I'm not sure that everyone has heard of Maailman nopein kansa(yes, strange name, Google Translator couldn't give any reliable translation anyway). Therefore I am gonna present it roughly. It was a TV program broadcasted by the Finnish MTV3 TV channel in 2009. It was based on an online contest using LFS demo with FBM @ bl1. Basically the people taking part had to make races on that combo, and the best would be invited to the TV show in the end. There was a prize given to the winner also, can't recall what.
After the contest it turned out that many, a huge amount of people created accounts to take part in the contest. Today there are 35,885 Finnish LFSers who have got an account at LFSW according to spdo Database. This is absoluetely huge considering that Finland only has had 5,367,188 inhabitants in 2010 according to Wikipedia. The second nation, Poland, only has 14,642 licenses for 38,192,000 inhabitants. Sadly I can't tell how many created their account only for the purpose of taking part to MNK since I don't know how many Finnish LFSers there was 18 months ago - perhaps someone could help me on that one.
Most of them obviously never touched the game again after doing a few races on the MNK's servers, but good part of them decided to buy S2 after this. Unfortunately I can't give any precise statistics on that one either.
You might think it's a good move, "the devs are getting money with that", etc... This is true, of course. The problem is that MNK mainly attracted pre-teens who don't know a clue about the racing etiquette. They are seriously beginning to cause a problem since a big part of them are racing on NFS standards, causing havoc on most servers.
Of course we cannot do anything about these people - catch one doing something silly, punish him, mkay, but you can be sure that there are hundreds or even thousands going to come and replace that guy.
I agree on the fact that generalisations have to stop at one point. Sure, some of these guys are absoluetly fine. I've a teammate coming from this contest, he's 13 years old, ex-WR holder and taking part in some prestigious leagues, and probably is more mature than most of the people involved on LFS. But I belive he's an exception among others.
So basically to conclude this post:
PS: I'm not racist. This post is only describing the possible effects of mass-advertising on small simulators of the kind of LFS. It's not critisizing the behaviour of Finland's youngsters in any way. Do the same contest anywhere else, you'll probably end up with the same result. In some ways thanks heaven they did it in Finland, if they did it in the UK/France/Italy/Spain/Germany we would have ended up with 10x more nutters of this kind because of the bigger amount of inhabitants.
After the contest it turned out that many, a huge amount of people created accounts to take part in the contest. Today there are 35,885 Finnish LFSers who have got an account at LFSW according to spdo Database. This is absoluetely huge considering that Finland only has had 5,367,188 inhabitants in 2010 according to Wikipedia. The second nation, Poland, only has 14,642 licenses for 38,192,000 inhabitants. Sadly I can't tell how many created their account only for the purpose of taking part to MNK since I don't know how many Finnish LFSers there was 18 months ago - perhaps someone could help me on that one.
Most of them obviously never touched the game again after doing a few races on the MNK's servers, but good part of them decided to buy S2 after this. Unfortunately I can't give any precise statistics on that one either.
You might think it's a good move, "the devs are getting money with that", etc... This is true, of course. The problem is that MNK mainly attracted pre-teens who don't know a clue about the racing etiquette. They are seriously beginning to cause a problem since a big part of them are racing on NFS standards, causing havoc on most servers.
Of course we cannot do anything about these people - catch one doing something silly, punish him, mkay, but you can be sure that there are hundreds or even thousands going to come and replace that guy.
I agree on the fact that generalisations have to stop at one point. Sure, some of these guys are absoluetly fine. I've a teammate coming from this contest, he's 13 years old, ex-WR holder and taking part in some prestigious leagues, and probably is more mature than most of the people involved on LFS. But I belive he's an exception among others.
So basically to conclude this post:
- Large-scale advertising is maybe not the good solution to boost LFS' shape as it attracts an enormous amount of randomers who mix up LFS and NFS, which is not good at all for the racing standards.
- If a <16 years old Finnish chap who joined LFS after 2009 come onto your server, be affraid. Very affraid. Just a friendly advice, keep 1 1/2 eyes on him.
PS: I'm not racist. This post is only describing the possible effects of mass-advertising on small simulators of the kind of LFS. It's not critisizing the behaviour of Finland's youngsters in any way. Do the same contest anywhere else, you'll probably end up with the same result. In some ways thanks heaven they did it in Finland, if they did it in the UK/France/Italy/Spain/Germany we would have ended up with 10x more nutters of this kind because of the bigger amount of inhabitants.