I earlier suggested that instead of having a lot of short random races we could have a small online tournament system: http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=2256. Lately I found that maybe we could have just more goals than a better pb or winning the race.

1. How about having some lfsworld related info during lfs races as commentator output. Like having the commentator (maybe the host) say things like:
- This is playerX's 100th race
- playerX made a new pb 1:56:12, advancement of 0,2 seconds
- This is playerX's 100th win, congratulations!

This kind of simple messages? And also an option to turn them off too

2.a Then what about making the players' have some kind of experience rank, maybe measured in laps or races? Nothing having to do with the pbs or wrs, just some kind of ladder where you climb up as you play lfs more and more (and more and more...)? By ladder I don't mean system where all players are set in some sort of order with a number but a simple title system where a lot of players could have the same ranks. I really can't come up with any rank related titles, the army ones like general, commandeer or private sound little off to me . Of course it should be thought how it's measured if player A has 10000 oval laps in F08 and player B has raced 100 laps in every track in couple of cars. Maybe total distance driven could be one?

2.b Make an LFS experience bar which could be like the gran turismo one (Now I'm asking for trouble ). This could measure the total experience the player has in LFS in various car/track combos, maybe even time related too? Like 100% would mean that you have driven all car/track combos for 100 laps each. So 100% would be very hard to achieve but that's one part of the fun!

3. Make some ingame options like voting and skins credit based: A certain amount of credits must be achieved before being able to use these. Why do we have offline and online credits separately? Unite!

4. Make some of lfsworld data available inside lfs, in a separate manu instead of just text commands?

Please post your ideas too about the this!

Online accident ratio for each player would be good start, imo.

Quote from JTbo :

Online accident ratio for each player would be good start, imo.

Bad idea. There's no way to tell if someone caused an accident or was the victim. All it would take is a few races with T1 crashers to cause your "rank" to go down.

Quote from Cue-Ball :

Bad idea. There's no way to tell if someone caused an accident or was the victim. All it would take is a few races with T1 crashers to cause your "rank" to go down.

It would be same with all so certain amount would be tolerable, unavoidable.

Of course better drivers can avoid T1 crashes, even hairpin kamikazes, lol.

Wreckers will have quite high ratio, also kick/ban ratio would be nice, if some guy has been banned or kicked a lot, then we know to avoid him/her.

Everyone will wreck sometimes, it is unavoidable, but some seem to just wreck that is unforgottable.

these ratios guys... they just arent going to happen, something can easily happen incorrectly and something go wrong with it, its just pointless.. originally it was a fairly good idea, but there are just to many flaws in it

and about the whole tournaments online, join [edit]OLFSL (lol dunno why i put LFSW)[/edit] or another large team that does that like NAL, online races arent going to be long, since most people either cant play for that long/lose patience or just get to bored to quickly, thats why the races are not much longer than the S1 races were

about #3, credits can be won extremely easily, so there isnt much point

#4 i like though i wouldnt mind having a menu in LFS that connects to LFSW to show you your stats and pbs and whatnot for the tracks and cars
(yes we could always go to the website, but this would be much faster, hopefully easier to use [sorry.. LFSW looks great and all, but in the end its just hard to opperate.. i have to open everything once to remember whats where])
so ya, thumbs up for #4 to be put into LFS

For me the problem is that there aren't hardly any long online races, except the league ones. Finding a server that runs for a 10 laps is a challenge and for more, just pure luck.

If we could have this tournament system I am describing here, it also help some of the drivers with good consistency but not so good times (the fxrs mostly ). I mean if there are 2 very fast drivers and the rest are more or less slower, in 3 races (for examle 3 races, could be more or less) three 3rd places could get you to 2nd or even 1st in overall standings if the faster drivers spin even once. And because every one who finishes the race (not maybe 5 laps behind the leader, after 1 lap could be the maximum? Or certain percentage of laps in whole) gets some points, it would encourage people to stay in race even if they are on 11th or 16th place.

To the #2, it certainly can have some bad effects, like people not finishing the race because not wanting to worsen their aldder position or online stats. Or maybe we could have just more ranks in lfsworld (like GTR-rank with some tracks, or TBO rank with some tracks) ?

As to the #4 maybe we could have it as an in-race option when spectating a race? Like now we have the menu where you can send messages to other players and see other stuff, how about adding a button there to show his/her lfsworld stats? This would open a setting-like menu inside lfs, and race could be going on in the backround. We can do this already via the command-line options, but most people don't even know it's there...But this idea isn't certainly the most important thing we need, when time comes, maybe?

Quote from Hyperactive :

And also an option to turn them off too

Good idea

As you can tell I don't appreciate excessive text during a race, but a Konfabulator widget would be nice

some nice ideas here.

it would like to view a few stats of a racer when tab through the field, watching a race.

I would love to see especially Buddies list / online alert available ingame. You could pick buddies you wanna be alerted about their online presence and the server they are on right now using the private text message in chat, right in the moment they join any server. (so you also know they switched to another and which one)

For an additional info about players, I like the number of kicks/bans. But imagine it being the only info attached to player's nick (at bottom right list for example) - would it look weird? It should be just another number along with stats like we can see at LFSW.
I'm not sure what does this take bandwidth-wise, devs sure had their good reasons to move it outta the game to the supporting website...

Small but useful improvement: "Racername (lfsworldusername) made a new pb". Currently only the LFSworld username is shown.

About the lfsworld info auto text stuff, I don't want to see any of it. I get enough of it already. I'm on dialup and don't autodownload skins, so everytime someone joins or pits out and back in, I get several lines telling me cannot load so-in-so's helmet skin, cannot load so-in-so's car skin etc. The text is over top of the map which I look at often, but can hardly ever see it. If there is more information being sent from lfsworld, then I'll never see the map. This was the case when I joined an ATC server the other night. It must have been running some race manager for the first time as every time someone would cross the S/F line, it would display they got a PB. I couldn't see the map the entire time I was on that server. Everytime someone joined or left, the host said hello/goodbye. Then everytime you said hello, the host said hello. So when someone joined, usually they say hello to everyone and it went like this:
someone joins
Host: Hello someone
someone: Hello everyone!
Host: Hello someone
Me: Hello someone
Host: Hello Me
Another racer: Hello someone
Host Hello Another racer

Etc, etc as all the other racers said hello to the joining guy and the host said hello to each one of them. Covered the map quite quickly and was very annoying. I don't even want to see the text that tells me the helmet and car skins can't load because I don't have it. DUH! I don't have skin autodownload turned on, don't you thing I know LFS can't load the skins!

Have to agree with mrodgers, further I would like to be able to block messages from individual drivers/host/system seperately (would be good for league races to, as I imagine you aren't allowed to chat but you cant have block on either because you need to recieve instructions from the race moderator) with these settings you could just choose to recieve messages from the host for example or on public servers just the racers and block host messages and system messages

Actually most of the lfsw info wouldn't add the amount of texts we see during the race but before and after the race. Like if you just had your 100th win, it should come after the finish. And that new pb thing, maybe that could be included in the original message, like: "Racername (lfsworldusername) made a new pb (-0.45)".

But certainly a system of blocking/ignoring some system/player messages is more important

And not only blocking what you want, but have a complete look at other multiplayer games and where they bring their chat features. Let me just name the most important to me (i would love to see in LFS too):

• public chat (we have now)
  
• chat channels / team chat (with its name, up on you and your team who will know it and joins)
  
• private message (to guy you click, just like we have now, but nobody else can see it)
  
• clickable URLs and server names
  

Plus the realtime alert about your buddies - just like we have at LFSWorld. Your friend comes online -> private message from the server saying where is he connected right now - you can click the server name and follow your friend there.
If team chat channels could spawn across all the online servers, including private ones, the realtime buddy_is_online alert might be left out.


I personally believe that these features are the must for the online game - it's alot about chat and communications. That way the community can "feel itself", and you might never get left alone at some lonely server, while the real racing action is happening right in the next room...

What I'd like to see is more LFSW content inside LFS. Like being able to load wr replays, looking at player pb lists, like some LFSW tables inside LFS, and generally more small information about everything. Like track pictures with speedtrap info, sector times (maybe even from WRs) etc..

Perhaps that clickable URLs could be easiest to do by having some way of copying text from messages to clipboard? Like pressing T, scrolling to the desired message and pressing ctrl+C for example...

I'd like to see those chat channels. Like you could start one (limited number of charts?) and use it just by writing a normal message but putting some special mark in front of the message, like "1 hello team members!!", for channel 1. The channel "founder" could invite players to his channel and kick players...etc.

And more graphical ways of doing these, many people don't know the ctrl+tab, n and other shortcuts.

Just a lot of small things you can live without but once you have them...

It woudl be nice to have a ranking and award system. A global grid showing the levels of eveyone a huge amount of usless statistics. I quite like that sort of thing.

A reward system would be good too. Like if you are consistently winning then you should be able to upgrade to a bigger trailer. Or a better looking supermodel. That sort of thing.

^ that would be the credit system..
otherwise.. no, i promise you everyone would hate that

and there is a ranking and award system, check it out at LFSW

*bump*

Just had a new idea (bear with me )

"Tag team"-system in online races (server setting):

After every race the grid is divided into 5 or 4 "teams" consisting of players chosen by the server (automatic). In every race you could then have 2 winners. One is the individual who won the race and the other is the "team" who got the drivers to best positions (or the most points). The scoring would be based on finishing order, maybe some kind of point system. Maybe even give some points for the fastest lap.

This could help people to try to finish the race. Also it would make the battling for lower positions more rewarding, since it would make a difference if you finished 10th or 11th. Also LFS doesn't have any kind of team aspect.

In a similar way you have team deathmatch in fps games.

What do you think? Too arcade? Not realistic?

Wouldn't this be better if these stats were per-server. I used to run an Enemy Territory server with a script called ETStats (http://soul.datamax.bg/~cade/away/ets/) there are similar kinds of systems running on Counter Strike servers. You could type in the chat box things like "/rank" to get your own info etc, it would also announce milestones (like 10 kills in a row etc for ET)

All this was then presented in a web page (which got more hits than our forums :rolleyes

Quote from Hyperactive :

*bump*...

this should be possible by an insim application, or am i wrong?

i would like to see this on a server .

I am not sure if the insim "mods" work online...? At least the players joining to this kind of host should "install" the mod beforehand...