This is a suggestion for Victor regarding LFSW. The statistics are such a wonderful tool for evaluating your driving but I find that the best laptime lacks any perspective. How hard would it be to show somewhere what your best laptime is compared to every other racer? I.e show what percentile you are in for each particular combo.

I often find it hard to get a snapshot of where you are at and which combo's you are lagging behind with. Is a 41.9 good at SO1 with FOX? I could check the world record, but that is not a good representation of the lfs population, instead a WR represents the best of the best with no indication how good everyone is.

Aiming to get into the top 10 or 5 percentile per combo would be a great goal, and dare i say it, an addictive goal.

Thanks

I am all for any extra little statistical information on LFSW. :up:

Perhaps this percentage could only come into effect if you've done a required amount of laps, because it will show more effort had gone into getting the PB. Because say I only have a PB @ BL1 in the RAC with 1:25.x and 18 laps. When the WR is a 1:20.x, and I've hardly tried that combo much. If a percentage showed, it would represent a whole lot.

I think with a lap requirement for that percentage, it would encourage more laps to be driven online, rather than having everyone being counted all the time with a percentage, as it could really throw results off in different directions for everyone.

Say something like 20-30 laps for each PB to place yourself into the percentage count. I just would suggest this because it would save a lot of needless work for LFSW (I guess CPU and database usage) if it didn't have to keep counting people's 1+ lap PBs that have no real proof of the drivers skill.

Would be even cooler if you could have an average lap statistic for each combo, but that is getting into more and more PB recording each time 'round.

ah I see what you mean. Hmm.

I don't think slow times due to lack of laps will throw off results too much. The percentile works off the top % of times, so regardless of how poor some drivers are, you're still competing to get into the elite group at the pointy end. Even so, I agree to about a 50 lap prerequisite would be a good idea.

+1

I'd like this also, I know I'm not WR quality. But would like to see how I compare to the average lap times for the tip of car and course. Doing 50 laps on a track for your time to count then averaged I think would work.

so you're talking about online pb's right? Because it's always very tricky these things, as they can be cheated. So a global % is (near) impossible to create due to no standardisation (or at least it wouldn't be 100% accurate)

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How hard would it be to show somewhere what your best laptime is compared to every other racer? I.e show what percentile you are in for each particular combo.

I'm not sure I follow. A percentage of what? The time of a certain track / car combo, averaged over _all_ other LFS racers?

Or would there be average times for all combo's and you could compare your times to them?

So there would for example be a page, looking a lot like your own online stats page, but filled with average pb's?

Quote from Victor :

so you're talking about online pb's right? Because it's always very tricky these things, as they can be cheated. So a global % is (near) impossible to create due to no standardisation (or at least it wouldn't be 100% accurate)


I'm not sure I follow. A percentage of what? The time of a certain track / car combo, averaged over _all_ other LFS racers?

Or would there be average times for all combo's and you could compare your times to them?

So there would for example be a page, looking a lot like your own online stats page, but filled with average pb's?

I think what the OP is requesting, is that alongside your PB, a percentile statistic will be displayed. For example, if the WR on BL1 with BF1 is 54.00, and your PB is 55.00, and out of 1000 people that have completed more than 50 laps with this combination, you are the 200th fastest, your percentile would be 80% (or would it be 20%?). I think this is a great Idea.

Burnzoire, do you think this should be displayed each time after 50 laps that you set a PB, inside LFS? Or just displayed on LFSW?

This could be very handy, because when you are viewing your (or other's) PBs on LFSW, unless you know the WR off by heart, you would not know exactly how good it is. For example, instead of 55.00 for your PB, 55.00 (20%) would indicate that you are in the top 20% of all racers who have completed 50 laps or more. It would give much more information and meaning to the PB charts.

Quote from Plastik8 :

I think what the OP is requesting, is that alongside your PB, a percentile statistic will be displayed. For example, if the WR on BL1 with BF1 is 54.00, and your PB is 55.00, and out of 1000 people that have completed more than 50 laps with this combination, you are the 200th fastest, your percentile would be 80% (or would it be 20%?). I think this is a great Idea.

Burnzoire, do you think this should be displayed each time after 50 laps that you set a PB, inside LFS? Or just displayed on LFSW?

ok first problem :

I do 50 laps on bl1 with bf1 with lfs tweak, lapping at 45 seconds.

See what I mean?

Quote from Victor :

ok first problem :

I do 50 laps on bl1 with bf1 with lfs tweak, lapping at 45 seconds.

See what I mean?

Ah ha. See, you all forgot about the fact that you can create a server on the master server and use lfs tweak.

I am all for attempting to figure something out for a feature like this. I have always wanted something to compare my PB's with other than WR hotlapping, which I don't do.

Yeah the point about LFS Tweak is a good one. But rarely people have such PBs, those could be considered 'outliers' and you could still calculate a fairly accurate average of everyone's PBs. As for the person's own uber-cheated PB, I don't know what you'd show for that.

Anything to give any kind of ranking based on your performance online would be nice to see.

Quote from Victor :

ok first problem :

I do 50 laps on bl1 with bf1 with lfs tweak, lapping at 45 seconds.

See what I mean?

Just by looking at those percentiles, that -10second pb wouldn't really make any difference. If the total percentage of the cheater is just few percents it has hardly any effect on the percentile numbers (% of faster/slower times than yours). And those impossibly fast lap times should be quite easy to filter out anyway. And if LFS would know if it has been modified (lfs tweaked etc.) when it sends those pbs to lfsworld, it would be quite easy to filer those out too. Only things left are then cutting and the crash bug-moon-flight lap records... Cutting can be prevented to some degree with better track design but not fully...

The big "problem" atm. is that most people don't upload hotlaps so the only way to compare yourself to others is to manually check the pbs in lfsworld with two browser windows. Or to use this: http://icespy.zilium.de/pb/top

It sounds like the LFSTweak problem is infact a big problem for LFSW and it should be addressed, regardless of this idea. When someone can cheat to post times it makes comparing stats in any way, shape or form somewhat pointless. :\

there's also the autox edit way of moving a finish line.

In either case, do not expect me to create charts from online laps - this will ruin online racing. For competitions, join a league.
But creating averages could be done. Though I'm too tired now, so I'll think again tomorrow.

Also please read well ppl - atm there are 2 different suggestions floating in this thread.

eh it was just a suggestion (edit: I don't need to mention how much lfsw already rocks do I?)...

I don't understand how it will "ruin online racing", what exactly will change? The best thing about LFSW to me is the addictiveness of getting your PBs better and better (with the aim of becoming fast enough to win races). Maybe that's just me... but I doubt I'm alone :\

Anyway, I understand now that there is no standardising for lap times... infact that's probably why hotlapping was created in the first place, yeah? To avoid having to put checks in place for tweaks & trainers and other exploits. It's just a pity that hotlapping is so detached from online racing. I don't hotlap - it's much more fun racing at the same time with other people as I'm sure you'd agree.

It seems there's a fundamental problem here... we have all these lovely stats but we're left to a sort of honour system when we wish to compare them.

Making rank-like systems for online racing will make people quit races prematurely when things aren't going well, or make people overly greedy to overtake you and start caring less about fair play.
This is a phenomenon you encounter when there is a competitive thing going on.

Because LFS is first and foremost about fun, no online ranks will be made.

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with the aim of becoming fast enough to win races

that is what leagues and such are for.

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we have all these lovely stats but we're left to a sort of honour system when we wish to compare them.

Nothing wrong with just honour? If you want more competitive racing, again, join a league

But like I said, making averages where you compare yourself to everybody else might be doable. Will have a look a bit later on, when our new servers are in place.

As I see it, there are only problems that can be solved. There can be a method that can filter edited hosts from normal ones, layouts can be filtered out as well. Only thing left is cutting that is a bit harder to detect, unless all laps driven are hlvc checked, and filtered out or shown differently in lfsworld. So pbs can be compared as the end user knows that the times he sees can be "fictional". Of course making ranks using pbs/online stats is not really an option as those stats are quite easy to cheat.

One thing I would like to see a lot more in LFS are graphics, graphs, pie charts, pillar charts etc. from laps/wins/2nds/3rds/hosts joined/time of day of racing/time (GMT)/WR times/combo/car/track/etc... Maybe even an ultimate graph tool that simply allows people to choose the variables he pleases on X/Y graph, with the option to use own stats, generals stats from every racers, or to compare multiple racers in one graph. With user definable limits for min/max

LFSworld supposedly has huge amount of stats. I'd like to see more and tinker more with them . A lot more

Quote from Victor :

Making rank-like systems for online racing will make people quit races prematurely when things aren't going well, or make people overly greedy to overtake you and start caring less about fair play.
This is a phenomenon you encounter when there is a competitive thing going on.

Because LFS is first and foremost about fun, no online ranks will be made.


that is what leagues and such are for.


Nothing wrong with just honour? If you want more competitive racing, again, join a league

But like I said, making averages where you compare yourself to everybody else might be doable. Will have a look a bit later on, when our new servers are in place.

You're right, I've seen it time and time again. You can't have competition without foul play in online games.

So join a league you keep saying... it's not for me.. I've tried private leagues and tired of it quickly. Lots of fun but I prefer to race when I feel like it, not when I have to. That's personal preference though.

I'll leave this suggestion alone, but it's got me thinking more about having leagues built into LFS. It's a complicated suggestion and many problems would have to be solved to make it a possibility. I already started a 'custom series' thread a while back, but that's only a small piece of the puzzle.

cheers.