The online racing simulator
Quote from tristancliffe :Okay lets compare racing games. I'll do it in English money (cos it's the best :shy

LFS S3 - £36
Grand Turismo x - £39.99 initially, probably reducing to 29.99 after a few months for each new version they bring out.
GTRx - £30 for each new version they bring out. Assuming one very two years, and two years before LFS is finished, they thats £60
GTLx - £30 a clone of GTR to fleece more money from you
rFactorx - £30 (once you add tax) Another version of rFactor's gravity defining masterpiece
netKar Pro - £25 but it'll still be unplayable online in all likelihood.

So LFS isn't really all that bad. I kind of hope track editors never get released, because it attracts a poorer type of person in my opinion, as well as flooding the community with 8 polygon versions of the 'Ring, including the 100ft kerbs.

Maybe peeps need to look at LFS and the costs differently...
S1, S2, and S3 are *not* seperate entities... You pay for S3, not S1 or S2... However, you have the option of paying a certain percentage of the game (S1 and S2) and that leaves less money to pay for the result. As soon as S2 was released S1 stopped existing! So those that have bought an S1 license should see it as their Symantec (or McAfee) update license ending... Maybe the devs should've made this clearer, and even shut down all the S1 licenses completely at some point. But they don't because they're nice people.

As for the track editors: Yeah, the community would be flooded with 8 poly versions of the ring, unless there's some kind of QA system in place. For every 10 "track creator noobs" there is at least 1 track creator artist, and for every 5 track creator artists there's 1 track creator god. I'd rather have the option of wading through 50 'bad' tracks to find one really good one, than to know I won't be seeing any tracks added at all.
Quote from eNGinE :Originally Posted by tristancliffe
LFS is NOT expensive. Compare LFS to the cost of a powerful enough computer in ANY country, and LFS remains small change, so no one should EVER be allowed to critisise it for being expensive. If they claim it's too much then how come they can afford a PC good enough to run the demo.
Yea.... LFS is not expensive ... compared to a PC,... a new Car IRL,... a house, ... LOL thats funny.
Would you plz compare a racing game with.. erm.. a racing game!

Tristan, this arguement can not be used. Yea, I just purchased a new computer, with tax return money that was overpaid recently. Do you know the last computer I had actually purchased was? A top of the line Pentium 75 MHz with upgraded to 8 mb of ram and a huge 2 gig harddrive. I don't think many of today's games would run well on that.

Since then I have aquired 2 Pentium 125's, an AMD K2 233, AMD K2 266, Celeron 667, and a Pentium 4 2.5 GHz. The Celeron was during S1 and just after S2 demo was released, I got the Pentium 4. Both of these were good enough to play LFS's respective stages. So, just because you HAVE a PC powerful enough to play, doesn't mean you PAID for them, therefore, saying paying for LFS is cheap compared to buying the PC good enough is not a good example.

disclaimer: I didn't pay for any of those PC's, but just wanted to note that with family members, throwaway's at work, and item swapping, I have all these PC's sitting in the basement along with my recent AMD 64 3500 purchase. I didn't steal them, hehehe.
You are the exception to the rule. I have plenty of things that I own and aquired perfectly legally without actually paying money for them, and some of them are worth tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds, so you're argument that mine isn't any good, isn't actually any good.
My point being, I see all the time thrown at the demo players who say they can't buy a license that "if you can buy a PC good enough for playing, then you can afford the license." But, just because you HAVE a PC that can play it, doesn't mean you were able to pay for it, therefore can also pay for the license. An Aunt/Uncle can give you their old PC that's good enough because they bought a new one, but if they don't buy a license for you, you can still not have the means of paying for the license.

Some of the younger folks may not be allowed to have a job by their parents, some are in college and can't have a job, and some older folks are trying to raise a family on a single income where $44 USD is quite alot of money when trying to pay for everything else. ($44 is about 3 days of gasoline to get to and from work for me). For those who don't care about sending their kids to daycare for 8-10-12 hours a day while both parents work, $44 isn't alot of money. I prefer my wife to stay home and raise them which is why it took me a while to scrape up the $44 and why I am running an Athalon 64 3500 with only onboard from a cheapo off-the-shelf compaq crap (luckily, had just enough after paying off the hospital bills and some of the credit card bill with the tax overpayment return).

There are more important things to spend the money on when you are a family on single income. Hopefully, next tax return, I'll have enough left to pay for a years worth of broadband as coming up with the $35 every month isn't possible. To others, broadband is really cheap, not for me. I'll need to get it in one big chunk when I happen to get the money. Monthly service charges just doesn't work.
Quote from tristancliffe :You are the exception to the rule. I have plenty of things that I own and aquired perfectly legally without actually paying money for them, and some of them are worth tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds, so you're argument that mine isn't any good, isn't actually any good.

GACK, You're LOADED! Can you fly me out for the kart meeting?
Money (which isn't mine, it's my parent's really ) can buy you lots of things, but it should never buy you friends. So no!
I never said I'd be your friend I just want to race!

LOL

j/k.
maybe a cheaper upgrade if you're just purchased the game in the last x months? 12 to upgrade as usual but only £6 if you've purchsed the game in the last 6 months or so?
Hmm, let's think that one through. We had months and months of speculation about when S2 was going to be released, then it came out without much warning. Surprise! Now anyone who bought the game up to 6 months earlier gets a £6 rebate from the original $12 they paid? That would be an almighty pain in the backside, and would cause further huge resentment from people who were just outside the timescale. Where do you draw the line?
Maybe everyone that pre-pays for S3 now without knowing the timescale gets a 1/2 price deal, then on the day of release the price doubles?
I think its more hassle than its worth for the three musketeers, to be honest, to police that sort of thing. After all the hours put into developing this game, they ain't getting very rich from all this.
Well I guess people have more or less made their minds up on this. I will say though, I mostly drive on rallyx circuits (not much online yet) and half the time that's XFG on blackwood (demo racers could drive the same!) or LX6 on same. Getting some S1 racers to be able to join in races on S2 servers (especially if there are S2 cars included driven by other players) may be something to encourage them to upgrade instead of ignore that LFS folder and play more rFactor...

Track change to S2 only, S1 drivers can't leave pit or something, they go somewhere else. Maybe they go to the website to buy an upgrade because of the great races they had for the last hour with their S2 friends.

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar
i agree kitracer (does that mean you race kit cars or just knight riders car ? )

er anyway where was i?

yep let s1 racers use s2 servers if the track is compatable but obviously only with their car content, hopefully when they see what the extra car content is like they'll be tempted.

this matter needs to be sorted, not because of the s1 users but because at the moment we have x,000 s2 users and sometime in the future we are going to have to organise the switch to s3. from what i can see there was a big obvious reason to jump from s1 to s2, it may well be that a lot of s2 users will feel that s2 does enough for them and they don't need s3. in thta case we'll end up with 2 seperate camps and a split community
#112 - col
Quote from macready :maybe a cheaper upgrade if you're just purchased the game in the last x months? 12 to upgrade as usual but only £6 if you've purchsed the game in the last 6 months or so?

I cannot belive how many people have made this suggestion ! illepall

cost of S1 = £12
cost of S2 = £24 OR £12 for folks with S1 licence.

I will translate these confusing figures for the more intellectually challenged out there:
If you already have S1, you get the FULL COST of S1 DISCOUNTED from the price of S2 !
Just to make absolutely sure you got that: If you have already purchased and S1 licence and you chose to buy an S2 licence, you get a TOTAL REFUND of 100% of the money you payed for S1

How the hell can you expect a better deal than that ?
How can you not be embarrassed asking for more ?

col.
Quote from tinvek :
this matter needs to be sorted, not because of the s1 users but because at the moment we have x,000 s2 users and sometime in the future we are going to have to organise the switch to s3. from what i can see there was a big obvious reason to jump from s1 to s2, it may well be that a lot of s2 users will feel that s2 does enough for them and they don't need s3. in thta case we'll end up with 2 seperate camps and a split community

Good point...
As long as the two sections of the community are large enough, then there is no problem at all. The whole reason that the thread creator has a complaint is that S1 license holders are a tiny minority compared to the number of S2 license holders. Often there are very few racers in S2 servers, so of course there are going to be big problems finding populated S1 servers, because most of the time they don't exist. If there were more people like him (S1 license holders that want to race S2 cars and tracks online), he wouldn't have such a problem.
Quote from sinbad :As long as the two sections of the community are large enough, then there is no problem at all. The whole reason that the thread creator has a complaint is that S1 license holders are a tiny minority compared to the number of S2 license holders. Often there are very few racers in S2 servers, so of course there are going to be big problems finding populated S1 servers, because most of the time they don't exist. If there were more people like him (S1 license holders that want to race S2 cars and tracks online), he wouldn't have such a problem.

If he stopped throwing the toys out the pram and bought an S2 licence that would solve the problem .
it has to be pointed out that he could afford £12 when he purchased s1, it would be a fair assumption that he should have been able to raise another £12 since then, if he hasn't purchased another game / sim in that time and hasn't bought one item that wasn't a life essential then fair enough but if he has bought himself a lager or smoked cigarettes or bought magazines which he doesnt buy regularly, then he could have saved the money if he wanted s2, he would only have paid the same as me
separate post for seperate point

the title of this thread is

s1 is worthless for me and new players


new players have to buy at s2, they cannnot purchase s1 and as such cannot have the same problems as robbson, i was a new player when i bought a licence and i've had no problem finding servers to race on because i had to buy s2 at twice the cost robbson had to pay for his s1 content.

don't use the new player card to try and gain support robbson, i have some sympaphy but only due to the fact that in future we will all be faced with upgrading to s3 but to moan that you have to pay same as everyone else is a bit off.

so there arent many servers or online s1 users, could this be because everyone else decided they wanted, could raise the money and were willing to upgrade ?

can you honestly say that you do not have 1 game you bought in the past for aprox £12 that you do not play regularly today?

i certainly didnt play grand prix when grand prix 2 came out, 2 when 3 came out or 3 when 4 came out, should i have demanded crammond gave me a free upgrade? hell lets ask bill gates for a refund because flight sim 98 was a waste of money when the better 2002 version came out.
lets go further, i bought a replacement dial up modem in 2003, 2 months later (and ahead of schedule) broadband became available for my house, should i have demended they stopped everyone else using broadband just because i'd bought a modem i wouldn't use ?
Wow, this thread's like the Duracell bunny...
Quote from Hankstar :Wow, this thread's like the Duracell bunny...

what covered in fluff, looks cuddly but is tough and unyielding underneath, corny but wanted by everyone or just that it goes on and on?


will duracell be doing a late night version of the ad featuring the duracell rampant rabbit ?
Please do not feed the trolls
Hi,
after working through the whole thread I would like to add following:

I think the topic was not complaining about whether the price is too high or not. This depends on every single user. If you earn enough money it's cheap, otherwise it's exensive. If you use the game everyday it's worth the money, if you play it 1 time in 4 month, perhaps it's not. But this is so with all things in the life and was not the initial topic question.

So in my opinion there is no reason to complain about the LFS License system and prices.

But there is another point than money! Why not let S1 users race on S2 servers (sure only with S1 cars and tracks) as mentioned above. No one would experience a disadvantage. But everyone, S1 users, S2 Players, the whole LFS Community and even the developers would benefit from that, I'm sure. Let's explain why:


Pro:
#1) S1 users could play furthermore online -> wouldn't be frustated -> more likely would upgrade to S2 when they always be overtaken by S2 cars

#2) S2 users would have more competion racers on S1 cars and tracks

#3) Offering the S1-License again would make sense again -> that would provide a less expensive start into the community for people who can't pay the money or only drive very seldom -> you could upgrade step for step

#4) The number of online racers would increase -> that means more popularity -> that's what a online community like LFS needs

#5) The developer would get more money for their work and more fans/popularity (money is not the only thing that counts, is it?)


Contra:
#1) ? don't know any
#2) perhaps difficult to implement? but wouldn't it worth it?
#3) perhaps there is a security reason? but when the not registered demo racers are furthermore on seperate servers only, where is the risk? all other players are registered, aren't they?
Quote from OpaJo :#2) perhaps difficult to implement? but wouldn't it worth it?

exactly the reason... there are only a few active S1 racers...
an S1 license isnt worthless to me...
Contra: LFS1 cars against the LFS2 Formulas... well...

FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG