Why are there so many servers with these stupid Air Restriction and Ranking systems? It's utter rubbish, I'll join a server that's running my favourite combo, only to be told "BAD SETUP". So i'll ask "What setup do I need?" and I will just be ignored, so I won't be able to race.

On other servers, I will try to jump in my favourite car and i'll be told "RANK IS TOO LOW", Then i'm forced to use a car i don't even like.

Are there ANY decent servers without this horrific system?? The kind of "get in and go!" racing?

I totally agree with this. ive had same thing and its annoyng as hell.

Dead Men Racing

"online at [CAD]"

can't get enough of this server me

I agree as well, maybe if R2R servers would be more busy then we have one, for example yesterday KY2 @ LX4 - pure fun imo, no stupid rankings and NO restrictions (thanks god). But again, only like 7 people online... In general, instead of forced racing with XFG on IHR I went drifting.

Quote from brandons48 :

Why are there so many servers with these stupid Air Restriction and Ranking systems? It's utter rubbish, I'll join a server that's running my favourite combo, only to be told "BAD SETUP". So i'll ask "What setup do I need?" and I will just be ignored, so I won't be able to race.

Normally it says what you need to enter the server, unless the admin is a total n00b.

The problem is that Mr average LFS users would much prefer an e-penis increasing server where they can boast to their average friends that they have more points than them on <insert server name here> - thats why such servers tend to me more popular than "other ones" - people get a "reward" for racing there.

Quote from JPeace :

500servers used to be good.
but they dissapeared

:dnfnoob:

Brandon, you went to the iTCC server which is for practising for a league with a restricted car. [AMG] GTR MotorSport is unrestricted... and then you went to (IHR)IRONHORSE RACING which well, is full up so obviously its doing something right, but if you don't want to drive the xfg/xrg for a few races well that's your choice.

But yeah after your very scientific experiment, it's obvious to see every server uses the shitey system

What car are you longing to drive like?

What I find much more annoying these days is that every server runs some kind of "you need to get some points to drive the car you want" system making it very hateable for the causal driver who wants to drive what he likes on a server with more than 7 players.

While it would be ok if all those systems would be at least sharing their databases with each other (since all are using airioooola anyway) but they are not. So you have several different servers being basicly about the same and the hour the spent on one server getting some points for your prefered car help you nothing on server B where you end up in the same crap box as on server A.

The point / career stuff is ok if only all the different hosts could align and form one shared database for all but atm it's just annoying with all the different ones (LR, IHR, Level, etc).

my 2 cents

I noticed this, too, the other day when I tried to race on a server other than the one I'm normally on. Tried to join but got kicked back to spectate with a message that I needed a certain laptime. Didn't tell me where I needed to set that laptime or anything. Then I tried another server and there I could only drive the UF1 until I got enough points, like three_jump said.

I guess this is what Fordman meant with this thread. I had no idea it was this way as I normally race exclusively on Dead Men Racing, where you can just hop on and have clean, fair and fun races with mature people, no matter how fast or slow you are.

Brandon, been looking around and I think -OsR- Old Skool Racing is closest to what you want:

If you win the race, you will get to choose a car of your choice

Trouble is, there are options to intake restrictions and added weight but no one seems to pick it

No ranking at least and it isn't full a lot of times

-OsR- is racing for fun, not ranks

I'll try OSR, but i'm not sure what level of experience people expect online

is there a specific combo you would prefer? or would you like to be able to select whichever you want?
after seeing a few of these threads, i was thinking of altering one of my servers to user-selectable combos, provided it is not abused.
the specific server currently is set up for oval, and does not use any points or ranking systems, so would be very easily switched to user-selectable tracks/cars.

or i can put up a poll here for a weekly combo to choose from.

k.m.

The topic starter points to an interesting problem. I agree that this move to all different kind of server rules is a bad thing for online racing.

It may be fun to have a favorite server where you can gain more "points" and unlock cars. Being able to "progress" in online racing brings in a new dimension. On the other hand I can imagine that's it's very confusing for a beginner (of anyone who just wants to joint a server).

I think it would be better if you could just join a server without having to know what exactly the specific rules are. Now I'm forced to reading all the different kind of "rules" when I just want a race. A lot of the information is redundant. "No crashing. No swearing. No...", is that really going to stop those who regularly do that? Having different kinds of ranking systems, racing points of time requirements makes it even worse.

Servers shouldn't be getting this much autonomy I think. LFS would better include some basic options which the server can chose from (what cars, how many laps, auto restart or not, welcome message...). A ranking system would be nice, but only if it's integrated in LFS.

This would obviously limit server freedom, but I think it would enhance the user experience in general. Racers should be able to join any server, drive carefully and know that general rules apply everywhere.

Interesting stuff for a discussion

brandons: I totally agree with you....I am also sick of collecting point nfslike to "unlock" new cars...
there must be some other interesting way of server rules...or no rules just servers like redline where I raced few times and there were quite decent people racing there and I had fun and was turning lfs off with smile on my face but I am not sure if these servers are still at least half full

it's actually kind of a catch 22.

Part of the reason there are ranking systems is try to help new LFS users to improve there abilites before they have access to faster, more difficult to drive cars.
Experienced players should have no problem progressing through a ranking sustem (provided it is done correctly) to get to the cars they want to drive.
Not to offend anyone, but if your abilites are not up to par, then you end up spending more time in slower cars, which (hopefully) affords those who do have greater abilites a somewhat better opportunity to have a clean race. Because if you join a populated server and get crashed out repeatedly by someone who cannot handle a certain car, you will not be happy, and will leave anyway.
If you take IHR for example, and allowed everyone on the server to drive the GTR's. How long do you think the "experienced" players who are there to have a good race will stay in the server? Probably not long.

And saying there are no "normal" servers really isn't fair. There are 930 servers that show up when i click on "display a list of hosts".

So the some of the most populated one happen to use ranking systems....not much you can do. You can't force people to go to another server that doesn't rank. They choose to be there, just as some choose not to.
There are good quality servers around, you just have to look.

This is not a skill issue (at least for most of us), but it's a time issue. Apart from the odd week or x-mas break I have basicly less than 2 hours of lfs per week.

And I don't wanna spent that time with unlocking content. It might have been fun the first time (ctra) and maybe even the 2nd time (LR) but why do I have to show over an over that I'm able to drive car X? I have done over 200.000 km in LFS, I think I know by know what I'm able to do and what not.

I agree with three_jump. Plus, being fast (and thus winning races, winning points and progressing through the ranks) doesn't necessarily equal having racing skills, and vice versa. There's plenty of people who are blazingly fast but don't know how to properly race in a close battle with other drivers.

I'm not very fast, I'm usually somewhere middle pack, but I am consistent, aware of my surroundings and can race side by side and bumper to bumper with another driver for laps on end (provided the other driver knows how to race closely as well). It usually takes me quite a bit of time to get enough points to get to the next rank, and I can't be arsed to do that.

That being said, though, z-ro does have a point; there are lots of "normal" servers around, it's just that most of them are empty and the populated ones just happen to use some kind of ranking system. Not much you can do about that.

Also, I'm really not too fussed about this because like I said, for the past 2 years or so I have almost exclusively raced on the dMr server so this problem doesn't affect me, but I can see how it can give a wrong impression to a newcomer.

Quote from z-ro 8 :

Not to offend anyone, but if your abilites are not up to par, then you end up spending more time in slower cars, which (hopefully) affords those who do have greater abilites a somewhat better opportunity to have a clean race. Because if you join a populated server and get crashed out repeatedly by someone who cannot handle a certain car, you will not be happy, and will leave anyway.

This statement seems to trip over its own logic. If I can't drive a particular car, thus I'm not fast enough to graduate on to a faster car, then were I to be driving the faster car I wouldn't interfere with the faster drivers' races anyway, because I wouldn't be able to keep up.

I agree with the others that all this CTRA-esque stuff is irritating and unnecessary. By all means penalise careless drivers but don't start from a position of penalising everybody, even if you are penalising them equally. It's just bloody-minded.

Nice discussion. My comments from the view of Airio developer:

1) Airio by default contains no restrictions per car type or anything else, there's a very limited set of checks running and everything is optional, both for admins and drivers.

2) If a server uses rankings and all kinds of limitations, it is because the admins of the server, who are paying for it (and for Airio as well, in many cases), want it to be so.

3) If you do not like it, ask the admins to change the setup. If they refuse, they have a reason. If you do not like it, bad luck for you.

4) Only about 1/5 of the available LFS servers use Airio only only about 1/20 of those (or even less) impose some limitations, sometimes quite substantial.

5) If that 1/100 of the available LFS servers appear to be quite popular, maybe it is for a reason?

6) You want nicely filled races (20+ cars) with mature drivers in your favorite combo, still open to everyone. Is that at all possible in public racing, particularly on multiclass servers?

7) The request to have a kind of global points or other data shared between different servers is a very valid one. It has its catches though, but I'll try to think about ways to overcome the problems and allow gathering and use of such data, if the admins of a particular server wish to do so.

Happy racing!

Out of 462 servers (not counting cruise as I had it flagged off), every one of them are running some kind of restriction?

The community speaks. The restricted servers are the servers other folks want to race on. You can run on any of the 462 current servers listed, restricted ones and nonrestricted ones. Unfortunately, that's all you'll be doing is running around because there is no one else racing on them.

The bad part about these servers are the fact that they are not new. If you've run on CTRA, then you've already ran through the "beginner" cars and moved up. CTRA is no more, thus someone starts a new set of servers. Now you are back to square one with having to run in a "beginner" car that you may not be interested in. What happens when this current set of servers disappear at the point everyone has moved up to the cars they want to run? Yet another person(s) from the community will start a restricted server and you will again have to run the "beginner" cars.

I am also not from the best drivers and if I win some race on full server it is really celebration day for me but I am not slow at all and I think that I can drive most of the cars in lfs quite well and responsibly...
for one race i can get about 5-10 pts average if I improve my pb on the track and if I finish on good position...but not every race is ideal and to unlock better car I need hundreds of points which I dont want to collect by racing some xfg which is imho absolutely boring...

I want to have fun by racing instead of checking ranking board after each race and counting how many more pts I need to actually be allowed to drive car I want to race with and which is fun to drive for me

The problem is that we DO have servers which we ask for, but see the pattern for yourself:

IHR - 40/47
FM - 31/47


Dead Men Racing - 6/24
R2R Gen Racing - 14/47

I don't need like full server and the truth is that for me R2R server is from time to time great place for racing with usually nice people, but usually it's under 10 ppl online.

Not now though, some online fun eh?

Quote from Mysho :

IHR - 40/47
FM - 31/47
Dead Men Racing - 6/24
R2R Gen Racing - 14/47

Of these servers only the IHR uses limitations, and that's because it is a multiclass server. FM and R2R have no limitations, although they both use Airio. I'm not sure about DMR setup, but Airio runs there as well. That just points out the fact that limitations are defined by server admins.

Quote from EQ Worry :

Of these servers only the IHR uses limitations, and that's because it is a multiclass server. FM and R2R have no limitations, although they both use Airio. I'm not sure about DMR setup, but Airio runs there as well. That just points out the fact that limitations are defined by server admins.

Yes you're right, basically I only wanted to point out IHR vs. DMR for example, restrictions are always winning because of people joining only full servers.

As to the FM (FOX) or AMR (AS3 @ GTR) - It's great to have such servers, but where the hell disappeared combos like KY2R @ LX4? (Just an example). I mean, ok, you won't be like driving AS3 everyday, and this provides R2R server from time to time, yesterday KY2 @ LX4, today AS3R @ LX4, or when it was actual TBO server was great fun!

Did you try -OsR- Old Skool Racing brandons48

No skill level needed, Even the experienced drivers can get clipped and crash, leaving me to slowly drive past them all, whilst hitting the smiley key