AA members and anyone else watching the situation more closely will know that the team is currently in a strange state. While the BL1 servers (both FBM and GTI) are very popular among the LFS demo community, the BL2 (GTI rally) server usage dropped considerably. This was caused by several factors, some of them not in our control, but probably the most important reason was serious team enlargement – having too many members and other people with extended rights lead to serious errors in server management. Also team thinning was a big problem, the more members we had the less they knew each other, leading to decline in server atmosphere. Due to insufficient communication within the team the problems rather cumulated and were not solved.
We have reached a critical stage. AirAttack needs to change into a real (demo) team, not just a bunch of people that can drive one demo track/car combo. Serious team downsizing must happen, with only communicative, reasonable, and active people remaining. Team events in all demo combos are a must, so that every member knows every other member and so that members do not stick to one car and one track only but try also other options. Having twenty active members is much better than having almost one hundred, totally uncontrollable.
The first step was already taken. Quite a few rally people decided to leave AirAttack and form a new team. While I lacked from them any attempt to try to point out the problems in AA and offer a solution, discuss things, I understand the decision and wish them good luck, hopefully learning from AA mistakes. After excluding people going into the new team and after removing long inactive member the AA team now groups approx. 50 people. In due time there may be further team downsizing based primarily on activity.
The next step is to rebuild the rally server. Rally racing popularity is going down in LFS, but we offer one of the few serious rally servers (not allowing crashing and normal tyres), so getting new community is not impossible. All the remaining AA people interested in rally are encouraged to spend time on the server. To further separate this one server from all other crashing servers, kick/ban voting is now enabled. Someone may still have strong reservations concerning voting, but FBM and GTI servers are showing that with limitations imposed by Airio it is best to let drivers themselves decide and manage the races. Forced over-management in effect killed the previous rally server.
Concerning team matters important changes are being negotiated. We are leading serious talks with an established S2 (LFS licensed racing) team that should lead to a very close cooperation. This experienced team could help us with proper team management and could offer to AA people a relatively easy way to serious racing outside demo world. Once the negotiations are completed, AA could have good forum and Web pages and many more active people willing to discuss things and try to find ways forward. Sorry for this rather long article, but these things are important.
EQ Worry for the AirAttack team/servers