I have had a few email conversations with Pete(mombassa) about rFCentral and other rF related stuff. He's a good guy and I hope he didnt take too much pain/heat (from the missus) trying to keep it going as he's a real good guy. I know some ppl can't use torrents but they really are the way forward for such things and you should vote with your wallet. It's just so unfair for virtually the whole community to leach off one person. I hope he hooks up with rTracker and then everything will be rosey
If things went to torrent I for one wouldn't bother downloading anymore. It's not that I can't use torrents, it's that I don't want to. I simply don't trust file sharing anymore. It's a big security hole and I'm not risking my network if I don't have to. If that means I can't download rFactor stuff well I'm not that bothered tbh. As for rapidshare and so on, you can forget that too. Downloading has to be hassle free or people won't do it.
It's not unexpected. A guy starts a great website and finally a single location to get rFactor downloads from and lo and behold everybody starts using it. Like all the mods it is given freely and you choose to use it or not. ISI didn't have the foresight to provide their own community download site and that ultimately is to the detriment of their game and getting any sort of decent following for it.
I'm all for donating to things you use and care about, but you have to ask yourself one question. If the site went down because I didn't donate, would I care really? It's about whether by not contributing you will miss out if it dissapears. For some it would be really bad for them so they choose to donate and others it doesn't mean enough to be worth donating. This is the point of a donation it's up to someone to decide or not and ultimately it boils down to whether enough people care enough to keep it going.
RSC has the same problem. It doesn't make enough through donations, despite having a massive number of members, to survive. If the threat of closing it down if people didn't donate more was given would it suddenly get more donations? I very much doubt it. It would die a death very quickly.
The problem is that I guess most people don't care enough to spend the money. They bought the game, why should they have to pay a subscription to something else to get all the bits they need to play it with everyone else? It's perfectly understandable. This is why GTR2 and out of the box games get better followings as you buy a game and you've got everything you need right there, no extra hassle.
It's a fantastic site and all credit to him, but if it went off-line is it really a big deal? rFactor was around before and will be around after. The hard core rFactor community is very small, the rest of us are just casual players and that is why there will never be enough through donations.
