Quote from Razvan :

Well how fair would that be, to penalize a team, for a legit disconnect due to bad ISP. For example, my isp on the race day had a shitty line(my entire node was busy) which caused me to disconnect (or lag) several times, in the 1st sector... I wouldnt appreciate it if my team got penalized for my shitty ISP, because we still lost time, while i or a new driver reconected and drove out the pits.

How fair it is that a team even with a legit disconnect gets fresh engine, possibly repaired suspension damages, new tires and full fuel tank

Like I said, random disconnections happen and I dont really have good suggestions how to deal with it. For sure penalizing teams for a legit disconnect is bit harsh. But as far as i understood, admins were looking for a simple solution. Thats a time penalty based on something. Of course best option would be that the car with the damages stays on the server even the player drops out but thats something we dont have in LFS atm.

What do you get when you get a DC, intentional or not:

New engine
Damage cleared
Fresh tyres
Full tank (or w/e is decided)
No pits drive-in
Free driver swap
Setup changes if needed

I think a -1 lap penalty is more than justified.

Quote from BurnOut69 :

What do you get when you get a DC, intentional or not:

New engine
Damage cleared
Fresh tyres
Full tank (or w/e is decided)
No pits drive-in
Free driver swap
Setup changes if needed

I think a -1 lap penalty is more than justified.

Exactly what I meant! In the meantime it's only fair to have a 1 Lap penalty for Shift -P and for a disconnect because it offers a lot of advantages! So I think that would be a good solution till there is something coming from LFS which gives us more possibilities!

Quote from BurnOut69 :

What do you get when you get a DC, intentional or not:

New engine
Damage cleared
Fresh tyres
Full tank (or w/e is decided)
No pits drive-in
Free driver swap
Setup changes if needed

I think a -1 lap penalty is more than justified.

Ok then heres a situation... Car A, does a pitstop, changes drivers, fixes damage(car A has no engine damage), looses 40 seconds in pit stall, and drives off. The car continues to drive for another 4-5laps.... and disconnect? Is it fair to give that team a -1 lap?

Quote from Razvan :

Ok then heres a situation... Car A, does a pitstop, changes drivers, fixes damage(car A has no engine damage), looses 40 seconds in pit stall, and drives off. The car continues to drive for another 4-5laps.... and disconnect? Is it fair to give that team a -1 lap?

No, it's not... When you have a "legit" disconnection and you're not counting on it you loose a lot of time... We had 2 disconnects, one on lap 8 of a stint and the other on lap 4 of a stint. The time we calculate we lost with that was enough to do at least 2 laps, and on the time of the race it happenned we lost 3 positions. After that we did 299 laps without any problems and never did a Shift+P during the entire 24 hours of the race. So, why should we, that raced according to the rules, receive a penalty that is the same of those that decided to "use" the rules to gain unfair avantage over the others?... If that´s the option, than I would prefer to let things in this race stay as they are now, and think of a way to prevent this from happening in the rest of the season...

Although I don't drive in MOE I do have an opinion


If you compare this digital endurance race to a real life endurance race there is a big differance. In reallife it is a battle to test if it can hold up, the car that is... If you roll it, crash it, park it in the gravel or get some technical failure it is over, done, no more for you... and they practise for a year for such an event, develop the car for lots of $$ etc. etc.

In my eye's the best and simplest solution to your problem would be... drum roll please. OUT is OUT... crash it, roll it, park it in the gravel or get a "technical" failure.. it's bye bye, pack in the spare tires and go home... Ofcourse this (negative word here) if your isp decides to unplug you for a second, but it also (an other negative word here) when your engine blow or your tranny breaks..

I think it would make a lot more "endurance" and adds the part where it's not the fastest guys that make it but the guys that hold everything together..

Just my 2 cents, I guess none of you are willing to go down this road, but in my eyes it's what makes endurance endurance. Imagne Le Mans.. "Well Bentley is down to their 5th car now, 2 took fire, one parked in the gravel and 2 blown engines. Lucky for them they took along 10 cars this weekend."

Quote from auch_enne :

Although I don't drive in MOE I do have an opinion

If you compare this digital endurance race to a real life endurance race there is a big differance. In reallife it is a battle to test if it can hold up, the car that is... If you roll it, crash it, park it in the gravel or get some technical failure it is over, done, no more for you... and they practise for a year for such an event, develop the car for lots of $$ etc. etc.

In my eye's the best and simplest solution to your problem would be... drum roll please. OUT is OUT... crash it, roll it, park it in the gravel or get a "technical" failure.. it's bye bye, pack in the spare tires and go home... Ofcourse this (negative word here) if your isp decides to unplug you for a second, but it also (an other negative word here) when your engine blow or your tranny breaks..

I think it would make a lot more "endurance" and adds the part where it's not the fastest guys that make it but the guys that hold everything together..

Just my 2 cents, I guess none of you are willing to go down this road, but in my eyes it's what makes endurance endurance. Imagne Le Mans.. "Well Bentley is down to their 5th car now, 2 took fire, one parked in the gravel and 2 blown engines. Lucky for them they took along 10 cars this weekend."

You're forgetting one major thing: In a lot of the IRL endurance races (see for instance ep9 of season 10 of Top gear) cars are pulled back into the grid and teams are allowed to work on stalled or damaged cars. LFS doesn't support such a thing, therefore we introduced a +1L for each shift+p/s to simulate the work in the pits.

Quote from auch_enne :

Although I don't drive in MOE I do have an opinion


If you compare this digital endurance race to a real life endurance race there is a big differance. In reallife it is a battle to test if it can hold up, the car that is... If you roll it, crash it, park it in the gravel or get some technical failure it is over, done, no more for you... and they practise for a year for such an event, develop the car for lots of $$ etc. etc.

In my eye's the best and simplest solution to your problem would be... drum roll please. OUT is OUT... crash it, roll it, park it in the gravel or get a "technical" failure.. it's bye bye, pack in the spare tires and go home... Ofcourse this (negative word here) if your isp decides to unplug you for a second, but it also (an other negative word here) when your engine blow or your tranny breaks..

I think it would make a lot more "endurance" and adds the part where it's not the fastest guys that make it but the guys that hold everything together..

Just my 2 cents, I guess none of you are willing to go down this road, but in my eyes it's what makes endurance endurance. Imagne Le Mans.. "Well Bentley is down to their 5th car now, 2 took fire, one parked in the gravel and 2 blown engines. Lucky for them they took along 10 cars this weekend."

I forgot the time but I think after 18 minutes a lot of people disconnected because of a server problem? ISP? whatever - doesn't matter, technical failure and they are all out. Great
How many teams would then have finished the 24 hours race?
None? 2? or 4?
And how many people would watch something like that in a broadcast for the rest of the 23and a half hours. 5 or 6?

LFS should also be fun imo but your suggestion would only create much more boredom.

Quote from Scawen :

...If you want reality then just go racing in reality! If you want a sim then you are avoiding many of the problems of reality, and cutting it down to the actual racing. That's the purpose of a racing sim....

A brave post there from auch_enne, I too do not drive in MOE (well not yet anyway - but maybe soon), I agree with the content of auch_enne's post though.

After all the promotion from the forum, I decided to watch as much of the race as I could, I have said before, how impressed I was never having spectated at this type of event before - even a real one (24hrs).
I thought that I would soon get fed up and do something else - maybe get some track time in myself, but no.

- I found the event most entertaining, - I was impresssed with everything, from the standard of Racing/driving, to the commentary, the tactics, and especially stuff like driver swaps, - it all just seemed to go like clockwork.
I watched the race and listened to Mika's exellent commentary, on one PC - and had live viewer set up on another. - Its a pity that both settups were 30 seconds out of synch, but both settups worked flawlessly - and I could see exactly what was happening at any time.

I think it was Mika, that said that all but five cars had had disco's, and I thought at the time that "wow that seems a lot" and then I thought to myself, "well I just look at it as if it was some major car problem that needed to be sorted in the pits", which happens IRL - so as a spectator it works for me.
I even noticed one or two of cars that went into the gravel - and then just warped back to the pits, I thought it strange at the time - but not being very experienced with LFS I did not realise what these guys were up to.

Something has to be done about this.

Even if it means less realism (until the next patch?), cheating and cheats have to be weeded out to leave nothing but a fair playing field where everyone feels confident in the results.

Because without confidence in the results, the results mean absolutely nothing. - to me, to you, to the admins, the drivers, and the six thousand spectators on livestream.
- Therefore simracing in general suffers because of the perception of cheating being rife in serious events.

Look at what is happening in real event like the Tour de France, - the fanbase is falling like a brick because of drugtaking winners, - i.e. cheating louses.

We all want to win ideally, thats why we are here, people like myself have to accept that we will never be that good at high levels, so we take what results we can and enjoy racing against guys of the same ability whilst we get lapped by the fast guys that find the rails that get them round corners quicker .

But I don't like to think I've been beaten by a cheat, and I dare say that the 6 grand that saw your race don't like the idea either, and having found the extent to the possibilities of over 80% of the grid may have done so - leaves me with a bad feeling, because now I'm not sure of what I saw anymore.

So is it worth watching again, - well maybe, but I don't feel the same as I did when watching you guys at Aston, and no doub't a lot of others feel the same way.

Whatever you do - you have to do something, and it has to be fair to all.

Some of you may not like the final decision, but if its the best you can do - and if it is fair and can be seen to be fair, then i feel you have no other choice.
At least until Scawen has made the neccessary changes, - which may take some time, as like me, he may only just become aware of the problem here.

nRcToretto & BurnOut69:
You cant fairly blanket punish people for completely different circumstances, thats just unbelievably stupid and naive!

Case 1:
Car has done 200 laps, its got 2 to go till its due another pitstop, it has engine damage and is 2sec a lap slower, small amount of car damage, and is about 20sec into the lap.

Case 2:
Car has done 5 laps total, brand spanking new car, 20+ laps till it needs to pit, no engine damage, no car damage, 2min into the lap and coming up to the last corner.


Those are 2 completely different circumstances. If both of those disconnect there and then, you both feel its only fair both get the exact same punishment because *apparently* they both benefit equally!?

Case 1:
Old car = New car
2 laps from pitting = due a stop anyway
Engine damage = No damage, now 2sec pl faster
20sec into lap = 20sec of the lap lost.

Case 2:
Already a new car = getting an equally new car in return
20 laps from pitting = an unnecissary pit that wasnt needed
Fresh engine = Nothing new
120sec into lap = 120 sec of the lap lost.

So you feel both cases should be treated with the exact same penalty, because they both gained?!? Absolute nonsense!


If the incident caused you to gain something, then and only then should you be punished based on how much you gained. If you had nothing to gain, then why should you be heavily punished for it??

If your due a pitstop in 2/20 laps, there should be a large/small penalty added.
If you have light/heavy engine damage, you should get a small/large penalty added.
If you have light/heavy car damage, you should get a penalty relative to that damage added.
If you disco 10/100sec into the lap, it should be taken into consideration that time was lost, and possibly some taken OFF the penalty, as 10/100sec has been lost already due to this issue.

Thats the only fair way to do things, claiming everyone benefits equally just because its POSSIBLE you can, is stupid and unfair on those it doesnt benefit in the slightest. Giving unfair penalties just means you get unfair races, and whats the point in that?

Quote from PaulC2K :

If your due a pitstop in X laps, there should be +X seconds added to the penalty.

I guess that's a mistake? This means that the closer you are to making a pitstop the smaller the punishment would be. X seconds removed from the penalty would be fair.

Nah, more a case of just badly put, i kinda thought it didnt read too well compared to the others just before posting, but figured fcuk it
The more laps you've done, the larger the need for a scheduled stop, and the bigger the gain from coming out of the pitbox with a 'full' tank of fuel & fresh tyres, so you should pick up slightly more of a penalty to counter & remove that gain. If your only 5 laps in, the last thing you need is a pitstop for fuel & tyres, so there shouldnt be punishment as if they do need it.

Everyone case should be looked at individually, gathering the gains and losses which occured by those circumstances. Disconnections and Shift+P's

To add to the above post's list of penalties:
+X sec if your re-appearance into the pit box is due to getting stuck in gravel or your upside-down.
Find what was gained, what was lost, and give a punishment which fits the occasion, throwing penalties which some gain heavily for while others suffer significantly for isnt in the interest of fair racing for all.

(Repost from the other thread that was in main LFS discussion and then died once it got moved to Leagues & Events, figure it has become rather relevant.)

Shift+p's are a generally good idea to allow considering certain cars can get stuck in the gravel and others can't. And none of the generic penalties I've seen suggested really work. Like ~2/3 through we had a disconnect that lost us about 3 minutes, but we also had engine damage that was losing us ~1 second a lap on average (thought it was 1.5 at the time to the MoE people I was talking to then, average pace over stints says differently). On a track like aston gp where you only make 21 laps an hour, that's 168 seconds gained from not having engine damage over the last 8 hours vs. the ~180 seconds we lost to the disconnect.

My point being that you can't apply a broad penalty to this and call it fair in the least. (What about the people who disconn and have 0 engine damage, which happened to us and many others earlier on in the race?) The gain/loss from disconnecting and repairing engine damage is so variable when you consider race length, engine damage, where the disconnect happened, and lap length. Sure, there is definite potential for abuse, but you can't penalize everyone for what a few a**es might be doing.

And on the other hand, this won't even make much of a dent in smaller endurance events. (The uninentional disconnects that is.) Most people had very slight amounts of engine damage, only really showing because the lap's so long in the first place. (Ours comes out to .35 lost per minute due to engine damage.) And you tend to lose about a lap on a normal disconnect once everything pans out, with the slight panic and attempting to get the replacement driver in. And it takes a long time to make up a lap of a normal endurance track at that pace.

/New - Considering we can't read engine damage at this point (afaik), what I suggest as a patch is something that tracks what sector you were on when you disconnected and prevents your team from rejoining until the lap you were on 'is complete' (aka time has lapsed since the sector you were on that totals a lap). Would require some programming though. You normally lose about a lap anyway when you have a disconnect, and it would prevent most opportunities for abuse.

"If your due a pitstop in X laps, there should be +X seconds added to the penalty." - this means that the closer you are to a stop the smaller the penalty; obviously that wouldn't be fair. Explanation: If you are on lap 1 of a 25 lap stint and get a disco', you would be due to stop in 24 laps and according to what you wrote this would mean a 24 sec penalty. However, if you disco'd on lap 24 that would mean a 1 second penalty; this would make no sense since disco'ing closer to your next stop is a bigger advantage/less of a disadvantage.

Anyway, your general idea may be good but not the easiest to implement. Getting penalised X seconds would mean you couldn't really race other cars on the track. Being penalised a number of laps at least means people can see where they are on the track against their opponents. There's also the issue of a timed penalty meaning you would complete one less lap. For example, if you completed one more lap than the car behind, but were only really 100 secs ahead on track, a 120 second penalty should put you behind that car but there would be no arbitrary way of doing this and estimates would be required... which wouldn't be nice. It could be possible to compare the gap at the last common check-point and apply the penalty to that gap.

The only other way that these kind of penalties could be used imo is with stop & go penalties of a custom length; or possibly delaying cars from re-joining the track for X seconds, but this would require an instant reaction and decision from admins which is obviously not feasable.

I think some people are forgetting the fact that, right now, there is no reliable mechanism to verify whether a disconnection was intentional or not, be it via InSim or low level checking.

So, as much as it may suck, yes, I think both cases should be punished equally. You can blame it on the teams that cheated in the 24 hours since from now on I wouldnt say you can rely on sportmanship to dictate rules.

As for the suggestion of a heavy penalty only if X laps have been done, you also have to keep in mind the extreme scenario, that would be the longest races.

Is there any way to keep an eye on each stint length of each of the 30+ teams competing, while taking care of other penalties, standings, etc? Honestly I dont see a reliable way of doing it, and manually is asking too much of the MoE organization.

That being the case, then it would seem that removing engine damage may be the way forward.
I don't like the idea iether, but removing engine damage will remove any advantage in disconnecting intentionally.

I think, it is better to do the following: when a car disconnects, they can't rejoin race before a particular time depending on their distance from pits. Then the question is how much time to take from the player (getting to pits takes the same time, but repairing can be different).

So pity, Audi prototype couldn't Shift+p in Le Mans 2007.

As for what Scawen can do:

Making AI on a host requires at least running a full version with physics (dedi host doesn't calculate it).

What seems more implementable is 1) making engine repairable but long enough 2) reporting car's state to the InSim application (engine, suspension & clutch damage). Then an InSim app may force players to stay out of the race for the time they'd spend on repairs.

Personally I think the best solutions have already been posted:

1) Ask Scawen to output an engine damage value and time needed to repair damage in pits value via InSim and create a nice algorithm that uses those values ánd includes stint length, race time left, sector of disconnection.
2) Ask Scawen to catch timeouts with an AI ghostcar taking over.

Until Scawen has implemented this, unfortunately we have to depend on the sportsmanship of the teams, to step forward and admit they used this cheat to get a better result in the race, since it's virtually impossible to prove it...

Edit: posted between the regular tasks here at work, hence the unexpected overlap with the post by details above.

Quote from PaulC2K :

nRcToretto & BurnOut69:
...
So you feel both cases should be treated with the exact same penalty, because they both gained?!? Absolute nonsense!
...

There is no doubt that these to cases you described are different but there is no possibilitie in LFS atm to decide which of both cases happened. I think it would be stupid to calculate after the race for weeks who is deserving which penalty ... that would make those huge and great events just a desaster! Like I wrote before ... for now this seems to be the only possible and nearly fair choice that can be made! All other and better ways we can discuss when we have a way to really find out what happened.

Btw: If someone has a better idea, I'm going to say no more word!

Quote from traxxion :

Personally I think the best solutions have already been posted:

1) Ask Scawen to output an engine damage value and time needed to repair damage in pits value via InSim and create a nice algorithm that uses those values ánd includes stint length, race time left, sector of disconnection.
2) Ask Scawen to catch timeouts with an AI ghostcar taking over.

.. // ..

I like those suggestions ...
Prolly gonna take some time implement it though. During this time I agree to the suggested 1 lap penalty for discos as well as telepiting. Sportmanship don't seem to work, at least not in moe since there are teams who actually get penalties for it.

Quote from Cawwa :

I like those suggestions ...
Prolly gonna take some time implement it though. During this time I agree to the suggested 1 lap penalty for discos as well as telepiting. Sportmanship don't seem to work, at least not in moe since there are teams who actually get penalties for it.

What I don't like about a general one lap penalty is you end up hurting the teams that had a random disconnect more than those that had an intentional disconnect. (If you're intentionally disconnecting, you're probably not going to do it anytime other than at the start of a lap.)

Quote from rcpilot :

What I don't like about a general one lap penalty is you end up hurting the teams that had a random disconnect more than those that had an intentional disconnect. (If you're intentionally disconnecting, you're probably not going to do it anytime other than at the start of a lap.)

Yes that isn't good, but the best there is for now. But by any means, if there is an opportunity to check this with a script or something it might work. To do a manually check is far to much of a work I guess. Just imagine how much to check in a 6 hour race with 29 teams with more then 120 drivers and probably more the double that in driver changes.

Why should a disco also have to be a +1 LAP penalty? U do nothing wrong. The internet connection between the server and your place is just bit shit. You'r just bit lucky that the engine was repaired. And next question is. How many guys damaged there cars? And when u force a disco all the time for repair your engine u will lose more time then when u just go round with a damaged car. And this is a really good race simulation GAME and some things u can't simulate like real 24 hours racing. My thoughts is that the admin just did a great job with the rules for disco's and Shift+p.

Quote from Cawwa :

Yes that isn't good, but the best there is for now. But by any means, if there is an opportunity to check this with a script or something it might work. To do a manually check is far to much of a work I guess. Just imagine how much to check in a 6 hour race with 29 teams with more then 120 drivers and probably more the double that in driver changes.

Actually, the tracker keeps a log of every event that happens on the server. We're using that to narrow down the list of disconnects and evaluate how we want to deal with them.

Quote from traxxion :

Personally I think the best solutions have already been posted:

1) Ask Scawen to output an engine damage value and time needed to repair damage in pits value via InSim and create a nice algorithm that uses those values ánd includes stint length, race time left, sector of disconnection.
2) Ask Scawen to catch timeouts with an AI ghostcar taking over.

As seen as it's a general improvement suggestion not league related, here's my general opinion but I won't comment on this specific case.

What about the host saving the state of all the cars (including distance in whole laps). The car could just leave the pits like a mid race join, but it would not lose progress and would be in the same state they were when they left.