I'm just a casual LFSer. I have a game when I can. I'm not a fast driver but I don't crash much and usually bring the car home in one peice. I'm in no league as I work to many late shifts. Just noticing recently the amount of locked servers though. Theres still lots of public servers but they are almost always empty. The locked one's usually have a few guys racing around.
If I was a LFS noob I would find it quite hard joining/finding a race with a few other people (I know ppl say 'I join a empty server and withing 5 minutes it's full' but that does not happen much these days.)

Just seemed a lot better a few months ago when there were more public servers full and less private. I know the wreckers/idiots have been a major reason for this but most of them have gone back to playing CounterStrike.

afaik its been the same since i can remember; there has always been about 2x more private servers than public; many of which were always empty, usually the private servers are just for leagues and team races though

I never really have a problem, maybe its the time time of day u race. I'm in Europe so there seems to be more activity when i go online. Join a team i'd say. Usually they have team races and you can enjoy racing on a private server with people u know.

Yep Im in the same boat as you m8, casual user because of shift work and added irritation of being stuck on an analog modem (gotta love farm life lol)..
Well in aussie time particularly in afternoon till early evening it is indeed slim pickings in the s2 licensed area.. still a fair bit of activity on demo but normally its near impossible to find a good race
But if you do shift work maybe on some shifts you can get on in the mornings to catch the end of the european peak times.. I personally never race in private servers even though Im on a team, I normally try to get online between 8am -12noon WA time and catch some of the USA, and south American racers (Normally go for any type of road car or rally racing as its always good value) the only other time when there's abit of activity for me is after 10pm

I just filter them out by default. Who cares about the private servers anyways? Yet being scared away by them?

"Oh no, it's the evil private server of doom! MUST...GET...AWAY *hides in corner*"

heh, if i wanna drive, i throw up me dedi drift server and drifters flock to it.. tis a demo server tho.. tis cause thats all i got atm..

Quote from shim :

heh, if i wanna drive, i throw up me dedi drift server and drifters flock to it.. tis a demo server tho.. tis cause thats all i got atm..

Yeah drifting and the GTT are popular downunder but if you want to do some grip racing in the GTi its a bit harder to find a server in Aus but thats demo heh

Quote from AndriodXP :

I just filter them out by default.

Yeh I do that too.. as well as the empty ones then there normally about 9-17 left with only about 3 with more than 1 racer in heh but that's what you get downunder

Guys, I know it's not what you want to hear, but most of the aussie scene is in the AAL league, and on the ARSE forums. We do have pickup races organized often too, so I'd say join in.

But I know from experience, when we open up the servers (The MPR server is sometimes open) we have a lot of sensless euro/us/whatever people joining, with lags over 400ms and little common sense. I hate it when I try to work out the tyre wear for the next race and some idiot comes in and wrecks me after 10 laps...so we'll not likely open up too much, in my opinion, until there will be a system where
- complete beginners and
- idiots and
- laggers (I'd say the limit is around 300-400ms)
can be filtered out somehow

This is just my opinion, not an official statement of course ;-)

I'm in western Canada (GMT -8 hours) and also find it difficult to find a multiplayer game during the hours I normally play. I suppose joining a league or a team is the best way around the problem.

Quote from ysu :

Guys, I know it's not what you want to hear, but most of the aussie scene is in the AAL league...

While that sounds like an easy solution not everyone can meet the requirements for entering a league appart from shift work, which means I'm never online at any particular time consistently it cahnges from week to week, I also currently have no option other than 28.8kb/s and if I'm lucky 33.6kb/s modem speed.. I've read on all league sites I've seen so far the minimum requirement is 128kb/s ISDN or ADSL which is understandable as for me racing with more than about 10 others online is lag city even if it is an aussie server.. I still have alot of fun and very good close racing with 10 or less racers often on LFS but I have to rearrange my sleeping patterns to get on at a time when there is sufficient activity online to find a race Having said that I do from time to time bump into the guys from the AAL scene and have a blast racing with them just this sunday was able to do some laps with a few guys running the GTi arround SO2R I think on an MPR server too IIRC I came second in a hoe down I think they were calling it LOL

I think in some ways the aussie scene is unique in that we are all focussed on the one spot on the ARSE forum and most of us also race in the AAL. If that weren't the case then I and many other aussie racers would be on in the evenings and the servers would be more populated like in S1 days. I think this is kinda what Ysu was alluding to.

Perhaps you need to convince five or six friends to buy wheels and start playing.

Yeah, start campaining to get more and more aussies online in LFS and the community down there will grow.

Slowly slowly catchy monkey

Yeah, Sarsi, I think you're spot on.

B2B@300: happy to hear that! Yeah the hoe racing was fun indeed.
That was one of the organized races, and you most likely found our practice session or an impromptu race. But believe me there are plenty of differently organized races, with 4 divs for everybody's convenience and racing speed in the main league - come in look around (the forums), you may even find a race or two for yourself. It does not cost anything :-)

ButterTyres: it's not the number of racers, it's that almost everybody is quickly entering the AAL/ARSE community. We're concentrated, that's all.
This season the fox festival has/had 83 participants...you probably can't even show another national league with this many ppl on