Normally I totally welcome new drivers, i'm keen to see LFS gain popularity. There is however one pre-condition, respect for other racers (which sometimes veterans are guilty of not having) and a basic level of competence.
Today I verbally bitch-slapped a driver who was clearly new to the game. Without wanting to be rude about it, the guy just wasn't ready to race online. I don't know if it's the same guy making this opening post (although the guy who I spoke too wasn't banned off he just left).
The thing is this driver was significantly slower than the rest of the field, I was lapping him around every two and a half laps of AS Club in the Fox, the speed differential was enormous and so approaching him involved taking evasive action, one moment he was a dot on the mini-map, the next I was fighting to avoid the barrier because i'd approached at around 80mph or more speed difference.
It would have been more appropriate for that driver to have either learned the basics of racing line and general driving in either a slower class of car with a lower speed differential, or in single player mode.
You are ready to race online when you can string some laps together without crashing, you don't need to be Fernando Alonso, you can be a good few seconds off the pace, but it is possible to drive so slowly that you are unsafe. Look what happened to Ide in Formula One ... super license revoked because of incompetency.
I've nothing against new drivers, quite the opposite, and i'm usually there with an easy-drive setup and some helpful advise, although today's muppet would have been hard pushed to get co-operation after what he did at T1... He hit me hard enough to play through 4 more cars.
It's ok to be slow, but it's not ok to lack basic competency. Other people are sharing the same environment and if a driver is so bad they are disrupting the fair play for other competitors, then they have to go away and get some practice before coming back.
LFS is a hard game to master, especially on mouse, and it only takes one bad apple and 6 cars have their race ruined ... as happened in the T1 incident above.