just an idea.........

as LFS is a sim, and not a game, and with some shocking driving standards online i had an idea.

in real life, if your car was damaged, you had to pay for repairs or new parts.
if you are a skillful, safe, courtious driver, i would expect your garage bill to be light.
the opposite would apply to a hotheaded unskilled moron.

like in the early days of LFS, you got money by racing offline, the better your result, the more cash you had.
now if that money could be transfered across into the online world, so if you had a lot of shunts you had to pay for it out of your virtual account.

i know it wouldnt take into account who was to blame, but if you drove badly all the time, your funds would soon be wiped out.....hey presto....you days of online racing are cut until you gain enough funds from sensible offline racing.

hopefully this will have two positive sideaffects.

1. the servers would soon be filled with clean decent racers
2. the loons who wreck a lot would be forced to learn to race offline, and if they dont.......no cash.....................
no cash means no repairs.

how differcult would it be for the devs to work out the cost of a front wing, burnt out clutch or overworked tyres?

hopefully this would encourage racers to think about their car and maybe, just maybe reduce to amount of stupid dangerous driving that for me is begining to ruin such an excellent racing sim.

i look forward to your thoughts, good or bad.

take care, race hard.....but fair.

Multirepost and would punish those getting hit. Wrecking appears to be much less of a problem than it was.

Quote from duke_toaster :

Multirepost and would punish those getting hit.

but it would punish the person causing the accident too...and unless they hit the same guy everytime it would be fair.

Well.. it's thought out in good cause but I beleive that it would need more than that. The AI are piss easy to beat, drivers who get hit and then in turn cause an accident will get punished, and it would take people away from online servers to play offline to earn creditz0rz.

Besides, then it would need % damage on each part, for the repair bills.

Overall I like the thought but this idea is a -1 from me

Have it as a server option in case you want to have a demo-derby server, football server or bangers race. You wouldn't want "fun times" to take away your hard earned credits.

Take caution with this type of thing though. My experience from running a cruise server has shown that some people tend to go quite insane when cash (virtual or real) is involved.

People will always want credit refunds for things that are not their fault.

It would punish slower drivers. Even if you're clean as a whistle, if you start a race down the back you'll have to pass some people who can't drive without hitting something.

I know a lot of slower racers who I can safely race with, even if I only see them for a few corners of a race because I'm a fair bit faster than they are I still know I'm going to pass them without incident. But they're a minority compared to the newbies at the back of the grid who are likely to cause a big ass accident if I try to pass them anywhere but the beginning of a straight.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

newbies at the back of the grid who... cause a big ass accident...

Kev... I think there are toilets, designed to prevent ass accidents.

:hide:

First of all, nay.

Secondly, there's not that much of a way t'would work.
With an improved damage model people will crash less because it will cause more problems as the race goes on. If ye risk radiator damage by nudging someone at T1, less scurvy swine would try it.

I did consider the idea of a limited number o' repairs per month. So ye could choose to repair a part at any time but it came out of an account supply and, like yer activations, those were refreshed every month. It might work, but I'm not sure if it'd be a good idea or a bad one.
Of course it would be cool seeing cars start races with dented bodywork, but I imagine it'd be a nightmare to keep track of.

Would be a bad idea from me, Daj. People couldn't crash each other for fun or bad drivers would not be able to race for weeks.

That was me main issue with the whole idea. But unless someone is actually targeting one specific person, the odds of it happening more than once or twice to the same person are pretty small.

The wrecker in question would be out of parts and either unable to race (preferable) or so messed up they'd be uncompetitive, essentially taking them out of the running until the next refresh.

I guess it could be made a serverside option, so if you wanted to set up a kind of banger racing anything goes server you could disable it.

cash is not really an option.
how about loss of lfs points ?
u earn points to gain the next license.
if u aren't skilled enough to keep earning u lose points, therefore u cannot progress to next level.
seems simple to me.

Make it optional on a host. Put it into a timed event so if you crash often you get charged, it could possibly be a little like insurance. Making sure that people don't get charged for genuine accidents would be key. If maybe you got charged for 3 contacts in 5 minutes? or something similar? If you charge for every crash yes, the victim would suffer badly. Charging for consistent crashing in a short period of time could work. I like the idea but it needs a lot of thought.

Once again we're back to my original idea of the ranking system. Each account can vote on another account once and each + o - vote adds to or subtracts from their default score. Servers choose how low (or high) a score to allow. So repeated wreckers end up unable to race anywhere and clean, fair drivers get acknowledged.

That whole points / license system is very rigid and it means that slow but clean drivers (like myself) can never advance. Like on the CTRA system I can't finish above midfield so I can't drive the cars I want to.

And having it time limited just means that wreckers would wait until they were outside of the time before doing it again. 2 wrecks in 5 minutes, wait, repeat.

Well, I think wrecking could be solved by a very simple measure, once the damage system has been improved: don't allow mid-race joins. That way, a wrecker could only take out one or two cars before being unable to drive (unless he's lucky) and would have to wait for the race to finish before being able to join in again. I guess most wreckers would simply lack the attention span and patience to do so.

Also, note the wreckers license name and send it to the admins with a replay attached. If he's banned from enough servers, he'll get a temporary LfS global ban.

And OT: Dajmin, I feel your pain, I am stuck at bronze for months now, because the Race 1 server is crawling with platinum and gold drivers I have no chance to keep up with. IMHO they should rethink the licensing steps, because atm, bronze doesn't give you any benefit over copper, rendering that license level practically useless. But that should be discussed i another topic.

@ dajmin & coleus rattus: hey, we should found a "stuck at bronze" club. a little hint: you can drive the baby-r. cleaner racing but a bit boring sometimes.

to the topic...
I've bee thinking about this issue too (http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=39164) - there has to be a real downside to wrecking or reckless driving in general. I had a few ideas in my thread... but now I'd like to add a new one:

(just as a basis... not intended as a final way to do it. and only for online races)

- you have 3 cars of each model
- if you wreck the suspension of car 1, it will not be "fixed" before a certain time (the time it'd take in real life to fix it).
- heavily damaged cars are not allowed to be raced.
- if you wreck your 3 cars within half an hour or so, chances are you can't participate in a race for a while.

Quote from Dajmin :

Once again we're back to my original idea of the ranking system. Each account can vote on another account once and each + o - vote adds to or subtracts from their default score. Servers choose how low (or high) a score to allow. So repeated wreckers end up unable to race anywhere and clean, fair drivers get acknowledged.

I do quite like this idea, but I think it would be important to make it so that you can only vote once per race. So for example, you can choose one person to give a + to and one person to give a - to. This would help limit the problem we get sometimes with the voteban where because one person votes, everybody does regardless of whether they witnessed anything, which can lead to pretty unfair bans (this has happened to me - someone smacked into me and immediately voted to ban me despite it being their fault. At which point, about 15 people vote to ban me too, despite the fact that they were no-where near the incident).

Limiting it to one vote per race would mean people would be more inclided to save their vote for themselves.

I reckon it'd be better as one vote per driver per account. So if you vote someone down once, that's the only vote you get. You can vote for them again after that but that would replace your previous vote so you can't spam someone's rating down all by your self. Three vote types - negative(-1), neutral (+0) and positive (+1).

That way it means if someone redeems themselves you can effectively remove your previous vote. Because it's possible that it was a genuine irregularity or they reacted badly; one event is not necessarily a reflection on their overall performance. But if someone pisses off an entire field multiple times, they will start to rack up enough negative votes that their rating goes through the floor and they eventually get removed. [Edit: Not removed, I mean that the next time they try to join the server they can't]

And I wouldn't have it as a publicly visible thing. You vote, it affects their rating but nobody else in the game or on the server sees it unless they specifically look up that player's account. Because the whole 'sheep voting' thing gets on my nerves. I don't vote on an event I don't see, but plenty of people do.

I'd do it as a "flag as wrecker account button", and instead of doing it as a setting possibly do it like getting too many server bans. I would possibly limit it to one flag per week thing.

However there are very very few wreckers anyway. People with spacial awareness issues? Sometimes. People who make cockups? Most people. Out and out intentional wreckers? Few.