The only time I have seen it is where people have not applied the usual restrictions, 3% for FXO 45% for UFBR, and continue to try and join without fixing it.
Airio was a little lacking here, as it didn't say exactly why people were specced, and if they tried 3 times they get booted. I believe that this has now been changed so that it states what you need to change.
Ario / Lapper are great tools, but will never replace live admins.
Same thing for CTRA - the reporting system was an attempt to provide good races (upper licences) without live admins, while providing training to beginners on entry servers.
In my opinion CTRA was designed neglecting "old timers", excellent concept though for new LFS players.
I got fed up with pickup racing lack of etiquette, I'm not commited / competitive enough for league racing, I am not newbie enough to start collecting point on a specific server.
After a while I've found a place to race, that suits my (lack of) racing timeframe and my conception of online racing (with live admins). So I can say that such places do exist, even if they are well hidden within the myriad of servers running the same combo or silly lapper / ario configurations. Keep searching!
The major benefits of using Airio are the autorestart, track rotations, and enforcing restrictions for GT2/BabyR classes. We do not use the various inbuilt points systems on our servers, and I have tried to make them as least-spammy as possible.
shhh. keep it low please!
Not supposed to be an advertisement, Doorman and Lameduck are keeping all lunch vouchers for Venca and Moose to stay on board these days, so I have nothing to get from that
PS Besides this place is only fun for slowpokes and backmarkers, so I can get some competition down the grid
I am not saying this but as you brought it up, yes it was HAHA. There is great servers out there, I mentioned one in my original post. A little more variation would be nice. Maybe if there was, and not 85% servers had BL with GT/GTI then maybe they all wouldn't be so empty?
OK before somebody suggests this, surprised they haven't, make you own server. Not all of us are blessed with that bandwidth.
The are plenty of people who can provide a server, it's just that there is a good chance it wont get used. I can get franky to set up a server with any combo you want.
After getting back into LFS we (ATC) have been using the LR server alot, not because of the combo or the insim but purely down to the good racing. We had a 60 GP (which you would have had to fight for a grid slot at one time) and only really got half the people we would of liked.
We're starting to set things up again, we used to race XFR/AS2 all the time and always have the server full within minutes, but those times are gone. We're looking to be racing the XFR on various combos and see how it goes.
p.s. Not ass kissing but if it wasn't for the guys in T7R providing us with some excellent races and a great league a few months back I dunno if we'd have picked up LFS again as much.
Aah yes - the 60 lap GPs - they were great. Good to see you're still about dude. Actually there's a lot of racers I recognise from years ago in this thread. Nice to see.
Well Fordman, its like this, every server wants some cool insim point automated admin system.
"Ohh you had a crash" "email it to us we review it."
Sorry to point you out beano but i frigging hate this ario stuff.
I dont want rotation, I want Pure LFS servers please, less spam (chat is not spam btw)
Im not bothered about TBP SPB sector times unless and pushing the car hard and then i will use LFSWorld when serious.(Ingame provides this info anyways)
Did i mention i hate autorotation.
What happened to the admin, you know the guy/gal keeping up moral and keeping idiots out and good vibes in.
Meanwhile the real racers keep getting rear ended, pushed off the track. But its ok i can email a report ........
Seriously being taken out doesnt bother me much though, as 99/100 I can smile as I know that the other racer is learning from his/her mistake.
You will still find that same experience fordman if you look around, people seem to be more true to themselves once peer pressure has worn off, and I still find myself helping other drivers with sets driving styles and lines.
Ahhhh but then come to the forums and all you see are childish posts/rants/ideas & the bullies and freaks.
There was once a time where you needed to really read a thread, now with my ignore list and the replies of what seems to be a selfish, arrogant and disposable minority. That seem to care about their own opinion, rather then the topic of the thread.
I have an idea i have long thought about, splitting the forum for under 21's and for over 21's
Hururattio made some very good points and voiced out most of my feelings about why some are disappearing, and shit... I have to agree with Tristan about CTRA.
I'm not one of these oldtimers that gets bored, or thinks dev pace is too
slow, Hell i have hardly driven the S2 Cars, still totally addicted to TBO.
Now usally i would just close my browser window at this point, and just walk away.
Today i thought otherwise.
*** edit *****
Just like to add though the forum has improved a little recently, some good threads.
I'm probably repeating some of what has already been said...
The way I see it its hard to find a popular server that isint running areio (sp) not only does this destroy the inserver chat, it also means all the car filters in LFS serverlist are no longer correct.
I joined a TBO (listed in serverlist) server a few months back, and couldn't drive any of the TBO cars because of server specific rules (points related)
I did stay and drive the XFR and realised I needed to drive months before accuiring the neccessary pointsrank. I felt dissapointed but continued at the LR server and enjoied some really nice races. I achieved the TBO rank last week
For me when in an "arieo" server I find the !help commands feel unnatural compared to what CTRA had, and I still dont understand what all the info displayed in some menus means.
When the CTRA was running it was the first of its kind, only had 3 or 4 public servers out of hundreds of "normal" servers, and when you joined it clearly told you what you needed to drive etc and backed it all up with a website that tracked everything, with clear and comprehensive rules etc.
Its seems now every server has different arieo settings and commands and is more confusing, than ctra was, to me at least.
There are still good pickup races to be had, you just need to use your LFS buddy list to find them or keep shifting servers until you find something good
The flood of BL1 servers is of course because a few patches back demo servers got combined with S1 and S2 servers in the list, without the option of filtering them ATM
Ill keep an eye out for ya on the servers Fordie ;P
If you are looking for a server where you can just login and have a quick fair race, try the Redline Demo server. Like all demo servers it attracts it's fair share of crash kiddies but most of the time there is an admin around to sort them out. I am often there and have track marshall status so I am able to kick ban or send to spectate any of the trouble makers. If there isn't any admin online you can leave a message on the redline forums http://www.team-redline.co.uk/forum/index.php and an admin will usually check in and sort it out.
Regarding airio spamming to much informations: Just hit "shift+i" turn every option off, save it and you won't see any of the clutter. That's always the first thing I do on any server running airio. (You'll only have to do that once on the particular server and your options will be bound to your S2 account)
I've got not much to say about the rest of this thread, but I think it's a little too easy to just blame the server owners, there are hundreths of servers out there but mostly the ones running special server software are the ones well populated, the demand for it is certainly there and with a few tweaks you wont even notice that you're racing on a server with airio/lapper enabled.
Can't say that i have much to add to this thread, but i can say i've enjoyed reading it thoroughly. Makes me smile to see lots of old names holding a mature conversation on these forums (a seemingly rare occurance of late).
I will be watching intently to see what can come out of this discussion, as it seems to be the group of like-minded people who brought me to LFS way back when.
Going back to something Dave mentioned........could an automated friends list, like the friends list on the xbox360 live system, help find racers easy?.
Currently, there is no simple way (i know of) of finding your friends, sure, you can find them, but its not as easy as it could be.
On the xbl system, as soon as you log on it gives you prompts like, "racer a is racing on Forza 2, press a to join", surely something like this built in to LFS could aid finding our friends?
Sounds like a good idea Dan
We already have the /find command, I would have thought without too much programming time, a system could be made to look for your "buddys" when you click multiplayer, maybe auto buddy list update (from LFSWorld) or manual where you have to input all your friends usernames, the former would be nice
I've thought about that "splitting the forum" idea Gener_Al mentioned, but I think whatever measures you take people will circumvent them, increasing the need for more policing in the long run, itws worth noting that the state of the forum and the state of online activity dont reflect each other IMO, there is still good racing online once you find the right bunch of like minded players but to the new to LFS player I think this forum has become a very dark place compared to what it was when it began, after the good old RSC days lol
Maybe if it wasn't as intrusive as the XBL system (which personally, I don't find intrusive), maybe something that you can access from the multiplayer menu, rather than is always active in game?
I wouldn't want to be informed that 4 of my friends are switching from some FOX server to an FBM server while I'm doing a quali-run in an LX6, so I'd rather see such notifications on demand.
On the topic, I still think LFS just needs more content. But I mean its content should at least double. And that's all I'm waiting for.
Though, since it's modern at the moment, we could alternatively start a break-away master server.
It opens the servers page, sorted by occupancy, public/non-cruise servers only.
If you have added friends, and turned on the doohickey for notifications then you will be notified if they are online and can click to join them.
Of course you aren't notified in-game when someone goes online, but you're racing then anyway I suppose.
You see, this is one of the (many) things that urk me about LFS, these sorts of things should be "in game", and not be the realm of external apps / programs, or the user jumping through hoops, we are (too) used to "making do"
It's how it worked in the olden days - Firing up All-Seeing-Eye with your custom server filters and friends list for a game of CS well before Steam came about.
The Steam server browser and friends list is not so-much different to LFSWorld if you think about it. Major difference is that it runs all the time in your taskbar.
