I haven't played LFS for a while myself, so I'm as guilty as anyone, but it seems that the servers got very quiet around last summer and they haven't recovered. Is this the iRacing effect?

TBH I subscribed to iRacing for 2 months and didn't think it was all that interesting. I'm surprised that so many people seem to have jumped ship already. It can't be the lure of the multiplayer because the multiplayer is so inconvenient, so what it is?

I think yes. This and the lack of updates. I gave up on LFS in September and I'm just playing from time to time when job, school and PS3 give me some loose.

I don't know how big the Iracing userbase is, but I doubt it is big enough to suck a chunk of customers from LiveforSpeed, plus I think a lot of the LFSers can't really afford it (especially at such times).

The inactivity of LFS has nothing much to do with the competition, rather than itself not providing the sort of new excitment due to slow progression.

Quote from JJ72 :

I don't know how big the Iracing userbase is, but I doubt it is big enough to suck a chunk of customers from LiveforSpeed, plus I think a lot of the LFSers can't really afford it (especially at such times).

The inactivity of LFS has nothing much to do with the competition, rather than itself not providing the sort of new excitment due to slow progression.

I see a lot of LFSers with 300$ steering wheels and 2000$ PC. Why wouldnt they be able to pay 200$ for a year of gaming?

Did iRacing kill LFS? By just itself? No. iRacing, coupled with slow development of LFS is killing LFS.

EDIT: You have 5 seconds to catch a breath. Flaming will restart in 5...4...3...2...1...

Not yet. But it will do soon if LFS doesn't do something drastic quite soon.

iRacing is too expensive to compete atm.

no, i dont think it's killed LFS, though I havent had a race in lfs in ages... What little time i have for sim racing is going to be spent trying to get faster @ LFS.

perhaps not just iracing, i've been trying out NKPRO on the quiet....

Is it even true that the number of active LFS players is declining? I'd like to see some numbers please. Otherwise this discussion is pointless.

Quote from Gnomie :

Is it even true that the number of active LFS players is declining? I'd like to see some numbers please. Otherwise this discussion is pointless.

No, the numbers of active players is not declinating. If you go to LFS Desktop, click two times on "Racers and hosts online" and then on "History", you'll see that the number of racers online per day is continually growing.

Now the problem is that if cruising, drifting, and bangers servers are growing, racing, or at least clean racing servers are declinating... So I'd say, no, iRacing is not killing LFS, because there's still new people every day who buy a license, but iRacing is stoling from LFS a lot of clean and experienced drivers. And the lack of these nice people make for example the situation of yesterday evening : only two really populated racing server(redline racing with tbo, and conedodgers with gtr@as3). And during this time, [CAD]'s DD server were attracting a bunch of people, the Falken drift server too I guess, and I'll don't speak of the cruise servers. For comparaison I remember that when I went online for the first time with my S2 license, I had the choise between 3 or 4 race servers, and that was only at 1800 UTC IIRC. And this situation will be probably worse in the next few weeks with the disparation of the CTRA servers.

You can see the numbers in LfS World, Gnomie

And to add to the topic: I don't think that iRacing "killed" LfS, it's rather the natural cycle of a game. Anything new rekindles interest that wears off until the next new thing is added. Problem is though, that LfS is really starting to show it's age, which makes it interesting only to a hardcore playerbase, and less to new ones.
That effect makes the "wave" of interest smaller than it could potentially be.

Also, many people here are long time followers, and I guess they are in a similar situation like me: The times in which I actively pursue to play LfS become further apart and shorter. And THAT is what's going to cause LfS's slow "death".

LFS isn't even Beta lol. How can you compare games to eachother when not even finished. I Like LFS better, just because...

Quote from thunderhead :

did iracing kill lfs? By just itself? No. Iracing, coupled with slow development of lfs is killing lfs.

Quoted for truth.

Quote from Scrabby :

LFS isn't even Beta lol. How can you compare games to eachother when not even finished.

Ah, the good old 'beta' -argument. Still hearing it after all these years.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

TBH I subscribed to iRacing for 2 months and didn't think it was all that interesting. I'm surprised that so many people seem to have jumped ship already. It can't be the lure of the multiplayer because the multiplayer is so inconvenient, so what it is?

I think iRacing gives access to relatively clean and careful racing without the necessity of joining leagues, which in fact are even more inconvenient. I don't know if this is a result of the system promoting careful driving (you need reasonably high SR to move to higher license and drive more interesting cars online) or only the fact that many teenagers cannot afford or justify its cost.

Last I read, iRacing was hovering around 6,000 active players, as players come and go. This is pretty small compared to the number of LFS player or players of any game.

As far as interest in online racing goes, LFS is one of the few games that still gets around 1,000 players online at peak times. The rest of the sim world is now in a cycle where they get a new game, play it for a while, then retire and wait for the next best thing to come along. I think there's a general burnout factor because some players have been playing online for over 10 years and the newness is long gone.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

I haven't played LFS for a while myself, so I'm as guilty as anyone, but it seems that the servers got very quiet around last summer and they haven't recovered. Is this the iRacing effect?

TBH I subscribed to iRacing for 2 months and didn't think it was all that interesting. I'm surprised that so many people seem to have jumped ship already. It can't be the lure of the multiplayer because the multiplayer is so inconvenient, so what it is?

It can't be iRacing alone (i still think it's too expensive to get a big userbase), but LFS has a lot of competition that seems to be developing faster then LFS. rFactor mods that keep popping up, GTR Evolution, the last Netkar PRO update.

Quote from JeffR :

Last I read, iRacing was hovering around 6,000 active players, as players come and go. This is pretty small compared to the number of LFS player or players of any game.

As far as interest in online racing goes, LFS is one of the few games that still gets around 1,000 players online at peak times. The rest of the sim world is now in a cycle where they get a new game, play it for a while, then retire and wait for the next best thing to come along. I think there's a general burnout factor because some players have been playing online for over 10 years and the newness is long gone.

True, the lifecycle of LFS and the LFS users is longer. But the same cycle also happens in LFS. When there is a new update there are more active users then after a long period of no updates.

I've noticed every time a new patch is released the number of players spike so when 0.6A is out i bet the number of lfs players will increase alot.

I just think for a lot of people that race LFS a lot, it gets a little tired. In all the time I've had LFS, we've had one new variation of a track which was SO6 - though SO6 is a cracking new addition .

I think what LFS really needs is a completely new track location, like we have Aston, South City etc. Marry that with the new Scirrocco and we have a ball game!!!!!

iRacing is awesome for oval! Really is. Whenever I've driven it on LFS, after a short while I've had enough while on iRacing the immersion is incredible!

I don't think iRacing has done anything to LFS. I just think LFS needs more constant updates to keep it up with the new boys on the block!

I reckon the whole rental thing turns a lot of people off, I've paid 24 quid for almost 2 years of LFS, which really makes $200 for a year of iRacing look rather silly tbh.

Just get hold of a copy of Nascar 2003 if you can, its just iRacing but without the laser scanned tracks.

But if the developers want LFS to survive, I really do think they should think about making their team a bit bigger, you can't really expect anything approaching fast development from a team of 3 people, all of whom have lives to get on with. C'mon lads, let some of us help you out!

lol

Quote from JeffR :

I think there's a general burnout factor because some players have been playing online for over 10 years and the newness is long gone.

Thats what ive seen, old faces going new faces appearing.
LFS didnt get killed & isnt even close to it imo.

oh and lol at kev again

I don't go online to look a whole lot, to be honest, but that's because when I have I've usually seen half a dozen servers with <10 people in, then a bunch of demo servers.

Maybe most people are settled into doing their one favourite thing with LFS and they know what times their favourite server is busy.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

and they know what times their favourite server is busy.

aye... whenever casse highlights everyone on irc to insult us and tell us to join his server

Quote from thisnameistaken :

I don't go online to look a whole lot, to be honest, but that's because when I have I've usually seen half a dozen servers with <10 people in, then a bunch of demo servers.

Maybe most people are settled into doing their one favorite thing with LFS and they know what times their favorite server is busy.

True for me. Only time i'm only is on Sunday evening.

i went awol from LFS and iracing for 3 months and when i came back a couple of weeks ago i had a couple of surprises, the fist was how quiet some of my favourite LFS servers are now and the second was how many more racers there are on iracing both when i come home from work at 6am and at 8pm.

hopefully the LFS numbers will pickup with the new patch but of course from the devs point of view the number that matters is the number of new licences sold each month so while the numers of current drivers may affect how attractive LFS is to possible buyers it may well be that, despite numbers of active drivers falling, the licences are still selling at a satisfactory rate.

Quote from JJ72 :

I don't know how big the Iracing userbase is, but I doubt it is big enough to suck a chunk of customers from LiveforSpeed, plus I think a lot of the LFSers can't really afford it (especially at such times).

Dec 2008: More than 8,000 individuals, representing a cross section of the motorsport community, have subscribed to date.

http://www.iracing.com/newsEvents/article.php?id=87

Like that suggests with 'motorsport community', of course 99% of those inviduals are real racing drivers, so its effect on player bases of other sims is quite minimal... :rolleyes: