New Le Mans Ultimate Online Racing Features

The latest V1.2 update for Le Mans Ultimate brings a plethora of Online racing updates including new team online championships, live stewarding & badges, plus an anti cheat system. Let’s take a look at it all.

Team Online Championships

Online Championships has been with Le Mans Ultimate for a year now and it’s a really great format for those players that want to take their racing more seriously.

With points given based on results versus the strength of opposition and human-reviewed protests for racing incidents – it’s a great place to race for RaceControl Pro and Pro+ subscribers.

LMU are now taking it to the next level with Team Championships coming online in this release so players can now battle for supremacy over multiple races to crown the champions.

This system will also be used in the upcoming Le Mans Virtual qualifiers, but you’ll have to stay tuned in January to find out more about that. For now players can jump in from this update to get a head start on learning this process and make use of some fast Le Mans Ultimate setups.

Driver Badges

LMU have been listening to the communities thoughts, comments and concerns about the state of driving standards and have made it a big focus for this release.

Whilst they are proud of their industry-leading netcode, some players are racing a little bit TOO close together, so they’ve pulled together some of their first wave of online features to combat that.

Firstly, they are adding new badges to all users.

This is a measure of a player’s contact ratio over their last 10 races, adjusted for the severity of contact and awards a badge that is shown to other players in your event.

Although it uses some of the same inputs, it is a different metric to Safety Rank so allows LMU to monitor a different method of determining a player’s online conduct simultaneously with their current Safety Rank upon its release.

For players first 10 races they will receive a rookie badge whilst gathering data. After that they’ll give the driver one of three badges:

• Good driver
• Trusted driver
• or Warning

Good and trusted drivers are the kind of people LMU want to see in lobbies. Warning on the other hand… LMU will give you a chance to improve your contact ratio before automatically banning you.

If a player gets banned, they’ll return to a “probation” state with a unique badge during a re-evaluation period. Automatic bans ratchet up in severity so each time it triggers the ban gets longer – until players get permanently ejected! So behave!

One of the main values to badges is that it should give anyone racing online a quick update on the players racing around them and their history. Knowing someone is new to the sim should be useful and hope players will give them the time and space to learn.

LMU hope it will also encourage everyone to reach the top levels of good and trusted by being someone that avoids contact and situations that create contact when racing.

They will also be experimenting with matchmaking using badges, particularly in beginner lobbies. Using this badge criteria first then by Driver Rank, looking to help players find better races more consistently.

They have also designed this badge system to add new badges in future that are yet to be determined. They could be for winning races or championships for example.

Heads up – LMU have already started tracking this metric in RaceControl for a few weeks now, so some players will already be given appropriate badges when logging in from the 9th December.

Live Stewarding

LiveSteward is a new pioneering method being used to automatically assess incidents in races. Starting only with what LMU believe to be intentional wrecks with a very high degree of confidence, this system will monitor races and deal with players that break the rules.

For now they are just going to be recording them on our backend systems in RaceControl for monitoring and training before allowing it to take action in a live race.

In future, they are intending to bring more authority for the LiveSteward to deal with incidents, such as penalties for unsafe rejoin and penalties for contacts between cars but will do that only when they are ready.

The hope is that these new features underline LMU’s commitment to a safe online racing environment. They’ll be constantly monitoring and reviewing this area over the coming months, and they don’t believe either of these new features will solve everything overnight but every step in a positive direction is one they want to take.

Engineer Mode

Everyone has been waiting for some time and LMU are sincerely sorry for the delay but are happy to share that Engineer Mode will be available in this release!

They took the time to write a more complete data sharing system that will also be able to solve some other long standing data sync issues when joining a server that is already in progress.

For those players that weren’t aware – engineer mode allows drivers to configure their team mate’s pit stops – the tyres, fuel, energy and who should be driving next for team races. This should allow a player’s teammate to concentrate on what they do best – driving as consistently and as fast as possible.

Not only that, but they’ve added in the ability to invite steam friends that own LMU to be your engineer for single driver Special Events and Online Championships.

Anti-Cheat

One of the sad realities of modern gaming, especially once a game gets some traction, is it attracts people that don’t respect the rules and spirit of racing. LMU have noticed and banned some players but need better, more scalable, tools in the next phase of the product.

To this end, they are adding “Easy Anti-Cheat” in this release, a tool that is used in other racing simulations. It will make attacking the game for nefarious purposes much more challenging.

What does this change? The high-level answer is it blocks access to write to memory locations and will crash the game if players start interfering. Everyone will also be unable to join servers without the anti-cheat service running.

To achieve this LMU had to rewrite some of their plugin system and whilst they have tested with the most popular plugins, they still want the community to report issues seen via support tickets.

Easy Anti-Cheat will install automatically with the update but if anyone ever needs to reinstall it, there’s a copy of the installer in the “support” folder.

One additional point for players is, at least for now, they must launch the game through Steam rather than just opening the Le Mans Ultimate executable – don’t say we didn’t warn you!