I see the anger between you and Dominik. It's so clear and his commentary exhibits these biases as well.

Quote from TFalke55 :

Just asking, where do you see the competition between different league organizers?

While not directly, there most certainly is competition. Many times drivers will only race in one league race per weekend. Whenever there are two races on the same weekend typically both events suffer, or am I wrong?

There have been plenty of GT leagues, there's been 3 TBO leagues if you count Live For Slicks and with each one attendance has seemed to drop. The 2012 WTBOCS averaged over 20 competitors a round. I'm not sure about Live For Slicks, but even GenR isn't pulling what we did in the WTBOCS in 2012 now. This from a more reputable organization rather than Worldwide Racing.

Not directly is there competition. I, as a director, wish to see all grids in all leagues and events full. Even if that means not having my own events and helping with anothers. If there were only 10 league races a year, would we have full grids in all of them, or would they be laregly the same? This is my question. .

I feel like, even though we all wish each other the best, we still pull from the same audience, and as such compete with one another.

You're right Cornys. If you recall my opening post in this thread one of the points I was trying to make is that the key role in running a league is really one of marketing to your audience [the drivers].

Making a uniquely interesting league is essential to attract drivers. It's okay on the one hand to say "TBO league", one of my favorite car classes - and if I was active that would have a chance of your league attracting me to race it. I like short circuits, and I'd rather do multiple 30 minute races than 90 - so there's also a chance you would lose me by not ticking those boxes... I certainly wouldn't be running in two leagues at once, for every driver these considerations are part of the final decision as to which league to race.

I believe that the best way to attract drivers therefor is to offer something unusual, something outside of the normal LFS parameters that encourage people to look over the standard LFS questions of car/track/racelength.

One of the plans I had for season 2 of the STCC was for car development which was designed to be interwoven both into the TBO car balancing system, and a success ballast system, and also be used to encourage attendance by making it team based.

It was designed to calculate improvements based upon actual driver inputs too, through an insim application and web control interface. The "development" would manifest through ballast and engine restrictions of course, but the program behind it allowed teams to focus their development and do test sessions where they literally drove their car differently to get the best benefit.

It wouldn't have appealed to everyone - nothing ever does - but it was uniquely different to everything else and that alone I am confident would have filled the grid at the time because it was something genuinely different, and therefor interesting.

Then there's being North American which becomes a whole other kettle of fish. 95% of leagues out there are impossible to drive in because they take place at like 10 AM on a week day. Or if they ARE on a weekend,, qualifying is on a weekday in the same time. Then take into account that I'm not in an active team (I am the active team goddammit! ). Finding a suitable league or 2 becomes very difficult with the factors

There are so many variables that make league participation more challenging, at least for me being in the awkward timezone that I'm in. I even contemplated looking at Australia as a place to enter leagues because they're almost in more reasonable times for me There are a lot of competitions I'd love to enter in. GTi Trophy for instance, but they're impossible when I'm sat at work.

tldr; I want moar leagues in better times for North America

Quote from Becky Rose :

One of the advantages of the short tracks is there are less corners to master, which means more drivers are closer to the pace which makes for closer racing. For leagues there are big advantages to racing on short tracks, and few if any advantages to racing on long tracks other than stereotype - and this is why I believe LFS needs more of them.

But it also means if you make a mistake, you'll be lapped.

Quote from Cornys :

If there was less competition between the separate leagues do we as a community beleive that league racing would become more interesting once again?

Just to be clear on this one, GenR do not want to compete with anyone as league organisation (we only compete on the track as drivers), starting to organize leagues was just our last step to achieve in LFS, also we felt like we could do something different, so we are trying to offer different ways of racing and avoid what you guys are already doing as much as we can. But more importantly we want to keep friendly relationships and we try to compromise as much as we can, that's why we had a join venture with Thilo on the NEC and we are always working closely with Deko from NDR for the planning of our leagues. But of course it is not always possible to compromise with everyone, though if I remember well we've moved one of our races to accommodate you last year!

The deal here is to not be stubborn and to avoid thinking that if a league doesn't work well it is the fault of the drivers and/or the ''competition''. When we try a format and it fails, the only thing we can do is try to improve it or ditch it and start something new...and with the downfall of the community it is becoming increasingly complicated to find something which works well enough to maintain a full grid through the all season, so I do not believe that competition between league organisations is the issue here!...if you feel alone, then just try to get closer to the drivers and organizers, talk to them and try to find compromises, always in a friendly way of course!

For the TBO cars, it is more complicated, I've organised 5 seasons of Dailycious series which were very popular in 2009 and 2010, we had close to full grid for most races. But what I have understood about those cars is that they only work per periods and fail in others. The main reason we are failing with TBO trophy is because of the big amount of signups (which we didn't expect) and the much too high level we get in quali, this is alienating the midfield amateur drivers, but we are very much aware of that, so we don't put the fault on the drivers or the competition, but only on our bad quali format for which we are looking for solutions!

Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts! (Winston Churchill)

Some people get influenced by other people, who mostly are like ''this combo is baaad, it's so baaad..''. Many people are about top competition, top level, top racing..Being at the top. Those ppl have forgot what fun is all about..And suddenly, some of those well experienced drivers mostly express their opinions in public ''this so baaad, why drive it...omfgroflcopter...'' Surely, not all the top drivers @ LFS act like this. You can probably guess some great examples for this one though.

Props to the all league organizers who are trying to bring ppl together for some racing. For example, Dead Men Racing. Might not have full grid all the time, but it's really great fun to drive there. Pretty much all of the drivers are on teamspeak. They don't really care about being fast or beating some WRs..They just wanna enjoy racing

Quote from Gutholz :

I know moderators do not get paid for what they do so after a while it can become boring.
Still I think moderators should service the forum instead of ranting about these same ever repeating things.
You have the power to make a difference by doing small things.
For example since years the league section has many inactive subforums, making it very cluttered. Why is nobody sorting that out?
Sure, it is not exciting as an LX8 but if new players can more easily find which leagues are currently running that is a nice thing, too.

This said in an adjacent thread is correct. It's all very nice having an archive of leagues from years ago but having to scroll past a list of them to get to information about current events is silly. Make the LFS leagues and events forum tidier and current so that people can easily see what's going on rather than having to click down into sub forums and then put that at the top of the forum.

Well, there's the 16hour race next weekend and there are only 22 signups... the cancer is the people not wanting to race, there is a magnificent event...

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

tldr; I want moar leagues in better times for North America

Thats why, I menitioned about my league. You up load a hotlap (qualification lap) to determin what group your in, as and when you do, it, but there is a cut off day.

Races take place on a Sunday Evening using around 6-7pm UK time. We used to have people from America/Canada/Australia compete no problem.

Fordie

Quote from chanoman315 :

Well, there's the 16hour race next weekend and there are only 22 signups... the cancer is the people not wanting to race, there is a magnificent event...

Well, if you're realistic, the organisation for this years 16 hours was pretty rushed (to put it nicely), at least it seemed that way from my perspective. I would think that is the main reason for the low attention it got...

If it was the MoE, I don't think more people would attend, to be honest. We got bored of LFS. Sadly.

I would disagree on that. The people are still there you see that on signups for other leagues, it's just harder to get them out and driving, especially now in the summer months. While throwing together a signup and some informations a few weeks before the event would've been enough a few years ago, it just doesn't cut it any more today.

16 hours used to always be in the Autumn (October) so that surely has something to do with the number of signups.

On the other hand it gives newcomers the option to try endurance racing with bit less pressure.

Seeing so many LFS league experts hanging around in this thread,would like to see some opinions what went wrong with Grand Turismo Allrounder Series (link still in my sig),where average attendance is just over 6 per round. It's kinda filling some gap - GTR sprint racing,is this gap there for a reason?

I try to organize more simple events and not top-seriousness leagues,trying to find something different and not overused,even not targeting full grids (would be happy though),but lately everything turns into host team inner battle or "beat-the-Niki" show. Wondering if this has something to do with the "current state of LFS" or I'm doing something wrong? I have a plan to launch new and also very simple league,where would be used in forum poll voted single car for all rounds,not sure if it's worth to bother,don't want to end up with a triel (not sure if it's an actual word,ment is like duel but with 3) with teammates again.

Rony, I think it's a variety of things ranging from awareness all the way to petty things like "I don't like <league organizer>". As someone who has sorta found LFS again after absence I find that awareness is a large issue. Yes the forum exists, but that involves trudging through a lot of threads to find which leagues are active/inactive and a bunch of other things. Heck, I managed to **** up and not realize GT Open was a FZR only league!

Information is a harder issue. I wish I had infinite time, as it would (I think) be incredibly useful to have a website that listed not just a mixed calendar of all leagues, but active series, accepting sign ups and being able to filter by car, team/solo and other things.

Bringing awareness to the people, so they can see all events and even schedule to participate in multiple events is the important issue IMO.

Quote from Framaris :

Just to be clear on this one, GenR do not want to compete with anyone as league organisation (we only compete on the track as drivers), starting to organize leagues was just our last step to achieve in LFS, also we felt like we could do something different, so we are trying to offer different ways of racing and avoid what you guys are already doing as much as we can. But more importantly we want to keep friendly relationships and we try to compromise as much as we can, that's why we had a join venture with Thilo on the NEC and we are always working closely with Deko from NDR for the planning of our leagues. But of course it is not always possible to compromise with everyone, though if I remember well we've moved one of our races to accommodate you last year!

I didn't mean to single you guys out by any means. What you do is great for the community. It's nice to have another league organization running and putting on high quality events . We all should move and accomodate one another. I changed my plans in order to avoid you guys this year . I want you guys just have full grids just the same as I want to. I think all league admins feel that same way, and it makes it nice around here

Quote from Eclipsed :

Seeing so many LFS league experts hanging around in this thread,would like to see some opinions what went wrong with Grand Turismo Allrounder Series (link still in my sig),where average attendance is just over 6 per round. It's kinda filling some gap - GTR sprint racing,is this gap there for a reason?

I try to organize more simple events and not top-seriousness leagues,trying to find something different and not overused,even not targeting full grids (would be happy though),but lately everything turns into host team inner battle or "beat-the-Niki" show. Wondering if this has something to do with the "current state of LFS" or I'm doing something wrong? I have a plan to launch new and also very simple league,where would be used in forum poll voted single car for all rounds,not sure if it's worth to bother,don't want to end up with a triel (not sure if it's an actual word,ment is like duel but with 3) with teammates again.

Honestly, Rony, I don't really see where you went wrong either .

Maybe organizers should just work together instead of having multiple series with no attendance of streamers/commentators/stewards.


How about that?


We already know what's popular. : GTR so how about just stick with that until numbers pick up again.



A stream is crucial for attendance figures. We're all vain, we all like to see ourselves on 'tv' screwing up, or being awesome. So if you can't forfil that, and a few admin cars then you mayaswell forget it.

You wanna feel like the series is valued, when it has only a few guys racing, you lose interest quickly which is a downward spiral.

I agree with blueflame. now tehre are a lot of (the same) gt series, why not work together?

I think the whole game isn't really designed for this. The game and all events are simply too unattached.

I never really joined any events in LFS, but I think it's too much of a hassle to participate. If you take iRacing for example, that whole website is built around leagues and events. There's a clear centralized overview of everything you need to know on the website and such, while everything on LFS has to go via third party websites which not everyone knows, or via the forum which is also far from ideal.

Then there's the problem that every event is hosted separately by people, and everyone has their own rules, or variations on rules. Teams are working against each other during events and host their own event if they can't agree on something which only causes more fragmentation.

LFS on itself should be a platform where you can host events via a set of rules and combo's and whatever.

Again, I only participated in an event or two, but this is how I see it from a spectator view. You also have to understand that I'm far from an iRacing fan and that I never raced on there either, but from what I've seen and heard, is that the hosting of the events is done better. I also think that's why iRacing has far better occupied leagues and people that complete all rounds (also due to the fact that you get scoring at such). I think it's in the nature of people to compete with each other, so bragging with scores and points and whatnot makes it more interesting for people to actually do their best.

Like iRacing, Battlefield 3 is also a good example with Battlelog. The integration of both games are great. You have one centralized webpage with all stats and things, and you browse servers via the website. Although both methods were hated at first, I think it's safe to say that people are starting to get used to it, and can't really do without anymore in other games. That's how I see it at least.

Just my 2 useless cents.

Basically you don't like the freedom,available in LFS?
I'd say it's closer to real life,when there are independent organizations for event organization.

Quote from Eclipsed :

Basically you don't like the freedom,available in LFS?
I'd say it's closer to real life,when there are independent organizations for event organization.

The option to have this freedom is what makes LFS awesome, but on the other and it's also what causes this 'problem'. I never said I don't like the freedom of LFS.

You cant really compare iRacing and LFS on that front. If you want to compete in a league racing sim in either community at a decent level, for most people it will take up their weekend time. Its not just racing, with GenR events for example their Q system means you are hotlapping a decent amount of Friday and Saturday. If you are spending the money you have to pay in iRacing, you are more likely to be the sort of guy who will make his schedule suite that and have the motivation to go with it, and obviously with a larger player base to find a grid of people who want to do that. If you run multiple leagues at the same time, then that will take up a lot of your weekend. That is probably why some people dont get successful leagues. They dont have the "prestige" of other leagues, and people dont have unlimited time to race everything

Well, lets be honest, Bose, the quality of race-craft skill in iRacing is way worse than the leagues in LFS. That's why LFS is still popular, not only do you get quick guys on track at once, but you get hard racing, the majority of the time without retardedness amongst the top half of the field.

iRacing's pro series seems to have a major wreck every other week taking half the field out, well, maybe they don't help themselves by putting shitty tracks like Sebring or VIR to run an F1 car on.