I was once on the Today Show (NBC). Not as a guest mind you. One of those idiots that wakes up at 4am, stands in line for hours, and has a camera pan past them for half a second on the plaza outside. My wife's idea.

Small bump.

We've made some changes to the system.

- Tracks now rotate every 3 hours.
- Tier 1 is MRT, tier 2 is FOX.

The MRT can be a handful, but the last few nights we've had some really good racing. I didn't buy LFS until S2 came out, but apparently the MRT was very popular back in S1 days.

The car choice isn't set in stone, but we do plan to stay with the MRT for a while at least to gauge community interest.

We have more updates planned. Stay tuned

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Big patches tend to turn up every six months or so. The last one came in the summer, so maybe we'll see one soon. Scawen seems to like to clear his desk a bit before christmas, then take a nice long break, so again - maybe we'll see something soon.

I am not Scawen, nor am I speaking for Scawen. I am guessing based on the way things have gone since I've been here.

Big patches do tend to show up every 6 months. And almost always they are preceded by a 30-45 days of complaints that LFS is dead.

This thread doesn't fit into that category. Those usually have titles like, "LFS - nothing new for a long time" or "LFS is dead to me" or "Nobody races online anymore". By my calendar, we're almost due for one of those threads. C'mon people, get to work!

I was part of that 22 on my lunch break . This is a lot of fun. I think it's all a matter of expectations. On other servers, you hope you don't get crashed in T1. On this one, you know you will .

I agree you can't give a complete exemption for actions taken during sporting events. Where to draw the line though becomes an interesting discussion.

If you can go to court for incidents that happen in sporting events, nearly every hockey player should be in prison.

If I recall, even the brawl at a Detroit Pistons (NBA) game a few years ago, where some players went into the stands after fans, didn't end up with any players in jail.

Quote from Töki (HUN) :

Hamilton's father admits F1 quit thoughts

Maybe he should go to NASCAR, where there's no trace of racism.

/sarcasm

Strange. I brought it back up now. Thanks for the heads up.

Quote from SamH :

Yeah, it's not like you ever get a whole grandstand cheering when someone gets taken out or booing when someone they don't like's kid brother gets pictured. Oh wait..

I was at this race. There was plenty of cheering when both Speed and Stenhouse got taken out.

My initial reaction was that Speed made a really stupid move. After watching it on TV and seeing Stenhouse push him halfway down the back straight, I have a little more sympathy. Still, the end result was the driver for a small, family-run team (Justin Allgaier) won the championship and is moving on to bigger and better things. So it's not all bad.

Thanks for the kind words.

We've made some tweaks to the system in the past few days. Namely
- Limiting yellows to one per 3 seconds. The "6 yellow crash" doesn't happen now (unless it lasts 18 seconds ).
- Graded scoring - both positive and negative - when less than 6 people are in a race.

We're pretty happy with the way it's working out so far, although we haven't achieved critical mass yet. It's the chicken and the egg - to get people to join the server, you have to have people on already.

I find that if I hop on the server I can draw a small crowd within a few races, but we don't have constant traffic yet. Still, it's better to have a great race with 4 people than a crappy one with 32.

Quote from Crashgate3 :

Yeah, seems a really good plan. I especially like the way the tiers don't neccesarily reward speed ( )

EDIT: Sorry, reading that back it sounds really sarcastic, I can assure you it wasn't meant to - I really do think it's a good idea

No offense taken .

It's definitely not perfect. LFS yellows seem to be based more on the actual speed of the car vs. the expected speed of the car at any given point. We noticed in testing for example that some spins were almost completely ignored by LFS.

That's why we've supplemented LFS-thrown yellows with spin angle detection. The combination of the two produces pretty good results. It's not 100% accurate, but the end result is that losing control gets penalized, maintaining control gets rewarded.

edited: 12/12/08 - Updated first post with the changes in the system.

Stars and Stripes Sim Racing is proud to announce the launch of a new tiered racing system for LFS. Each driver's race craft index (RCI) is tracked and updated for every race held on the tiered servers. Finishing races improves a driver's RCI. Causing yellow flags decreases a driver's RCI. Higher tiers require higher RCIs. Speed and finishing position are not part of the equation. The #1 goal is to ensure (as much as possible) clean racing.

A bevy of information, including the scoring system, can be found on the S3R tiered racing website. Some key points:

- Everyone starts with zero points and a basic license, which allows racing on the S3 Racing Tier 1 server.
- Racing cleanly earns a higher RCI. An RCI of 125 or greater is required to race on tier 2.
- Drivers can be kicked off of even the lowest tier with an RCI under -30. In the event that a driver goes below -30, his/her points are reset to 0 after 3 days. This is to prevent a driver from being locked out of the system forever, while still providing a period of time to practice offline.
- We plan to add more tiers and/or servers based on demand.
- Tracks rotate every three hours. Each server has it's own track rotation. The track rotation is random, but you will not have the same venue (i.e. two Aston tracks) back-to-back.
- Scoring is graded based on the number of drivers in the race.
- Tier 1 (for now) is TBO, Tier 2 is LRF.

Please direct any feedback on the system, bugs, questions, suggestions, etc, to our forum.

Last edited by Danke, Fri 12 Dec 2008, 14:20.

Quote from anbiddulph :

well, you need a shelf to put it on when not in use, so how bout an irack?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw2nkoGLhrE

As I get older, I'll probably need more technology - pacemaker, dialysis, iron lung...

For years we've known that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Now they've announced bus service.

Quote from Mustafur :

Not since it was adopted.

Ok, I kind of figured that. It seems like the rule is just there so teams have to try to make it look convincing. Of course you can't write a rule that essentially says, "ignore this rule, but make it look good."

I've only been paying attention to F1 for the past few years. Can anyone tell me, has anyone ever been penalized for breaking the "no team orders" rule since it was adopted?

Americans. Oh wait...

Maybe they'll do like the stock motor RC classes and hand out the motors right before the race starts.

I'm really surprised that F1 is going in this direction. I can't picture any of the factory teams sticking around.

Quote from The Very End :

The game is a winner on LAN parties. Usually me and my buddy ends up playing that game all night long.
But what worries me tho - each time we play it everyone gets stomach pain. No, I am not kidding, after 15-20 min playing Quake 3 Arena my and the others buddy's stomach'es start to hurt.. But we ignore that and play it further, despite the pain

I get big time motion sickness when I play FPS games. I didn't used to, but now I get queasy, headaches, you name it. That's why I stopped playing FPS games and went to racing sims. Good move on my part I'd say.

Quote from Becky Rose :

I'm not quite sure I understand what "equalise engine performance" means, are we going to have 1 engine provider? Or fixed power output? (which will just meen engine providers spend the same amount of money finding ways to output that power in a wider range of circumstances).

I'm glad I'm not the only one who was stumped by "equalise engine performance." It makes it sound like they're going to use crate engines.

Having won the first (and only?) Beaver Cup, I can vouch for the quality of the racing in all LOTA leagues. Congrats!

I'm a fan of Grand Am over ALMS. Technology matters much less to me than a competitive playing field.

I did just about choke when I read that Jim Hunter quote though. I hope they don't try to dumb it down.

I recently read a book ("Odyssey" - fiction of course) by Jack McDevitt that had a similar particle collider. In the book though, the scientists were so worried about the giant black hole threat that they built it light years away from Earth.

If anyone's interested...
http://search.barnesandnoble.c ... -McDevitt/e/9780441015405