The online racing simulator
24h of Aston: Intentional Disconnects
Well, we have a not so nice issue at hand after the completion of the race: We have had (and still are doing it) to investigate a situation where a team allegedly used an intentional disconnect to repair their car and save a 1 lap penalty for a Shift-P by that method.

The team upon inquiry admitted to doing so and we are currently discussing how we will handle that situation for the past race and for the future. At the same time, we will be investigating disconnects during the 24h of Aston if they seem to be similar.

If any other team intentionally disconnected to repair engine/clutch damage or save repair time due to a damaged car, we ask them to come forward and admit doing so. That would save us a tremendous amout of time, however, we will still be doing investigations, teams coming forward or not.

If you think you should contact us, pls do so via the usual email-address admins _at_ mastersofendurance.eu. We do not ask you to publicly post in the forum, but to contact us privately.

I am leaving this thread open for now, but I will close it quickly if the discussion gets out of hand. Be civil, please.
Im relieved to hear that someone will think and discuss about that disconnection desaster. I hope the teams are straightforward enough and put there balls on the table and speak to the admins . Im not genius enough to bring out the perfect answer for future races to protect us of wanted disconnects but i thought that it was the wrong way to give harder penalities to those who only have a disconnect. It will hit the wrong side. Its to simple deciding in every situation +1 lap for every disconnect. Imo it must be different in which time it happens. My 50 cents
I wouldnt wanna throw some info here and what not, i hope they come and admit this themselves.

So much about any unsportsmanship aint it?
I understand the point of shorty, but to discuss every single disconnect means a lot more work for the admins.

I think, the only way to solve this problem needs the help of scawen!

you may know it from online poker. in that moment you suddenly disconnect, the software takes over from you until you reconnect.

It could be a serverside option, that if a player suffers a disconnect, an LFS-AI takes over the car and bring it back to the pits. so the player can rejoin and continue driving the same car he drove before! nobody can gain an advantage, and you don't loose a lap if it happens.
Quote from foofighter :I understand the point of shorty, but to
It could be a serverside option, that if a player suffers a disconnect, an LFS-AI takes over the car and bring it back to the pits. so the player can rejoin and continue driving the same car he drove before! nobody can gain an advantage, and you don't loose a lap if it happens.

Wow, frankly I like that Idea and to me it sounds implementable.
#6 - Gil07
Seems a good idea... But what if you disconnect and can't reconnect, so a team-mate has to take over?
There is plenty of room for a team-mate to reconnect, that is not a problem.

At the moment we cannot think of wild solutions that are not easily feasible for us right now... Scawen doesn't exactly cater to our special needs all the time . We have to look at the issue at hand here, and hope we have some honest teams to come forward. Any possible countermeasures to these intentional disconnects are going to be hard to implement, and we have to go with rather simple solutions until we get something satisfactory.
Quote from foofighter :I understand the point of shorty, but to discuss every single disconnect means a lot more work for the admins.

I think, the only way to solve this problem needs the help of scawen!

you may know it from online poker. in that moment you suddenly disconnect, the software takes over from you until you reconnect.

It could be a serverside option, that if a player suffers a disconnect, an LFS-AI takes over the car and bring it back to the pits. so the player can rejoin and continue driving the same car he drove before! nobody can gain an advantage, and you don't loose a lap if it happens.

Thats actually a really good idea.. however like tweak said, it probs wont happen because Scawen will be busy working on the sim rather than little features that would be handy, after all he cant cater for everyone's needs, no-one can.

Super idea though!

EDIT: Couldnt an insim application be written to check the replays and detect a disco? i dont have any programming experience, but im sure it would save the admins a lot of time...
What would be a good idea, make a insim app that uses a database of some kind moniter peoples laps and stuff!. What would also be nice, if Scawen could add a insim packet to report peoples engine status then on d/c you could do 1 quick check if its broken laps + 5 if its not save in the database it was a geunine time out....very easy tbh...
Quote from Tweaker :There is plenty of room for a team-mate to reconnect, that is not a problem.

At the moment we cannot think of wild solutions that are not easily feasible for us right now... Scawen doesn't exactly cater to our special needs all the time . We have to look at the issue at hand here, and hope we have some honest teams to come forward. Any possible countermeasures to these intentional disconnects are going to be hard to implement, and we have to go with rather simple solutions until we get something satisfactory.

Yeah, you're right, Scawen has other things to focus on.

What I meant is how would you get your teammate to take over the car you left when disconnected?
Good idea, but it would be even better if the reconnecting player (not necesserily the same who disconnected) could take over the car from the AI on the track, like in arcade games for example (3-2-1-you drive). This way a disconnection would only result in maybe only a few second loss (that the slow AI would have to drive the car until the new driver takes it over).
Maybe it's just a dream .
When i had a disconnect while driving we didnt lose out, and possibly slightly gained from it as it happened 2 laps before i'd have pitted in anyway. With the updated engine damage from patch Y it was pretty clear some teams were suffering and that yanking the network cable out would probably solve all those problems with minimal damage done. Personally i think that the engine damage really spoils things, you can have a completely geniune disconnect and you lose on average 90sec, you get back in and have a brand spanking new car. If you shift+P you get the same deal, but lose ~3+ minutes. Neither have done anything different to their cars, but one is a get out of jail free card, the other is go to jail and dont pick up £200.
It doesnt feel fair that someone elses 'misfortune' is rewarded, while your driving a bag of cr*p pretty much pleading with your ISP for the same thing to happen to you! Wheres the realism there?


IMO the 2 need to be treated the same, then review the incidents afterwards and give a penalty based on what you effectively gained from what happened, intentional or accidental. The disconnections might not be intentional, but if you had a damaged car and needed to pit, then theres clearly something to gain, especially if its unrepairable damage like with the engine, the other aspects just delay you maybe 10 seconds and its like new again, the engines are unrepairable and will cost you about 20-30sec every single stint.
As i argued last week, the xrr cant get out of gravel, we had baggy come out of the pit-box after a disco to rooble on lap 8, he got a pop-up and ended up stuck in gravel before he'd got back into LFS again, any other car could have drove out. We went from what was a 20 second old car, to another new car, losing a lap in the process. That was punished, but a disconnection where a fresh car is awarded too, nobody bats an eyelid. It just seems a little unjust. Both gained, one benefiting (new car) from inconvenience, one by being allowed out of gravel (ffs!), but one is just fine, the other is heavily punished.
I understand one was a driver error (of sorts) but considering it wouldnt have been a problem in the slightest if it was any other car, it just doesnt seem fair, like its not a level playing field.
If these incidents were reviewed and penalised by what was gained, the there wouldnt be much of a penalty for bagbags incident, but an accidental (or intentional) disconnection where a significant gain was received should get a comparable penalty.
Likewise from Shift+P's, penalise based on what those actions have given you, like the ability to continue in the race, if you were a few laps into the stint so a 'full' tank is only +10% fuel, or if your on the last lap and a 'full' tank is +70%, likewise if you crash/disco 110sec into a lap, then that should be considered as collateral, and taken into account as a loss suffered already.
If you crash 100 meters from the pitlane and lose 2min because of it, you shouldnt lose the same amount as someone who crashed 100 meters from the line, purely because that teleport already costs them 2min to do exactly what someone else could do after 10sec into a lap, but one loses 110sec more than the other for the exact same deal.
The penalty for using the shift+P and getting a brand new car should reflect exactly what was gained & lost from it, consider all angles rather than turning a blind eye because it was 'accidental'.
Thats my honest opinion, blanket punishments arent fair, it wouldnt be for major/minor incidents (DT/SG or more), so why should it for other penalties, the punishment should fit the crime, no more, no less.


Incidently, my disco was due to a lovely BSoD, i'd spent half of Friday installing a watercooled 8800gtx into my loop and redoing all the tubing and tiding up all my messy wiring, when i came to power it all up and install drivers i had 3+ BSoD's in about an hour (1 desktop, 2+ in LFS), i then spent the rest of the day removing the card to go back to my trusty ATi 1900xtx which now refused to load the Catalyst software (gfx worked, but no aa/af and i cant drive without it) i wiped all drivers (again) and tried the drivers again but no change, did the same thing a few times over with registry & driver clean-ups and couldnt get it working, went back to the nTardia 8800 and it was running crysis cpu/gfx demo's fine for about an hour, passed 4hrs of system burn-in tests to check all hardware, and ran LFS replays fine and seemed ok for the LFS practice stints i did beforehand, but alas i got a BSoD and instant reboot where the bios *claimed* the (non-existant) overclock had failed. As easily the slowest driver had i thought it was a problem i wouldnt have driven, and would have just got some much needed sleep as i'd spent 46hrs awake with 3hrs of frustraitingly light sleep, spent the 4 days beforehand going from 5pm-9am days to 10am-2am (shorter days) so i could do the 6am shifts (also cos i had a 9am hosp appointment this morning so needed to adjust for that), and then had hardware trouble the day before. I cant say i was too impressed with how the weekend unfolded on the whole

I also dont think we can rely on the dev's to implement something that works, let alone in time for any of the remaining races. They've already 'fixed' the balance issues, lets not encourage anything else ey

anyway, some of that is on-topic...
yeah i know, that scawen can't implement such a feature in 5 min. i just thought, the idea is to good not to post it but may be scawen is reading it and puts it on his very own list of stuff that should be done ... and someday in the future we may have it
So I think the idea of AI Drivers taking the car when someone disconnects is some kind of risky! Think of a close battle between 2 cars and now the AI takes the car and tries to catch the optimal racing line again and now the other car is getting touched! I don't think the other car (team) would like it that way

I think the best and easiest way for the moment would be to punish every shift + s, shift + p and disconnect with a 1 lap penalty because I always liked the idea of taking a disconnect as a engine damage or a technical problem! I know that teams who really have a disconnect feal disadvantaged through that but we wouldn't have this discussion if everyone would have behaved fair.

For now this seems to be the best way to me!
Quote :So I think the idea of AI Drivers taking the car when someone disconnects is some kind of risky! Think of a close battle between 2 cars and now the AI takes the car and tries to catch the optimal racing line again and now the other car is getting touched! I don't think the other car (team) would like it that way

it could be a ghost-car as long as the AI is driving it...

Quote :I think the best and easiest way for the moment would be to punish every shift + s, shift + p and disconnect with a 1 lap penalty because I always liked the idea of taking a disconnect as a engine damage or a technical problem! I know that teams who really have a disconnect feal disadvantaged through that but we wouldn't have this discussion if everyone would have behaved fair.

i can remember, that we had a disconnect just before start/finish-line. -2 laps just because of bad luck is pretty hard to take
Quote from foofighter :i can remember, that we had a disconnect just before start/finish-line. -2 laps just because of bad luck is pretty hard to take

Yeah, but it's even harder to suffer with a damaged engine and see others doing disconnects intentionally and having a fresh car every 4 hours

But that "Ghost Car" thing sounds nice but i dont think we will get it in the near future, so we should find a solution which can be realized at the moment with the things we have imo.
I think the only way to do it is give timeouts the same penalty as a normal disconnect or a shift P, but I don't think it would be fair to implement this untill the server has been upgraded or something, the full way through the race it was giving some TCP error and throwing people out.

With the server being in Germany it's a big advantage for those who live in Germany, I think this is the second major crash that has happend in the MoE, the last one was at blackwood. Now with 10 more cars on the track and alot of people joining the server 2 laps before their car is due for a pit, it's much more strain on the server.

If it's something to do with funding i'm sure there will be pleanty of people who are willing to donate in order to make the series better, I know I would as it is a total bastard when you practice so much for something like this and have time outs.

Same with the qualifying too, it was an aboslute joke driving in it for me, so much lag from people joining and spectating all the time, never experienced anything quite so bad..
I also get bad pit-lags in LFS, although I'm unlikely to drive any qualifying sessions in MoE myself. Maybe shift+s / shift+p should be disallowed in qualifying and people should have to drive to the pits? Driver changes could be done in the same was as they are during the race.
Quote from joshdifabio :I also get bad pit-lags in LFS, although I'm unlikely to drive any qualifying sessions in MoE myself. Maybe shift+s / shift+p should be disallowed in qualifying and people should have to drive to the pits? Driver changes could be done in the same was as they are during the race.

+1 Turned out pretty well in eTM
I'm also for this option.
but according to the MoE website we had a server with a dedicated 1000mbit line, there isnt much more that sensible money can buy you, so what is there to gain? Had it been say 10 accounts on 1 server, and problems were arrising due to activity on the others, i'd say go for it, but im not sure what throwing money at the exact same thing would give us.

"For the 24hr we basically have a full 1000mbit connection for MoE only to ensure the best connection possible, including enough storage for the server replay."

Also, the 'no shift+p/s in qual' was discussed a while back, and nothing came of it, im not sure why but i'd imagine it probably comes down to the fact that you'd have the issue of crashed/stuck cars out there which would need to shift+p/s, and if they can do that some will say at least it lessens the problem, but then if you screw up your first sector isnt it easier on a track like AS5 to just 'accidently' crash and shift p than waste 2min driving round and pit-stopping for the next run. call me cynical, but i dont think it'll help matters much.
If shift-p/disconnects and rejoining were not allowed in qual you may aswell cut the qual session to 20-30mins. All the fastest time are done with fresh engines in the beginning of the session, unless of course you keep doing some major mistakes. After maybe 5 laps the gtrs start to lose their full potential and it makes the rest of the 1h qual pretty much useless imo. And like paulc2k said, what about then if people intentionally or not, crash or get stuck, its either shift-p or then what, qual over? The idea worked nicely in etm, but back then there was no engine damage or clutch heat, and the session was short(15mins or was it 20mins) anyway.

Maybe only way Id see it working would be to split the 1h qual into 3x20mins sessions or 2x30mins. Id prefer 3x20mins. That way drivers could shift-p after the 20mins is over and get fresh engines or the people who had to shift-p whatever the reason was during the 20min period could join the track again and have a new try.

About the disconnections in race, if the engine is damaged severly,you easily lose 2-3s a lap making it even upto 50s a stint on a track like asgp. No need to be a mastermind to see how big advantage it can give if its not penalized properly. For that however I dont really have any suggestions as the engine damage is not same for everyone and random disconnects still happen. And it can happen on the last sector which makes team lose alot of time. Maybe only penalize the disconnects that happen on the first sector or somehow count a time limit after you have passed the start finish line and then decide whether its worth of a penalty or not.
Quote from Sracer :Maybe only penalize the disconnects that happen on the first sector or somehow count a time limit after you have passed the start finish line and then decide whether its worth of a penalty or not.

But then you still have the problem with the time the disconnected team gains with a fresh car on the track! Like you said it can be up to 30 or 40 secs per stint, so this still seems quite unfair for those who dont have or do a disconnect! This is a really problematic situation and we should really find a good solution. In shorter races I dont think this engine thing will play a big role, so we are not so much under time pressure!
Quote from Sracer : Maybe only penalize the disconnects that happen on the first sector or somehow count a time limit after you have passed the start finish line and then decide whether its worth of a penalty or not.

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.

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