League Racing Needs a Little Love

[RaychelSnr]

Terry Crouch is back this week to save racing fans from the massive amount of NCAA Football 09 info we have bombarded our readers with. This week on The High Groove, Crouch looks at how racing games can take their online modes to the next level. Check out his article, League Racing Needs a Little Love.

Quote:

"What better way is there to compete against other people than league racing, which scores your performance in not only the race you’re in, but also other races across a defined schedule? This is the essence of league racing online, yet for some reason, it’s been completely ignored for years."

[BlyGilmore]

couldn't agree more with this. over at MM I ran a Forza 2 racing league and it was a huge pain. Needed to tally results each week, determine how many points folks got, setup races and the schedule, etc. took a TON of time to pull off for something other sports games are starting to handle on their own.

[lnin0]

Excellent article, Terry. Thanks for echoing what too many in the racing community have felt for a long time now. I hope some devs are taking note.

How long must we endure with the pen & paper while all other sports have moved to in game seasons/leagues with online stat tracking. Or while every shooter and sports title integrates some kind of trueskills or ELO ranking.

iRacing gets a lot of things moving in the right direction but will unfortunately be overlooked by a lot of gamers and developers. A few other games are making inroads slowly. N09 does not do much for league play in itself but it is nice to get emailed results and have the ability to hold pre-race qualifying. Not big steps but steps none the less.

Yet for every step forward there are just as many setbacks. Publisher's like Codemasters who are scrapping the entire idea of a sim to build yet another short attention span race. And not only does it seem they have scapped the sim idea but everything about online racing they learned on the way.

And speaking of Forza 2. While it is the best sim on a console it is absolutely the most unfriendly league game around. The inability to set the grid/hold qualifying or to easily capture post race stats (just two of its many bad traits) is unfounded in a game that claims to be about 'community'. How can you have a community when, as a game, you cater to the jump in / jump out mentality?

As a long time rally fan and have always wondered for years why nobody would incorporate online leagues into their game. I mean, how simple would it be for a rally game when everyone races the clock. All it would take is for the league admin to setup the schedule and then let people turn in times at their leisure. Yet some dozen online rally games later I am still wondering.

I guess you hit a nerve with me on this one but I am glad someone else feels this way and has the ability to reach a lot of fans and developers. Like you said, league racing is some of the best times you can have in a game, it is high time racing fans get their due.

[GaryM05]

Take a look at http://www.race2play.com.

This site runs multiple series of events over about 3-month-long seasons in many of today’s popular PC sims (GTR2, GT Legends, rFactor, etc.) They track every stat, for every driver, for every race. They run and set up the servers, have live stewards at all official events, have a well-documented protest procedure, and have an easily-navigatable site, from which you can sign up for races, check your stats and those of your competitors, and engage in community discussion in one of several forum areas. They maintain (and enforce) a straightforward set of rules for behavior on the track. Also, you don’t have to make a commitment to running every single race of a given series for an entire season (though of course you can).

They have free memberships available, though you can also gain some benefits by signing up as a paying member. It’s not perfect (I think any game/league setup will always have room to improve) but it sure is close.

[TCrouch]

That's appreciated, Gary...but that's kind of the point. Developers are getting by because committed community members create entire sites that run these leagues because they're such a monumental pain in the *** to begin with. It really needs to move toward more in-game integration and less things like Race2Play, which is great in its own right. But it shouldn't be required to avoid the tedium of league racing stat-keeping.

[Bahnzo]

I add my .02 here just to say I agree also. Especially as the new consoles get more sim-oriented racing, there's no reason league play can't be a "feature" in these games and is expected of all other sports games. Unfortunately, since there have been so few sim-style driving games, the developers have the mentality of the pick up and go racing that most other games have.

I have to admit that it's something that I've not really given much thought to. I'm just happy to have a few sim racers on the the 360, but it's definitely time to demand not only leagues, but qualification and practice as well. NASCAR has at least given us that; I have to admit that I'm a bit surprised that with as much as they are pushing easportsworld.com integration that league play wasn't included. Next year?

[GaryM05]

Yeah, I hear what you're saying, Terry. I agree that it would be really nice if league tracking was integrated in the game, and not something you have to go outside to get. Like you mentioned, iRacing has a lot of promise there (once they start supporting leagues, and move beyond the well-organized pickup races that they currently support).

[lnin0]

I was reading IGN's short hands-on of SimBin's Race Pro and found this a good illustration of the gaming media's short sightedness.

"Although we didn't get to see the career mode, the meat of the racing game experience....The game will also include online multiplayer modes that support up to 12 racers over Xbox Live."

I do not agree the meat of a racing game is the career any more than the meat of an Unreal Tournament game is the single player. RPGs and platformers lend themselves to a meaty single player game but the meat of a racing sim should be the multi-player. I hope SimBin recognizes this fact even though IGN doesn't.