Once again our team starting a race series and looking for a way to try and keep the racing close despite the differences in driver skill. Right now the only way we can slow down people is to add weight to thier cars. This however is only viable using added passengers. The problem is that not every car can cary the same number of passangers and none of the GTRs can cary any. This means that we have no way to inpliment a weight penalty system in the Race cars.

So once again I am here to bring this issue up for discussion in the hopes that some enterprizing coder can come up with an in-sim mod or that the devs can understand our need for such system, as an option to server and league admins, not requirment of racers.

I would like to second that humble request
Weight penalties are a great way to keep the field balanced trough out a series and I would really love to see it implemented one way or the other. Since they use it in real life, it has to be a good idea, right?

it relies on the honor system but can't you use fuel or is it not a signifigant enough change? i don't know how long your races are either.

but pure ballast added to the cars that everyone in the server could see would be a nice touch.

how about an option to reduce the max rpm's by 500 or 700 or something? that would be a nice equaliser.

speedfreak227

Using fuel isn't a good solution, on some tracks you can't add more than 100% (think about 40 laps on Kyoto national with GTRs: FZR's can do 1 pit using 96% of fuel).
I'd really love to have weight penalties that can be setted by the admin of the server.
It would help a lot during leagues or championship races to level down very fast pilots.. something like what happens in WTCC championship and so on.
If it could be setted via server admin, then nobody would start whining about wrong decisions, because weights can be decided by looking at the championship results of the previous race.

I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be added for the next patch..
The weight would be uniformedly distributed over each car, right?

Yes, i think that weight should be distributed over the car, possibly equally so that there should not be too much difference in the original mass distribution of the car. That would really help in future.. And of course it could be a system that would not be forced for everybody, whose that want to use it can set it via server, others can simply not activate the system, and race as we all do right now

Quote from J_Matrix :

Yes, i think that weight should be distributed over the car, possibly equally so that there should not be too much difference in the original mass distribution of the car. That would really help in future.. And of course it could be a system that would not be forced for everybody, whose that want to use it can set it via server, others can simply not activate the system, and race as we all do right now

well, irl they put metal plates on the floor where the co-driver would sit...

I never was a great fan of leveling a grid by weight penalties. It just seems so artificial to me. When i started 1st racing in a league (ESl ESCC) i was very slow and had no idea at what to do with the setup. But i worked hard on it and got better and better. Don't know if i had worked as hard if the fastest driver had been made slower by weight penalties, cause then the gap wouldn't have been so big and i would perhaps been satisfied at some time with my performance.
I see it that way. Everybody has the option to take the same car as the fastest and everybody can train to get better and better so that the gaps get less big. i know not everybody has the time to train 2,4 or even more hours the day. And not everyone has the same skill/reaction time/base speed. But as many leagues are running with more than one grid the best will come to the best and the less fast will come to their equals (i don't want to attack the slower driver or so, as i have the utmost respect for every driver). And with weight penalties it could probably falsify the results.

Well it wouldn't bother me if it was an option and not forced to everyone.

I also think it is a good idea to penalize cars that have a clear advantage in a specific race. That way it will be much easier for leagues to have equal chances across the whole range of cars in the class.

Vain

Its also an added challange to the faster drivers as every win makes the next more diffacult.

Quote from Vain :

I also think it is a good idea to penalize cars that have a clear advantage in a specific race. That way it will be much easier for leagues to have equal chances across the whole range of cars in the class.

Vain

Well take for example a league where everyone drives the FZR and only one driver drives the XRR. The next race is on a track where the FZR are having an advantage, so they get penalized. But the XRR Driver is a hotshot and the others are all medium skilled. So the XRR driver would win either way, and with the FZR penalized it would probably come close to boring for him.

Your system could work but only in a grid where all drivers are almost same skilled.

Example: A 4 grid league could use this system in grid 1 and the other grids would be without a weight penalization or perhaps less weight penalization in grid2, even less in grid 3 and so on.

My thoughts were the following:
Let's assume a GTR class race on Westhill.
The FZR has an advantage in qualification and propably also in sprint. Now it may be hard to choose a feature-race duration that is short enough for all to race (a lot of people don't like racers longer than 1 hour, depending on the league) and long enough to penalize the FZR enough to equal with XRR. If the host could now just assign some more weight to the FZR this would get a lot easier for the host.
The host could also use the weight penalty only in the qualification, and balance the other races by fuel-consumption.
Also this really small adjustment to LFS would allow the leagues to get the FXR into a position where it may even have a chance to win a race.

Of course, this fine-balancing is only needed in the high-end type of leagues where all drivers are top-notch. No sense to "balance" a field of cars where equal cars differ 2 seconds in laptime.

Vain

Quote from Vain :

I also think it is a good idea to penalize cars that have a clear advantage in a specific race. That way it will be much easier for leagues to have equal chances across the whole range of cars in the class.

Vain

Nooo! () Even if the race is held on a track (AS3 for example) where FZR has significant advantage it's still bad to have all FZRs "ballasted" just because this. Because not all the drivers who drive the FZR are that fast. I was couple of days ago driving at the AS5 with FZR against couple of XRRs and it was quite hard for me to keep up with them, even though I had better car and the race was just 6 lapper.

In real life the ballasts are used so that no car gets too fast, (like the Ferrari in F1 couple of years ago). And used mostly in series where drivers drive very different cars with different weight/power/torque specs. Though in DTM it was used to (don't know if it's still) keep the races equal.

Of course the ballasts would be great thing to have but their main use is in leagues where some driver/drivers are too far away from each other in means of skill and speed. There ballasts could make the races more interesting as the fastest guy can't start hotlapping at 2nd lap for the rest of the race while others follow in line watching the guy in front running away.

Just my PI €uros...

I keeps the racing close and interesting, i vote for ballast

I'm not fpr penalizing cars, at all. What i meant is that weight penalties shall not be used normally (maybe this can be done, but it's at discreption); i meant that in a league or in a championship, no matter what track are driving on and no matter which car has got advantage on it. You race for a championship, so who wins gets a penalty (like in WTCC) and will have to race with that penalty the next race of the league. Nothing more complex than this.
The weight penalties would be decided by the admin just looking at the classification results, and this can happen for any kind of class of cars ingame. For non-racing cars you can already use passengers, but it's always at discreption of the player to board them in or not, so you have to trust everybody, or look at the replays of the race to check if that player raced with the penalty or not. If weight penalties could be done via admin, and so they would not be setted by the player, that would be better i think.

Quote from nikimere :

I keeps the racing close and interesting, i vote for ballast

Yeah I'm for it too, whether it's to keep a class of cars evenly matched, or to make it harder for a successful driver to continue his success (like in BTCC etc).

It's not like it would be compulsory to use it, and leagues would have to have rules about how the weight penalties/success ballast is distributed before the first race is started so there'd be no surprises for anyone. As with any competition, if you don't like the rules, you don't enter.

Easy to implement and definitely wanted.
It would be an option, so those that don't want it wouldn't be bothered by its addition.. one of those rare choices where everyone is happy?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is definitely simple enough to be done for the next patch, right?

Yeah, good suggestion. Although I'm suddenly thinking about racing UF1000's with a ton of ballast in every car

You'd better get a good exit speed from that corner if you want to make it up the hill at all...