The beginning

Assetto Corsa is a stunning experience. Perhaps not visually, but racing simulation wise. One important aspect in AC is modding support, which allows modders to convert content from other games, and of course to create their own content to the game.

Modding makes it possible to expand the contents of the game infinitely, and along with extremely realistic physics, that's the main reason why AC stays alive.

Basicly the game concentrates to racing and drifting. However, there's multiple popular servers running a "track day", where there's no race sessions. On these servers people can do hot lapping, cruising, drive or drift together, and play around without being too serious. It's fun.

Then came ACP.

ACP started as a simple cruising server, with the same idea as those track day servers. At first it was nice, everyone was having fun. But soon, they came up with an idea of having in-game money that could be used to buy your own car on the server.

So, what kinda of cars could you "own"?

Answer: All kinds of. Basicly any mod is approved, even if you modified it to have supernatural grip and unrealistic amount of power.

Issue: Here goes the main point of AC: realism. Everyone who drives racing simulators knows that this is a no-go.

Well, that's not bad, but how to earn the in-game money?

Answer:

1. Drive laps and km's and procedurally earn it. Very slow, and took hundreds of hours to earn enough for a car.

2. Use real money to buy in-game money.

Issue: Obviously many players ended up using real money, and the outcome is that players are paying real money to use modded content, but the actual modders won't see that money. And no, legally it doesn't matter if the real money is converted into in-game money before it's used to buy mods.

So where does this lead to?

Modders are using their time and skills to create very accurate mods for everyone to use for free. They have the actual car data to be used as a starting point, and some of them has also irl experiences on the cars they're modding.

Now someone else is making money from their mods, also raping their mods by altering the accurate physics data to completely wrong direction, and then sharing the mods.

Obviously this lowers the average quality of modded contents. Creating a decent mod takes easily months of hard work. Raping it takes and hour, so it's not hard to calculate the production ratio of quality mods vs ACP rapes.

And now we have witnessed real modders going under the radar. Many of them wont release their mods anymore publicly becouse of this bullshit ACP is doing.

This is the bottom line. However, there's a lot more to come. Next we'll take a look into ACP's track "modding".