The online racing simulator
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As an additional information:
There are some users of these servers that abuse random racing servers. The most of them were driving with the Quattro-tags unfortunatly I don't have any replays of them.

Anyway, the provocation from these drivers really kills the fun for many simracers
Quote from RussianAttack96 :There are some users of these servers that abuse random racing servers.

In what way they abuse them?
Quote from sermilan :
Quote from RussianAttack96 :There are some users of these servers that abuse random racing servers.

In what way they abuse them?

I guess that drivers of flood public servers with public vote and keep everyone else banned/kicked
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I was thinking the same thing just the other day. Consolidation of LFS servers would concentrate the community and possibly filter out the crackers, but it might also channel them towards servers with genuine, rule-abiding racers too.
The cure may be worse than the disease :/
One more thing that has to be addressed and that's why I asked how they abused them is DDOS vulnerability. Last Friday there was an unusual large number of racers on FM's FOX Friday. Nothing went bad during practise and quali, but as soon as we started racing.....

Well, see for yourself, mpr is attached. Several restarts - same result, only when we moved to another server (and lost about 40% of the original starters) the situation settled down.
Attached files
LAG - SO4R_race_50L_19R_0F.mpr - 1.7 MB - 368 views
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Taking away the option of hosting servers your self, would punish all the people who did pay for LFS. I'm running 6 servers for many years now and coded a lot of great scripts within the Lapper environment. I would feel gutted not be able to do all those things anymore. When trying to stop criminals, you shouldn't punish the people playing by the book (which the industry has done for many years with all sorts of creepy DRM systems), but they should go after the abusers. Sadly that will cost a lot of time, energy and not to mention money, so it's advisable to weigh the options carefuly.
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Sorry to revive this thread but couldn't be there a solution like the guys from Project Reality (Battlefield 2 Mod) do?

There you can only host a server with a valid (free) license. This could eliminate the issue with illegal servers.

This would circumvent the problem with centralized servers and in the same time make setting up illegal servers more complicated.
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The purpose of the grudge?
and what harm these people?

but the server I can help prevent people selling lfs so trying to credit through
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Quote from cargame.nl :People stealing from a shop. If many people steal, the shop has to close. This is the harm these people do.

And it are many people. All these Facebook groups and the Russian equivalents. I know them all. It's pretty easy to research with a little bit of internet investigation.

Legal online racing already is dead (sorry readers, it really is). Not because of the age of LFS, because of the ridiculously high amount of illegal activities. The release of the new Westhill only boosted the illegal environment, not the legal one. The difference between Iracing and LFS is its protection of online environment. We should have that here too.

I agree with you on that. I misunderstood
How many of our wonderful skinners, and renderers do you think really _paid_ for Photoshop and 3DS Max (and VRay / Brazil)? I'm pretty sure you could probably use at most, both hands to count them.

I looked at the download numbers for some of my free programs I've written. LFS Player Hacker has been downloaded over 24,000 times. If I'd sold that for £1 a pop, do you think I'd have made £24k? very unlikely.. _maybe_ £50.. the rest would have shared it around / cracked it or simply not bothered.. 1 less person using a cracked piece of software doesn't equal one more legit purchase, by any stretch of the imagination.

If you write software for a living, you learn to understand this.. as the devs have done I'm sure. You can't prevent it (anyone really believing you can is simply delusional), but if you accept that it's going to happen and you do what you feel is adequate in making it harder for Joe SixPack to do it, then you're likely to have a few more strands of hair at a later point in life than if you stressed and fretted about every person that might be using a hookey copy of your software.

The devs themselves are obviously happy with the legit:cracked ratio (OK, maybe not _happy_ per-se, but understand and can tolerate it) else there would be other measures in place or they would pack up their bags and go home.

If you make software protection _too_ complex, then it's only the legitimate users who will suffer.. this has been proven multiple times with big houses / publishers, like Ubisoft etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not condoning any of it.. but unless you have a vested financial interest in LFS itself, I really wouldn't continue losing sleep over it.



Cheers..

Ian
Still - these illegal servers have a banner on them:
"Hey,you don't need to buy LFS,come here and have it for free!"
This is where devs' money and legal server population is lost - on users,who would buy,but not spending money because of free alternative.
Just read the thread, I totally agree with Dave, illegal S1/S2/S3 servers are destroying LFS's legal multiplayer.

A official server hosting and official server hosters would be a nice solution, or just add user login into the dedicated server app so that DEMO users can't create licensed servers. Wink
Quote from nacim :so that DEMO users can't create licensed servers. Wink

problem is not on demo servers (only wen they advirsiting illegal servers) problem is (i don't know how to explain correct becouse i'm not hosting anything but i know a little how this works) in i don't know in lfs? becouse you really don't need any license to play online on s3 when you make server on pc or other host. When s3 come on cracked severs and unlocking was gone i come to (i think everyone know where) and about this pleace was maybe 100+ maks online players on all severs then some guy from old crack who own most of pirate servers find this and he just make tutorial and call thousand people for this shit and now is problem +next thousand of turkey people..

Maybe that's sound for You will stipid but big reason why i don't get license was price i have sometimes free money but i was think ech time when i buy s1 i need to pay full price again for s2 until i saw this https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/89305-Buying-license so for s1 im sure i get money
for holidays to pay devs a litlle and also i can help about this servers a little but propably is nothing to do whitch this.
To start, the community doesn't really have any say in what piracy countermeasures are/are not implemented.

I have to agree with Ian.H, combating piracy usually hurts paying users more than the pirates. Software piracy is a highly debated topic and the fact is you can not make the analogy of software piracy to stealing physical goods. I would conservativly estimate the percentage of cracked users that would buy LFS if there was no cracking scene to be under 0.5%.

The demo is a great deterrent to piracy, and of course there are those that will tell you the reason there is no S1+ traffic is the demo. Old games that survive 10+ years almost exclusively do so because of the community taking over the role of the developers (look at project reality).

LFS was popular when it was competitive in the sim racing category, and it will be popular again when it is comparable to current Gen sims. Piracy isn't killing online traffic, its happening because the only people who would play LFS over a competing game are those that don't want to spend any money(10-14 year old Russian pirates).
Personally I think that it's purely speculative to say that 0.5% of thief would buy a product they enjoy playing. I'm sure most of them are intelligent enough to understand they need to support a small developer if they want to have the said product being developed further on in middle and long term future. The fact that they have the possibility to use it without paying overweight their good will in supporting the game they enjoy, and this is the problem LFS is facing now with piracy.

The iRacing way (launching through browser while being logged on LFS-world for example) isn't such a bad idea. The thief would probably still be able to race offline but the online part would be saved. Even then, how many users are able to play iracing offline? Even if iracing is an expensive niche service, they are able to survive by keeping everyone on-board and I guess that's something to regard whether we like their model or not.

It's a vicious circle, if no one is online, then no one wants to join. How many times years ago did I join empty servers, seeing one or two users join/part because no one's there but once there are three,four users simultaneously, the speed at which ten more arrive is exponential. This game deserve a better fate than what it gets now.
Go on lfsworld.net click on LFS Racer database/stats

Turks licenced .6% sure this is problem turks biggest community in LFS but many hacked servers used by turks Smile
if all the crackers bought licenses we would actually have a very active LFS scene. A lot of my teammates with licenses race in crack races with their fellow country men and try their best to get them to buy licenses. We have actually given 2 licenses as a team to those we felt worthy of them, but there are too many to buy for all. I guess we can do nothing until it becomes impossible to host crack servers

(scawen, you can fix this by removing the ability to join by server IP on LFS)
You're wasting your time, people on turkey and some other same classe country always played pirated games, buying over the internet and spending 1 month worth of salary ( if not 2 ) for a game is a no-no for them, they always lived that way, if you go there you can find stores who are legally selling pirated games for pc and consoles, and no one can say something about that since there is a lot of people who can enjoy them for 1.5$.

It's simple, if they find a cracked games they will play them, If they can't they will look elsewhere, because many of them simply dont have the choices at all, there is no potential customers for game who are selling over the net in those country, and tbh even if the devs managed to secure the game we'll only see the same empty servers all the day for obvious reason that you and me know very well, you will simply make them leave if you force them to buy the game, but yea I am sure if they leave some " human " will have large nasty smile.

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