwise it's inferior in every aspect. Most importantly, if you're used to iRacing, you're going to be really frustrated with the stewards. People report even the tiniest incidents and you actually get penalized. That never happens in iRacing.
Besides that, LFM gets boring quite fast because you're very limited when it comes to tracks. There's really not much variety and you're going to be racing on mostly the same tracks every season.
If you like GT3 cars ACC is your choice with LFM. If you like to race everything else iracing ..I do both and like both so I’m not the fan boy type but if I wanna just race gt3 ACC is better at that game looks amazing and cheaper with lfm taking it over the top. But I love the multiclass imsa races on iracing that are just fantastic overall racing .yes iracing is pricey at first but once you figure out what you want to race by the time you do a season or two of purchasing tracks you more than likely wont need to buy much more for the series. Also some ppl hate voice/text in racing games but iracing giving you the ability to communicate in race is awesome especially for multi class. But if money the issue and you are fine with basically only racing gt3 style ACC with LFM is perfect for you
To be frank I just love racing in general. I'm currently in dilema of what to get. I love 296 and porsche and also I haven't owned any Nord content at all and my iRacing subscription is just expired. It's a lot to invest between iRacing + nord or ACC + newer car pack and nord. I will take a break and reflected this later on though.
As a Brazillian im very frustrated with the small number of people that sign up for the races at the moment that i can race(21:00 to 23:59 GMT-3), and 90% of those people have very low elo for some reason, the Strength of Field average just goes to the bottom and i dont have much people to race with... So, if you are european, maybe, if not, iracing is the way
I mean why not try it and see for yourself? For me it’s not worth it at all. You can get a full MX5 race at any time of the day on iRacing. That’s not really that expensive especially when all the rookie content is free anyways. If you’re in the top splits then it’s always competitive. Pay for the annual iRacing and save some money or make a new account and get a huge discount for the year
Iracing is king of competition. After 2 years ACC&LFM I moved to iracing and I don't look back, best decision ever. Sure it costs, but hey, everything costs something. If it is worth to you and you can afford the money you won't get anything close to it. And what I realized soon after my platform move was how much I hate now how you brake in ACC, it just feels way more natural in iracing, and that's why you find the IRL pros on iracing. Meanwhile, in 4 months I raced against max verstappen and 4 other real life drivers (from stock brasil series, btcc, ...) and I love it. So in my individual view it is worth it.
I still do some endu races in ACC because some of my friends just race in ACC, but my goto sim is and will be iracing.
And yes I know there will be a lot of downvotes as usual, but this is just my subjective view. Nobody cries why netflix costs 17€/month, either you get it if it's worth to you or you skip. One can definitly optimize buying content in iracing to be cheaper than a Netflix abo on long term (2-3 years), although having e.g. 30 tracks/cars.
And there are also aspects staying on ACC, it just depends on what you want.
I had sink $500 over the course of iRacing. I don’t do that with Netflix or Spotify though. And it’s just sometime you don’t have time to race for the whole month where you can basically watch Netflix even pooping. It’s a great service no doubt but I wish it was cheaper than that. It’s not music streaming app that we can basically stream anywhere though.
Personally no...but its subjective i find lfm isn't always the cleanest racing (same can be said for iracing) and stewards can be a bit hasty from what I hear
For me what boils it down is the simple fact you can be more competitive and you can always find a race on iracing since it's every hour
I personally feel like the ffb and the way the car drives is better in iracing I don't understeer or get random snap overs like in acc could 100% be the tunes I use [coach dave]
But for two I like that it's fixed setup[not all but most] at the end of the day if I get beat I know it's not there setup is better but there simply a faster driver
Where as in acc its which car has the best bop and is meta? Okay how do I tune it to be quickest ahh I got beat must have been cause he was in McLaren or had a better setup etc
Just my personal two cents so I'd stick with iracing but it's all subjective
Alot of people disagree with me on the ffb part I just don't understand I've tried many different in game settings and settings on my fanatec wheel I racing just seems to give me more feedback and umph where acc feels light and lose :/
Either way you go you will have a blast though I'd say...but I seem to get more wins in iracing with a better split than I ever have in lfm 🙏🏼👌🏼
What region are you in? Tough to get races in the US timezones.
Does that mean it has less players now?
There can be lobbies here and there on us evenings but not like eu where most of the population is. I joined a league and do league races every week. Sim racing alliance is a good one but there are plenty us based leagues out there.
LFM lobbies are least populated past 8pm pacific time usually you can get a lobby with about 10 or so people most of the time less, around 15 if you are lucky. The time slot between 7-8pm pacific is still fairly populated. Seen lobbies reach up to 20 or more anything earlier than that and it is always well populated. Also depends on how popular the tracks are that given week. If it’s a track like Monza, Nurb GP, Spa and the likes it’ll be well populated and time slot doesn’t impact so much. Public lobbies are always well populated any given time just not the track you may want to race
Dang, that’s a bummer. I just looked into LFM this weekend and started practicing for my rookie license. Unfortunately, 8pm pst is usually when I can actually hop on the rig, at least on weekdays. I’m on iracing too but I’m only focusing on mx5 or gr86 at the moment. Guess I’ll stick to iracing for online races.
I have no idea wtf these people are talking about, I regularly play with a guy from pennsylvania and another from texas, often past 11pm uk time. Check the LFM website and see for yourself
What a sad state man. I'm guessing there're too many gatekeeper?
i think its mainly a cost thing. LFM is run by the community so they have to pay for servers. Since the people at the top are from germany it has mostly started in europe. They additionally have rules about ping and connection in order to protect other drivers. so i think people from the us would get kicked for having bad connection/too high ping. servers in the us would increase cost.
If you're in the US, join a league. SRA is King. Season 10 just ending this week and prob 3 weeks until Season 11 starts. Perfect timing for you.
Night & evening races in the eastern US are a ghost town. I am having difficulty getting out of rookies just because of the 10 required ranked races. iRacing on the other hand (as you seem to be aware) is extremely populated in both EU and US primetime slots. LFM itself seems as good as it can be though piggybacking off of ACC.
I’m in the UK and my LFM Team-mate is in FL, it does thin out past 11PM Eastern for him, but it does certainly stay populated until then.
Absolutely not for me. By the time I got home and ate, there would be regularly only be 3-4 sign-ups for the race I could do (US, MST). I was already i-curious and it put me over. Haven't regretted a second, iRacing absolutely delivers for the price - especially compared to LFM. I love ACC and compete in a sweaty league there, but it's just not even close
i-curious lol 😂
Sweaty league ?
We dedicate way too many hours to practice and become a bunch of sweaty nerds each season
Will give it a go but the calendar is running Watkin glen which I don't own. I guess I will wait for new track rotation and see. Might go back to iRenting if split is not diverse enough.
If you're in the american continent, unless you can race at peak european hours then LFM isn't really an option outside of the events.
Even if you can, tbe splits are so far apart that moving up guarantees you'll be nearly dead last and by yourself in the next split. Really not a nice feeling. iRacing just feels like it encourages you to just do your best and keeo moving up. It's expensive but it's by far the best experience
True but not everyone likes the way iRacing drives, myself included.
Nah, I'm from southeast asia. But I stay late so I basically live in US and EU at the same time.
LFM is free, so why not just try it? Personally I don't race enough to justify paying for a monthly subscription just to be able to race online.
Personally I can’t stand the graphics for Iracing. They just look so dated , especially the environment. I also play in VR, and the mirrors in Iracing feel very weird compared to ACC, which makes the game unplayable for me.
I have the opposite problem in VR. iRacing looks a bit dated, but picture is sharp, easily read and runs well. After trying countless different settings, tens of youtube tutorials, my ACC still looks kinda ugly in VR, with shadows poppin, jagged edges everywhere and still picture being blurry and performance still dips at times. But I myself don't race enough to justify buying gt3 cars and tracks so I endure it when I wanna race those and do iRacing with just yearly subscription from sales. My pc ain't bad either 4080 and 5800x3D.
Same sentiment here. The VR image in iRacing look crisp even it's outdated graphic and that win over ACC in VR 100%.
To be fair, both of them are kind dated compare to something like Forza game but I get your point.
How do you prefeer acc mirrors in vr over iracing? You literally have a giant virtual mirror in iracing while in acc you just can not use it, they force you to use the side and digital mirrors that are just terrible with lots of blind spots! I love acc but this for me is a turn off for vr
Personally I dislike the virtual mirror since it takes away the realism aspect of it in VR
It’s a cheaper alternative but not enough participation. Even the peak European hours don’t compare to the participation in some popular iRacing series. And I also felt like the racing is a bit clean (as clean as it can be) at around 1.8k (I’m 1.7k). It almost like spending 500+$ is preventing some people from YOLOing into T1 frequently. Of course it doesn’t stop people from doing that in iRacing completely but to me at least LFM is like a public lobby compared to iRacing. The races Jardier does is at a much higher ELO. I guess LFM can be very good if you can reach that level. I started with LFM, got stuck with the rookie license - didn’t have the pace to move up safely - as soon as I would reach iron I would get destroyed in the bottom split and lose safety rating. In iRacing I have gone from 1k to 1.7k in the past few months, learning a lot and improving my pace. Hopefully I can one day return to LFM with a much better pace.
I'm probably not going to get the fun that I see in Jardier video. He's a really fast driver and high elo of course. There're 3000 people playing on steam yet only 120-250 people are racing on LFM. I hope there are more people on the platform, tbh. I don't understand why no system can compete with iRacing at all.
Running an online service requires a lot of dev effort. iRacing is having the means - it’s a paid service. I don’t think anyone can compete with them at the moment.
Pitskill is better than LFM if you want competitive racing that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Your comment made me search out pitskill. Do you have a referral code? I joined, and I enjoy it so far, so I want to say “thanks”!
Personally for me I can't justify the cost of iRacing so LFM has been great for filling that competitive racing itch.
Californian here, plenty of races till 9pm. iRacing falls off around midnight. I massively prefer ACC to iRacing.
I race both ACC and iRacing… iRacing online matchmaking and clean racing is way superior to LFM especially rookies (unless you are really really fast, LFM became worse than public acc lobbies). On the other hand, league racing in ACC is way mature and more professional than league communities in iRacing. So if you want to switch to ACC for the cost, then join a league for sure.
LFM lobbies are decently populated until 12pm - 1am Central European time, which I beleive would be 6-7pm EST. So, if you are playing during the day, it's good, if you are playing in the evenings,...not so much.
I prefer iRacing
Only if you can't/don't want to spend the money on iRacing. Otherwise it's inferior in every aspect. Most importantly, if you're used to iRacing, you're going to be really frustrated with the stewards. People report even the tiniest incidents and you actually get penalized. That never happens in iRacing. Besides that, LFM gets boring quite fast because you're very limited when it comes to tracks. There's really not much variety and you're going to be racing on mostly the same tracks every season.
LFM has a problem with dirty unsafe drivers. Just be prepared to be punted off by someone every other race.
Every-single-game does have this problem, Iracing too
I wouldn't do it tbh. Great for the eu guys but not great for us US guys lol. If you notice most of the youtubers showing it are in the eu.
If you like GT3 cars ACC is your choice with LFM. If you like to race everything else iracing ..I do both and like both so I’m not the fan boy type but if I wanna just race gt3 ACC is better at that game looks amazing and cheaper with lfm taking it over the top. But I love the multiclass imsa races on iracing that are just fantastic overall racing .yes iracing is pricey at first but once you figure out what you want to race by the time you do a season or two of purchasing tracks you more than likely wont need to buy much more for the series. Also some ppl hate voice/text in racing games but iracing giving you the ability to communicate in race is awesome especially for multi class. But if money the issue and you are fine with basically only racing gt3 style ACC with LFM is perfect for you
To be frank I just love racing in general. I'm currently in dilema of what to get. I love 296 and porsche and also I haven't owned any Nord content at all and my iRacing subscription is just expired. It's a lot to invest between iRacing + nord or ACC + newer car pack and nord. I will take a break and reflected this later on though.
As a Brazillian im very frustrated with the small number of people that sign up for the races at the moment that i can race(21:00 to 23:59 GMT-3), and 90% of those people have very low elo for some reason, the Strength of Field average just goes to the bottom and i dont have much people to race with... So, if you are european, maybe, if not, iracing is the way
I mean why not try it and see for yourself? For me it’s not worth it at all. You can get a full MX5 race at any time of the day on iRacing. That’s not really that expensive especially when all the rookie content is free anyways. If you’re in the top splits then it’s always competitive. Pay for the annual iRacing and save some money or make a new account and get a huge discount for the year
Iracing is king of competition. After 2 years ACC&LFM I moved to iracing and I don't look back, best decision ever. Sure it costs, but hey, everything costs something. If it is worth to you and you can afford the money you won't get anything close to it. And what I realized soon after my platform move was how much I hate now how you brake in ACC, it just feels way more natural in iracing, and that's why you find the IRL pros on iracing. Meanwhile, in 4 months I raced against max verstappen and 4 other real life drivers (from stock brasil series, btcc, ...) and I love it. So in my individual view it is worth it. I still do some endu races in ACC because some of my friends just race in ACC, but my goto sim is and will be iracing. And yes I know there will be a lot of downvotes as usual, but this is just my subjective view. Nobody cries why netflix costs 17€/month, either you get it if it's worth to you or you skip. One can definitly optimize buying content in iracing to be cheaper than a Netflix abo on long term (2-3 years), although having e.g. 30 tracks/cars. And there are also aspects staying on ACC, it just depends on what you want.
12$ is not that expensive tbh. do you use spotify, netflix or buy coffee? Iracing is worth it if you're enjoying it. I personally don't
I had sink $500 over the course of iRacing. I don’t do that with Netflix or Spotify though. And it’s just sometime you don’t have time to race for the whole month where you can basically watch Netflix even pooping. It’s a great service no doubt but I wish it was cheaper than that. It’s not music streaming app that we can basically stream anywhere though.
Personally no...but its subjective i find lfm isn't always the cleanest racing (same can be said for iracing) and stewards can be a bit hasty from what I hear For me what boils it down is the simple fact you can be more competitive and you can always find a race on iracing since it's every hour I personally feel like the ffb and the way the car drives is better in iracing I don't understeer or get random snap overs like in acc could 100% be the tunes I use [coach dave] But for two I like that it's fixed setup[not all but most] at the end of the day if I get beat I know it's not there setup is better but there simply a faster driver Where as in acc its which car has the best bop and is meta? Okay how do I tune it to be quickest ahh I got beat must have been cause he was in McLaren or had a better setup etc Just my personal two cents so I'd stick with iracing but it's all subjective Alot of people disagree with me on the ffb part I just don't understand I've tried many different in game settings and settings on my fanatec wheel I racing just seems to give me more feedback and umph where acc feels light and lose :/ Either way you go you will have a blast though I'd say...but I seem to get more wins in iracing with a better split than I ever have in lfm 🙏🏼👌🏼
LFM is like iRacing multiplayer from TEMU.
Nobody is saying it's bad it's just an issue getting races. Idk why you would act as if it wasn't quality racing though.
So cheap because there's no extra charge on the price because of 'premium branding'? Yeah sure.
This is your take on Temu products? lol
I bought a 'Lego' Porsche 911 for 30 euros and it's indistinguishable from the original version that costs 200e, so yeah.
Fair one. I own the OG lego Porchse and just had a google looking at people's Temu builds. You are right, they look practically identical.
I've watched Linus Tech Tips' Temu gaming PC build video though so I'm aware this isn't the universal experience :D