LR Race servers do a good ranking system i think... and they produce some good racing too most of the time
most servers have a ranking type system, but no where near as complex as the ctra one i dont think
The special "key" from the ctra system wasnt the ranking system, it was the Wrecker / Report system. And that why you cant have that nice races on one of the Semi-Ranked server (what we have out there now).
The problem from the Report system is that you need some group of people that will check all the replays, Reports. and this will take a hell lot of a time.
The Ctra was a great system, and probely still is a great system, but you cant expect from one guy to check all the reports.
So if someone is planning on a new Ctra he need to be damm sure that he got a Big Stable group together to check all the reports!
Sam is quite right that for the CTRA to come back it has to be an evolution of the concept, not a replacement. CTRA failed to adapt and evolve over the last year and died from the inside and I think Sam's post is a frank acknowledgement that he realised this too late.
For any system to stand up it has to remain dynamic and pro-active, and keep developing. There is no "It's finished" in online gaming, and therefor it has to very much be a team effort and no one person can do it all once it is out in the wild.
For my own part the system I am [slowly] working on does not replace CTRA, it is a new concept - a rethink, and a fresh approach - designed to compliment every server and add to its armoury of tools and functionality. It's not a replacement CTRA, it is a 'server management system' in the same way CTRA was a 'server management system', but it's a rethink of the concept and is designed to compliment all servers not just a given server operator.
I'm all too aware of the burdens that both myself and Sam previously went through however, that of burnout, and i'm keen to avoid repeating that which is why if my system ever appears it's going to be a fair while from now as I focus my life on other areas. Developing for LFS is a hobby to me, and i'd like it to be a pleasurable one - and that meens if I feel like working on something not Blue 2 related then that is exactly what i've been doing.
Ultimately, Blue 2 - in as much as is possible - will have to be open sourced simply to give it the ability to react and evolve and develop to react to online trends. This cannot be done by 1 person, the history of the CTRA proved that more than once.
When a replacement for the CTRA does arrive, whether by the new affiliation Sam has found or in the approach of Blue 2 - or indeed, as is in my mind most likely, a server that ultimately runs both tools (as B2 is designed to be complimentary in this way), then it will not be the CTRA of old.
Ultimately, the structured nature of the racing that was on CTRA is not the key reason behind it's sucess, as previously stated the sucess of it was in the reporting system, and the tiering/access limitation of 'pro' servers.
Access limitations are a double edged sword. There are many experienced drivers who never qualified for the higher CTRA servers simply because they did not wish to go through the access system of the lower CTRA servers. I've spoken at some length to drivers for whome this effected, and intend to do so more yet, in my own efforts to devise a system that is as inclusive as possible and yet still provides open access pickup racing for drivers of a proven skillset.
Additionally, it is clear to me that whilst the tiering of servers is a great concept to give experienced drivers a good place to enjoy public pickup racing, that saturation of servers in this regard is not a healthy approach. There should, in my view, only be a couple of 'pro' restricted pickup servers.
With a community driven approach to handling of servers, I think, that running one of the few 'pro' servers in itself is a task that should be limited to experienced, enthusiastic, qualified server operators who fit the bill for giving the public a good variety of pickup racing.
In essense, I intend to bring the server operator community together to work together in a very similar way that the CTRA brought drivers together. To provide places for 'pro' drivers, aswell as giving feature rich content and extended features to the entire LFS userbase.
This is where Blue 2 is headed, and as I mentioned before, it by no meens needs to be mutually exclusive with any other servers systems. (and in this regard it should be noted that I intend to use the $prefix for commands again ;P ).
theirs many leagues and such available, if their unsuitable talk to the owners of the most popular teams here and ask them to arrange a co-op server , we everyone trains/levels up, much like Ctra, improve + bragging rights...
Yes that's the direction i'm headed. My hope is for Blue 2 to be able to handle and run on every server in LFS, with every feature fully customiseable and optional. To do this it is built upon a neural network, with several parties already have expressed a keenness to run 'nodes' of the application. These nodes should be sufficient to manage every LFS server.
I'm taking a totaly different approach to driver licencing, systems such as the CTRA's licence system will be fully integrateable into Blue 2, or optionally disregarded, but access limitations to 'pro' servers will work very differently.
I do not think that the userbase on LFS can support a 3 tier system, it's my feeling that for pickup racing there is enough of a userbase to support one open wheel and one tin top 'pro' server.
Also, pro servers have a high degree of workload for the operators in handling reports etc. It's my feeling that this work is best shared and moved between those operators able and willing to work to a reasonable standard, and i'm devising the system to support this approach. When launched, if the solution I deliver proves popular, I believe it will make a positive impact for all of LFS and not create access restricted content all over the place with insufficient drivers for any of the systems to work.
In short, it is intended to share the 'pro' status between all the willing operators. With the currently active drivers chosing what server they want to race on.
My hope is that this approach, of mutual co-operation and adaptive server access restriction, with drivers able to earn their 'pro' status on all servers irrespective of individual server ranking systems, will ultimately lay the basis for better mutual co-operation within the server community.
I also hope to devise automated mechanisms of helping to 'drive' active player traffic around the content that LFS offers, with the hope of improving the variety of available LFS content whilst still allowing for the popular static combo's. I'm not going to give too many details on this yet as it's very involved and still a little unclear in my plans anyway, but again, the intention is to produce a solution that enhances LFS without taking anything away, with the desire for the various operators to co-operate and share administering the active driver population: Either by the means Sam hinted at with the direction he's taking; or live adminning; or however an operator wishes to work.
EDIT: Just to add and to hint, i'm planning on using a heuristical method of popularising the 'floating' content part of the system by providing mechanisms to encourage content to be tried. For instance, we've all sat on a server waiting for more players, rather than relying on track rotation on a 1st tier server to encourage drivers through a fixed tiered system, I hope for Blue 2 to pick those servers with small player numbers and encourage other players to join up and race together, the hope is that when a few people fancy a bit of LX racing, Blue 2 might encourage a few more LX racers to join them. etc.
In essence, i'm trying to address problems, not create new ones, with the vision I have for the tool I am working on. It isn't intended to 'do everything' and provide a framework that servers must work around, it's intended to add to the toolset on each server that it is run on and work around their existing practices, and unlike the CTRA which was a closed system, it's an open system, my hope is that it benefits the whole community.
competition keeps the guarantee that the server owners try to get them better as the others
and you cant really compare the servers to each others because:
- LR has licence based servers with tin top cars
- FM has single seater servers
- SR has championship based servers (btw what happened to them?)
and not to forget CD 1, they provide really hard GTR racing with a championship sometimes (dont know really how it works there, but you can read alone i think )
Becky, if you haven't already done so, worth talking to EQ Worry to see if there are any data elements that would be useful for Blue 2 that can be captured by the increasing number of server operators using the Airio application.
Whilst Airio should quite happily sit alongside Blue2 on the same server it's framework is not suited to the task of talking to the Blue2 database servers.
Blue 2 can connect to and track every server whether it runs Airio or not without the need for running software on the server host, so stats can be acquired regardless of what software is running.
To explain a little - Blue 2 is being developed as a neural network, each node on this world wide network (of which several parties have agreed to run it and I just need an Asia / Australasia partner nearer launch) will handle numerous servers. I believe I will have sufficient capacity in place to cope with several hundred servers which is likely more than are likely to sign up already - I just would like an Asia / Australasia node for low ping to those regions.
You do not need to run a copy of Blue 2 to have it, it's all done from the web. Your web account gives you access to configure Blue 2 to connect to your server, the web talks to the database servers, the database servers talk to the nodes, the nodes talk to your server...
In order to protect the integrity of the Blue 2 database only static IP 24/7 datacentre based machines will have access to the Blue 2 database servers, so individual users of Airio all over the world are not going to have access, and Blue 2 is quite capable of collecting any data it needs from insim itself.
That's the basics of it anyway, i'm actually yet to finish the neural network stuff, but it's not far off. It needs a day spending on it but at the moment I only have my laptop and I preffer to do app development on my big computer - which suffered one of those failures which takes money to fix a month back :/
heh no no, like I said before the purpose of Blue 2 is to fix problems without creating new ones - it is not being designed to do everything. The philosophy of it is to be open to all, anyone can use it, anyone can make use of whatever features they want from it, and it will be open sourced (another reason why the database servers will be protected in the way i'm planning) for community development.
Although it will be open source the core application is a multi-threaded app and not for the feint hearted, some experience of mutexes is required. The web site of it too will be open sourced and is being written in OO php + OO javascript with heavy use of ajax. So any reasonably competent web developer will be able to enhance it.
Ultimately the only things that I will control is the updates that go live, which is simply to check quality, stability, and security. Longer term I may even shake that off to a committee somehow.
I'm building the framework, but I intend to give it to the community in its entirety once it's reached a point where it is able to walk on it's own feet.
I think you missunderstood what I was getting at. Becky knew what I meant and has obviously a similar vision for a while.
I wasn't talking about comparing the servers.
You asked what happened to the SR servers? I think LR happened to them. SR has points being reset every month while LR keeps the points going. Just my opinion, I could be way out.
Say what you like about the racing being the most important, people like to collect points, they like to see that they are gaining something over time, me included.
My thoughts are that SR could carry on their monthly points thing but also every point you earn at SR could count towards your "career" points. This way "points collectors" would have more choice of where to drive. Same could work for the Driving standards and bans etc. Get banned from one, get banned from them all.
I'm not saying any of this is easy to implement, it's just an idea. What I am also NOT saying is they would have to become the same.
